Winter light

Picturebook Backstories 10 : The Snowchild

A happy ending. Watercolour and ink endpaper from ‘The Snowchild’ pub. 1994

1994, huh?

Been doing this illustrating lark for a long time, and lately it’s not felt particularly larksome. Trying to come over all fluffy bunnies and happy endings in 2025 has been a bit of a struggle. There’s only so much reassurance that I can give before throwing down my watercolours and turning to black, black ink and Dark, Dark Thoughts.

However, you’re probably not here for the Darkness, so for the brief time you’re joining me in this newsletter, let’s cast our minds back to 1994. What? You weren’t even born then? For those of you who were still floating blissfully in amniotic fluid, or residing as a twinkle in your mother’s eyes or, if you should so desire, working your way through your last incarnation prior to a karmic makeover and another turn round the wheel, I ask you to bear with. Humour me.

Looking back at this book, I can see how very autobiographical it was. Is that massively self-indulgent? Many of the sources we draw upon for inspiration are simply our memories of our felt experiences in this world. Especially those laid down in childhood. In truth, I have more in common with my protagonist than a head full of dark hair. If I’m not getting my dates mixed up, in 1994, as I was working on these illustrations for The Snowchild, I was also wading my way through the works of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and masking the sound of my sobbing in the bath by running both taps full bore. So, as we say now - all the feels.

In this illustration which introduces the key themes of the story, I know I was trying to convey the feeling of not fitting in. Of being peripheral. Out of synch. I used colour deliberately to keep my little heroine in the cold, outside, looking in to the warmth.

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On the shut-out rim of one game
was a small girl called Katie. Katie left-out.
Katie-who-didn't-know-how-to-play.
She knew lots of good games, but somehow
she never played them at the right time.

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Is this a definition of what would nowadays be termed neurodivergence? Mistiming her/my attempts to communicate? Lonely children can be resourceful. They have to be. It’s very boring being left out. It’s also an exercise in maintaining a wobbly illusion that you’re perfectly happy with your own company. Like many children, Katie invents things to do, games to play and gets on with filling the hours. She does this for days, weekends, entire school holidays, years at a time. Eavesdropping, just as I did, on the elaborate plans my classmates would make for the long lacuna of the summer recess. Dreading being asked ( albeit rarely) what I was going to do with my one precious life when school broke up.

What was I going to do? Read? Do my assigned daily housework tasks to assist my mother? Draw impossibly long-legged women in a variety of impractical outfits ( it was the early 70s) and stare at the telephone, willing it to ring? Instead, or perhaps as well as, I took to stroking up and down the Glasgow University Rec. swimming pool like an outcast minnow, thankful that my daily marinade in chlorine could account for my pink-rimmed eyes, witness to the purposeful boredom of those months where I doggedly paddled across the shallow end, finally venturing out into the vast length of the Olympic-sized pool and the vertiginous depths of the deep end. While my mother worked to literally keep our heads above water, I grew my sea legs in a criminally under-subscribed state-of-the-art swimming pool.

Bored, no doubt by the lack of proper athletes to train, a gruff swimming pool worker took it upon himself to teach me how to dive. I had absolutely zero desire to learn this skill, but it felt impolite to refuse his help. At first, he showed me how to slowly slither on my tummy off the edge, like a seal. Then a slow tumble off the edge from a standing position. Then a proper dive from the edge. Then diving off the first board, bouncing higher and higher on the springboard before each dive, nervously eyeing the two higher ones; the top board, so dizzyingly lofty that it entered my nightmares for months after I quit the pool.

Because of course I quit. After semi-mastering the second diving board, I made a clumsy move on one dive and the resulting red SLAP across my chest, the feeling of water turning into stone, my inhalation of what felt like litres of chlorine and subsequent desperate desire to hide in the changing rooms all determined that I would never go back. That, and the fact that my unwanted tutor appeared to have turned me into his pet project without consultation or very much in the way of meaningful communication. I was polite, he was gruff and scary, we were fundamentally misaligned.

And FYI, I’m no athlete.

Which goes nowhere to explain why my next port of call to alleviate the lonely school holidays was to join the local tennis club. I’d saved up and bought myself a very basic junior Slazenger racquet - heaven knows why - nobody in my family actually played tennis, so I’d spend days bouncing a ball against the outside wall of the communal midden in the hope of luring some other equally bored child into joining me.

My enticements failed. I bounced alone.

But my gorgeous new racquet demanded that I use it. Hence the tennis club. As a child, I could obtain basic membership for less than half of my pocket money, so I signed up. This upgraded me from bouncing a ball against the midden to bouncing club balls ( by the dozen) against a white line painted across the back wall of the clubhouse. The white line at net height, obvs. I bounced and I bounced and I persevered, and I eavesdropped on how games were scored ( so weirdly) learned the language of love and let and match point, and lusted after a white pleated skirt and perfect tennis shoes and any talent whatsoever. Talent which, despite my determined and laudable efforts, was utterly unforthcoming.

I bounced on.

Very occasionally, some kind soul would spend five minutes trying to show me how to improve my service, or my forehand or backhand, or how to pick up a ball without hands or how to smash the ball in such a way that my non-existent opponent ( the club-house wall?) couldn’t return it… but without my actually getting on a court to play with another human, it was all a bit pointless.

It hardly needs to be said that I didn't renew my membership at the end of the year.

Then came high school. Adrift in a sea of unfamiliar faces, the small cluster of unfriendly girls from my primary school became much chummier. Once, I was even invited to play tennis with them at a public tennis court in a rougher area of Glasgow. I showed up, my no longer new Slazenger under my arm, wearing whatever felt appropriate for a Scottish summer ( this could have been anything from a vest and shorts to woolly jumpers and wellies) and hoping that this might be the start of my assimilation into some friendship circle.

On arrival, I noticed that the others, outfitted in matchy-matchy tennis whites, were all wearing makeup. Loads of makeup. It wasn’t applied subtly ; it was trowelled on and made my colleagues look much older than their eleven years. I guess that was the point. There was much horsing around, much shoving and pushing, much performative mirth, almost as if they weren’t really there to play tennis but to perform an elaborate pageant with racquets and balls as the accessories of choice and the tennis courts as the backdrop.

They were all annoyingly good at tennis. Of course they were.

As I galumphed from the back of the court to the net and back again, growing hotter and more aware of my own failings, I realised that I wasn’t enjoying any of this. The conversation was mainly about boys and who was going out with who ( at eleven?) who was a slag, who had WHT¹, which teachers were tasty² and who’d claimed to have done it. The latter was carefully filed into the category of Sins Against the Holy Ghost, a state of spiritual disgrace from which there was no redemption whatsoever. Angels crying over your deflowered hymen etc etc.

As if my terrible tennis and the impenetrable conversation wasn’t bad enough, I’d begun to see that there was something fundamentally mean-spirited about my fellow tennis players. They reeked of entitlement, of nastiness, and displayed a taint of cruelty that I found utterly repellant. Their chatter and loud shrieks had drawn the attention of a small group of boys, and as I made my excuses and left, the two groups were oblivious to all save for the potential conquests to be made.

I returned to my own world, telling nobody when my parents finally and irrevocably drew a line under what had been our family. I kept schtumm when I inadvertently discovered that my father had a second family tucked away in reserve for such a time when he finally plucked up the courage to admit as much to my mother. I did make a few friends, sort of, but the passage of many years and some degree of understanding of the true nature of friendship has led me to believe that I was always alone and had constructed my school friends out of nothing warmer than the snow from which Katie made her Snowchild.

apologies for dreadful photos - the light in January is in short supply, as are the hours I can devote to anything non-deadline aligned

Bleak, huh? Damn straight. However, at sweet fifteen ( fifteen?) I ran away from home, left Glasgow, hung out with deeply unsuitable and dangerous people, hurled illegal substances into the temple of my body like a temple-destroying Vandal and survived to tell the tale. Which of course, because I write for children, has had to be couched in language suitable for small people. Not watered-down, just sifted. The lumpy bits left in the sieve are the foundations of these newsletters.

Back to Katie and her Snowchild.

1994. By then I’d been through five blissful years of Art College and had made real friends. Good, generous, lovely people with whom I could be 100% my own self. People who I loved and who loved me back. How lucky was I? And yet…I have to ask, why was I sobbing in the bath? Partly because I’d embedded myself in an impossible marriage, a state of affairs that would take a further three years to untangle, and partly because I had undergone enough counselling to understand that I was damaged and in need of…the best word I can find here is caritas.

All of this, swirling around in my head as I trekked across the deck to my husband-built studio in the back garden of our little slice of rural perfection, high in the Lammermuir hills. On the surface, an idyll. Underneath - all the feels. I loved my studio. I had a photographer’s sink in one corner, which for those of you raised on digital photography, is a vast shallow tray for washing prints in. Also, for an illustrator, it’s a vast shallow tray for soaking watercolour paper prior to stretching it for future paintings.³

I miss that studio enormously. There was a collapsing Chesterfield sofa across from the photographer’s sink. I would tuck my infant daughter in her little baby basket on that sofa, tiptoe across the studio and get on with whatever book I was working on until she woke up and demanded my breast. My daughter, the tiny infant whose pregnancy coincided with the final untangling of my marriage. A story for another time. Instead, let’s recall the soft quietness of that studio, the windows out to the wild garden, the table with my brand new Apple Macintosh computer displaying its glorious flying- toasters-in-an-aquarium screensaver ( does anyone here even know what the heck I’m talking about?) and the Snowchild artwork on my drawing board. Radio 4 Woman’s Hour playing in the background.

I had so much work at that time. One book succeeded another. I loved the flow from one to the next, the cycle of ideas, to rough draft, to finished draft, to print and send to publisher ( no email back then) to pencil roughs, to watercolour artwork, to parcelling up in brown paper, string and sealing wax ( an affectation even then) to straight on to the next book. I look back on those books like diaries ; I can read between the lines, the brushstrokes, see where I was at on each page.

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‘Oh, I am a lonely painter

I live in a box of paints

I’m frightened by the Devil

And I’m drawn to the ones that ain’t

afraid…

Joni Mitchell, ‘A Case of You’

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And yes, to paraphrase my all-time favourite musician’s words, it’s in my blood like holy wine, this need, this drive to communicate, to draw what I didn’t even know existed until it flows off the end of my nib or brush. To share. To ask - are you like me? Do you feel the same way too? Every book, every newsletter a little signal beamed out into the vastness of space - do you feel what I feel?

Do you feel what I feel?

Wait, what? Two Snowchildren? Watercolour and ink from The Snowchild.

There have been many times since where I’ve sent out my signal and it’s been met with puzzlement or a crashing silence. Times where I’ve repaired to my room in a variety of places and felt utterly desolate. Times where I’ve wondered if I was spawned on a far planet and dumped here as a cosmic joke.

Lately, under the cosh of an impossible deadline and a fair degree of physical discomfort verging on pain, I’ve found true friends. Not Snowchildren, but real, golden-hearted, fully human friends who get in touch and ask - am I coming out to play yet? Have I finished that book yet? How am I? Can’t wait to go do stuff together, when will you be free? How’s the hip? When are you coming out to play? We miss you.

It’s snowing. I love winter. I can’t wait. See you soon.

Do you feel what I feel? Watercolour and ink from The Snowchild.

And finally -

1. Wandering Hand Trouble, but it took me years to decode this.

2. Attractive.

3. If we don’t stretch paper, it goes all bumphly ( technical term) and wrinkled and impossible to paint on. I still stretch every single bit of paper for every single spread in every single book I make. Dinosaurs R Me.