Sally Gardner explains to Danuta Kean how fairy tales can offer escape from adversity

Storytelling saved Sally Gardner, the bright and passionate author of the novel I, Coriander. As a child she was bumped from school to school, at one point ending up at an institution for maladjusted children straight out of Dickens, because neither her teachers nor her parents could understand why such a clever girl, with an obvious love of books and words, could not read. It was the 1960s and she was dyslexic, a condition that had yet to be recognised.

“After the school for maladjusted children I was sent to a so-called posh school where they wore horsehair uniforms and slippery-soled shoes,” she recalls in typically vivid detail. But this was no Hogwarts. “I was very badly bullied by these really hideous girls. I loved horror stories, so decided to make up a few to escape from them. Under my bedclothes one night I started very quietly speaking them out loud, when I realised that everyone in the dorm had gone very quiet, then girls started screaming and matron had to be called. They never bullied me again.”

She laughs. Her laugh is warm, open and happy; she is living proof that the bullies can be beaten. And the memories, though no longer hurtful, inspire her to write vividly of her 17th-century heroine Coriander in her much-anticipated debut novel. The book is as much a love song to the city of London as it is an adventure story, set against the backdrop of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. Coriander Hobie, a girl with fairy blood coursing through her veins living by the Thames, tells her extraordinary story of triumph over tragedy. It is a magical tale vividly told, weaving fantasy and fact seamlessly against a background of hard-line religion twisted to serve the greed of hypocrites.

London comes alive in her writing. “I absolutely love London and know it very well,” she explains. “It is incredibly rich, and when you think you know it something else is revealed.” Gardner grew up in the heart of the capital in the law district of Gray’s Inn – her parents were high flyers in the legal profession. The area still had the scars of wartime: bombed-out buildings revealed a cobble-stoned past and the milky light of gas lamps seeped through the smog that blanketed the streets. It was a place to feel the magic of ghosts. “I used to feel the past was literally just through the fog, it was a tangible thing,” she remembers, and looks wistful at the memory. I wonder whether it was in those pea-soupers that she first believed in Fairyland.

By ‘believe’ what she means is that fairy tales help us to understand our lives in ways that religion cannot. “Fairy tales are the soul of the world,” she explains. “They talk of great universal truths in a way that is accessible. When you write about a child living in a tower block with a crackhead mother, it is too close to her reality for her to see what else is in the story, but place her in a fairy tower with a horrible witch whom she is trying to escape, and she can take inspiration from the message that good can triumph over evil.”

The River Thames is as much a character in the book as the girls, boys, fairies and hags. “When I was growing up my parents divorced and my mother went to live on the river in Hammersmith. It was then that the river had a great impact on me,” she recalls. “It washes the city. Alchemy was still believed in in Coriander’s day, and the river was the perfect philosopher’s stone: it was the colour of lead but brought gold into the city. It made the city what it was.”

Her parents’ divorce had a devastating impact. “A lot of children have to be mothers or fathers to their brothers and sisters in very difficult circumstances, and they don’t get credit for that,” she comments. “All my knowledge of childhood unhappiness I never lost, which is why I think I can write for children.”

At the root of her unhappiness as a child was the ignorance of adults that she is severely dyslexic. Surrounded by high achievers, her seeming inability to read or write was taken as a sign of stupidity. But she is a bright woman, as she discovered at art school. She also realised that dyslexia has a positive side. “What I realised is that I visualise everything. I had thought that everybody did this, that when I said an 18th-century woman they could see a clear image of that woman with white cheeks in a silk gown.”

But not everyone sees in her way: “I was doing a show with a director and was explaining exactly how I saw the set, and he said, ‘I can’t see it.’ I remember standing up and saying, ‘My God, you are blind!’ He said, ‘I am not!’ ‘But can’t you see it in your head?’ And he replied, ‘Most people cannot.’” It was a revelation and I realised that what people had put me through purgatory for was a real gift.”

I, Coriander is a special book for Gardner, not least because Coriander’s triumph against powerful foes mirrors her own victory over self-doubt and ignorance. For children feeling pitted against a cruel world, the message it offers is of hope and a future. “One of the most extraordinary things is that in publishing my dyslexia has never been a problem,” she says when asked how it has affected her writing. “I can’t tell you how liberating it has been to hear my editor say, ‘You can write, just get on and write.’ It has been like the start of my life.”
How I write

Sally Gardner is proof that dyslexia does not have to stop you from being a successful writer. Here she describes how she overcomes it to create magical stories.

“Computers are a godsend for dyslexics. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t laugh at you. It even has spell check that can occasionally help spell a word the right way. It gives you the ability to go. I work on an Apple Mac, which I think are designed for dyslexics. A lot of problems with dyslexic writers is the lack of organisation, of not being able to order your thoughts in a way that makes sense. When you are writing you are often five steps ahead on the page. With a computer you can do the five steps ahead and then put them back in the order they should be. I think it is very important to be brave and take a plunge into the pool and not worry about it. You can work slowly on what you write afterwards. You don’t have to show it to anyone. The other trick is to read slowly into a Dictaphone and get someone to type it up afterwards for you. That is what I am going to do for my next book. Don’t worry about grammar. I was so fearful about this grammar business, but what I decided was that grammar is like the lungs of a book: you have it to allow people to breathe. So it goes like this: a comma is for a short breath, a full stop is for a big breath, end of paragraph is a cup of tea and a chapter means that you can leave a book alone! Apart from that you shouldn’t worry. If you are running out of breath then you should put a full stop in quickly. And short breaths are best for books.”