Jacqueline Wilson has been to Dublin many times, but never managed to fit in a visit to the zoo. Now, finally, it’s on the cards. “The wonderful film festival people have actually got a special gift card,” she says, delighted. For years her “comfort viewing” has been a documentary series about Dublin Zoo, “but the schedule’s always been so crammed together that there’s never been a chance to go”.
It’s telling that Wilson, now 71, in town for the Audi Dublin International Film Festival, views three days of public events and interviews as a lovely treat rather a work trip. She has two new titles out this year: Butterfly Beach, a quick read for World Book Day on March 2nd, and Wave Me Goodbye, a novel about child evacuees due out in May. A film adaptation of her book, Four Kids and It, starring Michael Caine and Bill Nighy, is in production, while the BBC is adapting another of her books, Katy, for the small screen.
This is what a “quiet” year looks like for Jacqueline Wilson – who typically releases two full-length novels a year, whose hundredth title was published in 2014 and whose UK sales alone stand at more than 40 million copies.
Unlike many children’s writers, she avoids pitting novels against the audiovisual. “I have got quite a few DVDs,” she admits. Wilson is known for her collection of more than 15,000 books; you can imagine what “quite a few” means to her. But cinema trips are her favourite, where she can get “sucked into the screen. I might be worrying about something or just feeling pretty low, but if I go to a film – even if it’s not a particularly good film – it’s a mood-changer, and much less painful than actually having a workout!”
At home in Kingston-on-Thames, near London, she can be found taking advantage of films shown in the morning. “It’s very decadent!” she laughs, recalling accidentally ending up at a special mother-and-baby screening. “I was divided. The nicer, sweeter part of myself thought, what a lovely thing to do. I would have liked this when my daughter was little. And the crotchety part of me thought, silence your baby!”
The “crotchety part” of Wilson is rarely on display as we talk, though. Among the films she introduced for the festival is the 2003 adaptation of her 1999 novel, The Illustrated Mum. “I was a little anxious. Often, even with the best adaptations, the very sad things are softened. Normally I’m not a desperate control freak but I did feel very protective of this book. I was so lucky, it was such a sensitive production. The scriptwriter, Debbie Isitt, was very respectful to the book. Cilla Ware, the director, works wonders with children.”
She is full of praise for the cast: Alice Connor (Dolphin) and Holly Grainger (Star) play the daughters of Marigold (Michelle Collins), the titular “illustrated mum” whose bipolar disorder is handled delicately in both novel and film. Wilson has tried watching it with a critical lens, but her love of film kicks in, even when it’s an adaptation of her own work. The opening scene is particularly impressive: “it’s all these pretty colours blurred, and it looks dazzling. Then it starts to focus, and you realise you’re in a tattoo parlour, and she’s having a tattoo - and you think, oh lovely, and then, UGH!”
In many ways this echoes her novels, where children face difficult situations with creativity and resilience between Nick Sharratt’s bright, cheerful covers. “You can take them through worrying things, sad things, but you have to have some kind of resolution, some kind of comfort, and some light-hearted moments too. I don’t want to be responsible for depressing a whole wave of children!”
And yet her saddest books are often among the favourites when children are asked, including My Sister Jodie (2008) in which the protagonist loses her older sister. “I’ve always thought this sounded so fey and irritating of writers, but it really did happen to me – I wanted it to have a different ending, but my whole being said, NO.”
Wilson notes that sad endings are “true to the tradition of children’s literature”, recalling Beth’s death in Little Women. It’s a classic she would love to revisit, along the lines of her retelling of What Katy Did in Katy (2015). She is conscious that these twists on the classics must be respectful, while acknowledging “sometimes the moral viewpoint of a book doesn’t quite chime in with the way we think now”, In Katy, learning to be more patient doesn’t – despite the Victorian ideals of the original – “fix” a disability.
Ballet Shoes is another children’s classic she adores but can’t imagine reworking, simply because “I know nothing about ballet. It would be such a project.” But the three Fossil sisters do appear in her forthcoming Wave Me Goodbye, where they serve as imaginary friends to the evacuated bookworm Shirley – whose lack of knowledge of real ballet echoes Wilson’s own.
The novel after that sees Wilson return to her favourite historical period with Rose Rivers (May 2018), featuring a character first met in Clover Moon (2016) and in which the irrepressible Hetty Feather – who has starred in a whole series of her own – is bound to make an appearance. The Victorian era has always fascinated Wilson, but it wasn’t until she was involved with London’s Foundling Museum and was asked about writing about a Victorian child that she felt she had “permission” to write one.
“I had no idea whether children would like this or not, but I thought, yeah, I have to write this book. And wonderfully for me, Hetty Feather has become one of my most popular characters. On BBC, the Hetty Feather series is about to start showing the third series, and later this year there’s going to be a special Hetty Feather exhibition at the Foundling Museum.”
Her capacity to understand modern children remains as sharp as ever, though contemporary teenagers mystify her slightly. Despite having written several teen fiction novels in the 1980s, when "you could really more or less write about anything", she can't imagine writing YA today. "If most of your life is to do with what you post on Instagram, what is your plot?"
Claire Hennessy is a writer, editor and creative writing facilitator
