When my daughter Sally was five, I said: “Whoopee! Now I can read some fairytales to her!” So I went out and bought Children’s and Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm. And that night, I read Snow White to Sally. Now, I don’t know if you remember, but at the end of the original Grimm version, Snow White’s wicked stepmother is made to put on red-hot iron slippers and dance until she falls down dead.
This came as something of a shock. I always thought fairytales had happy-ever-after endings. And I didn’t want my five-year-old daughter going to sleep thinking: “Thank goodness they tortured that old woman to death.” That’s when I decided to write Fairy Tales, my own book of stories. And they came easily, I suppose, because my mental age is about 10.
In the first week, I wrote two stories a day and read them to Sally at bedtime. I judged the stories by how well she received them. ForIn the second week, I couldn’t keep up the pace and wrote only one a day. Then I faltered and wrote a story every other day. Nevertheless, by the end of the month, I had accumulated 30 stories.
The Corn Dolly was based on a child who was always complaining, while The Silly King was just a silly story Sally loved. The Fly-By-Night is exactly what it says, but The Glass Cupboard and The Wind Ghosts are (surprisingly) about nuclear power, but you can’t read any morals into them. The Witch and the Rainbow Cat I wrote for Sally because of her enormous appetite for stories about witches. Dr Bonocolus’s Devil is a new version of the Faust legend: here, the cleverest man in the world sells his soul to a fool.
Nicobobinus, however, was different. I wrote this book four years later. Sally was older and embroiled in all of that formative stuff girls have to do – who’s friends with who, who isn’t friends with who, who stuck a sticker on the back of whose jumper calling them a twit, or whatever the insult of the time was.
Nicobobinus, the boy who could do anything, came out of my yearning for a more innocent world. It begins: “This is the story of the most extraordinary child who ever stuck his tongue out at the prime minister. His name was Nicobobinus. He lived a long time ago, in a city called Venice, and he could do anything. Of course, not everybody knew he could do anything. In fact, only his best friend, Rosie, knew he could, and nobody took any notice of anything Rosie said, because she was always having wild ideas anyway.”
Nico and Rosie’s friendship is a proper friendship between a boy and a girl – she really does believe he can do anything; and because she believes it, he believes it too. Never mind that the world around them is as corrupt as it always has been (the book is full of crooked doctors, kings and religious figures – all after Nicobobinus’s golden arm, which they’re willing to cut off with the usual gung-ho attitude of plunderers). Pretty much all the grownups – the ivory poachers, the bankers, the frackers – come off badly. Only the dragons are vaguely honourable. Since there’s no meanness, no mistrust, between Nico and Rosie, they succeed against the odds, finding the cure to his “deathgold” and turning him back into flesh and blood – hoorah!
The critics were embarrassing in their praise of Fairy Tales. The Times said “Lucky Sally Jones”, while the Financial Times called me “an author setting out to rival the classic fairytales and making an exciting job of it”. Nicobobinus, however, received not a jot of that sort of praise. And yet, over the years, it is the book that has surprised me most – it might not have made it into the mainstream consciousness, like Erik the Viking or Life of Brian, but people who have loved it, have loved it hard and have kept it dear to them.
So when a young theatre director called John Ward approached me about the stage rights in 2010, I was surprised. John was so full of enthusiasm for the story (“my favourite book EVER”) and for its potential as a musical that I found myself swept along. Last year, I went to see an early version of the show, produced by John’s company DumbWise and Red Ladder, and found it something very different to that little book I’d written so long ago. It was funny (of course) and silly (thank god), but also, well, contemporary – not at all the museum piece it might have been. A new and shiny thing made with all the energy, thoughtfulness and resilience of a generation who’ve had it harder than mine.
I recently asked Sally what she thought of Nicobobinus. She said it wasn’t her favourite. I might make her come and see the show with me.
• Nicobobinus, a co-production between Red Ladder and DumbWise, is at the Lost theatre in Wandsworth, London SW8, from 11 December to 4 January. Box office: 020-7720 6897.
