Some children want to jump into the pages of a book when they finish it and stay there. I was one of those children and as an author of gritty middle grade realism it’s very important that I am responsible in the world that I offer children, after they have finished the last page. For example, Will You Catch Me? is about Nell Hobbs, the child of an alcoholic, so at the back of the book I’ve included the details of charity Nacoa (The National Association for Children of Alcoholics nacoa.org.uk) so that if a reader thinks, ’This is my world, this is happening to me,’ they have somewhere to go. I am now a proud ambassador for Nacoa.
Storm Horse and my previous book Moon Dog are both partly set around the Beckham Animal Rescue Centre. My hope is that children who read these books will become rescue-animal minded, and want to love and care for the creatures around them.
The Beckham Animal Rescue Centre is fictitious but as an advocate for the rescue charity All Dogs Matter, it is really important to me that the way it exists on the page is bound by realism. I don’t offer a world where children charge into rescue centres, wandering around by themselves, taking over and independently rescuing animals willy nilly in an unrealistic way.
I know that All Dogs Matter get many phone calls from parents asking if their children can volunteer in their centre. To volunteer at ADM you have to be 18 and over, so it’s really important that I don’t show children working in rescue centres in my books. However, my books do show them how they can be rescue animal minded as young people.
My challenge as an author is to make the extraordinary happen within the ordinary – that challenge is what excites me
My extraordinary within the ordinary in Storm Horse is that the children find a horse and keep him secret, but again I spent hours justifying how it could be possible, and constructing a scenario where Daniel would have access to the resources in order to do this.
It’s really important when writing realism that I keep an eye on the world around me. My books have happened to overlap with topical issues again and again. Moon Dog raises awareness about cruel puppy farms where puppies are bred on a mass scale with little thought for the animals’ welfare, often kept in terrible conditions resulting in disease and heartbreak. I had no inkling whilst writing Moon Dog that the pandemic was about to happen, and that the demand for buying puppies would fly up. Everybody decided they wanted a dog and puppies have been sold for ridiculous prices on the Internet by dodgy puppy farmers and backstreet breeders. To make matters worse, when people realise they’ve made a mistake and no longer want their puppy, rather than doing the responsible thing and taking it to a rescue centre they are reselling the poor little thing online to get some of their money back. The result is a population of puppies with separation anxiety.
Whilst writing Storm Horse and Moon Dog, I was in full consultation with Ira Moss, the general manager of All Dogs Matter throughout. I could not have written the books without her. She checked all the rescue centre content for me and gave me very useful notes resulting in several parts being rewritten. For example, at no time was Daniel ever wandering around the Beckham Animal Rescue Centre on his own as this is not allowed and any interaction he had with animals was done responsibly – even though the children were keeping a secret horse!
All Dogs Matter rescue and rehoming charity work in and around London to transform the lives of unwanted and abandoned dogs, they have also rehomed dogs from overseas. An example of their work is in 2019 when they rehomed over 370 dogs with new owners and found homes for 27 unwanted and abandoned dogs from China, Italy and Egypt. I am in awe of the work they do.
All Dogs Matter are such a creative charity and run lots of fun competitions, so if you do have an animal-loving youngster in your life or indeed if you yourself feel like entering, do checkout their website. They have a wonderful scheme called Mini Paws with lots of fun ideas for young people to get involved in fundraising. Here is the link: https://alldogsmatter.co.uk/team-mini-paws/
I’m often invited to judge their competitions and am counting the days until live events can happen again as they are always an important part of my calendar.
Find out more about All Dogs Matter here.
