Nicholas Shakespeare

And I think that's the secret of storytelling.

It's very, very difficult to tell a story that people want to read, even if it's a simple story.

And so I was determined, you know, to follow the footsteps of the people I regard as great storytellers and who, indeed, I had discovered myself when at this school in Oxford, which is loosely based on a school called the Dragon School, where many people, I mean, Neville Shute, for instance, one of your great writers was a pupil there.

And that's where I first read On the Beach, On the Banks of the Charwell.

Antonio Fraser was there, John Mortimer was there, John Betjeman was there, who had given the wedding speech at my parents' wedding.

I was conscious that this school had a lot of writers in it, and I suppose in age 9, 10, 11, I am learning to read their books as well as the novels of writers like John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, or Green Mantle, and The Tales of King Arthur.

Again, the river where the hand comes with Excalibur above the water, I saw it as the char-world.

So the char-world, which meandered beside the playing fields, was the kind of boundary of my universe when I was nine.

I was dropped there, incidentally.

It was probably particularly a potent place for me because I'd grown up in Cambodia and Singapore.

My parents were diplomats, and I was dropped off age nine

at this school, as my parents steamed off, as they did in those days by boat to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

And I was left, although I spoke English, I was left in a strange country where I spoke the language, but I felt like a spy in a cold January day in a boarding house, the color of kind of sticking plasters with boys who I didn't know.

I absorbed it with particular

intensity, these early experiences, which were quite formative for me.

And there was indeed, as you cross the road into the school on the left, a small sandpit.

And that sandpit became a kind of metaphor, as I was writing the book, for what you bury, what childhood memories

Sad is also used, it suggests the deserts of Iran where one of the characters comes from.

It suggests nuclear fusion.

So I wanted to use the iconography of the school to explore a more adult universe.