We are delighted to welcome Natasha Farrant to the YLG blog to talk about the inspiration and development of ideas for her twelfth book Voyage of the Sparrowhawk, set just after World War One, it is a compelling adventure novel for young people.

Some books – usually first novels – are born of an author’s pressing emotional need. Others come about for more prosaic reasons: an author has a contract, and that contract must be fulfilled. Voyage of the Sparrowhawk, my twelfth book, was one of the latter.

I was in Norfolk, staying with friends, and wondering what to write about. Lying on a stone beach watching a stormy sea, I elaborated the premise of a potential heroic fantasy dystopian time-travel saga to my husband. He was baffled. Back at the house, I explained my idea to my friend. She was not so much baffled as dismissive.

Discouraged, I cuddled her dog, a chihuahua called Dobby.

“Maybe I should write about you,” I told him.

Everybody liked that idea, because everybody loved Dobby. You don’t hear of many rescue chihuahuas, but that’s what Dobby was, discovered starving and neglected by my friend’s mother in law in a filthy cage. “He looked like a rat”, I’m told, “but with such beautiful eyes.”

Rescued, washed and fed, Dobby became magnificent. He wasn’t one of your fluffy, little chihuahuas. Sand coloured, short haired, with huge ears and eyes like shiny black marbles, he was about the size of a terrier but behaved like a much bigger dog. In his mind, Dobby was an Alsatian. A Doberman! He strutted along with all the assurance of a dog who knows the world belongs to him, and protected his adoptive family fiercely. He was hilarious. Absurd. Courageous.

                A perfect dog for a story.

Then, as I do with children in writing workshops, I began a process of deduction, mind clicking and whirring into action, drawing on my surroundings, my imagination, my memories to produce a story... A rescue dog – rescued from whom? By whom? How? Why? Other factors began to feed in. I was in the middle of reading Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage. I’ve a long history of being fascinated by the sea (and remember all this process started with me on a beach). My grandfather was a shipowner in Cardiff, until all his ships were requisitioned by the government during World War II, and thereafter sunk. “All over the world,” my grandmother once told me, possibly exaggerating, “at the bottom of the ocean, lie your grandfather’s ships”. Steeped in the epic voyage of La Belle Sauvage, I thought I too would like to write a boat adventure. But how to link it to Dobby?

At the time, I was studying in North London. To clear my head at the end of a day’s lectures, I had taken to walking from Angel to Kings Cross along the Regent’s Canal. Just behind Granary Square, on a magnificent old Dutch barge, there is a bookshop where I liked to stop and browse.

A Dutch barge?

“She came from Holland?” I asked. “Across the Channel?”

Click, click, went my mind. Whir, whir…

The canal was lined with narrowboats, brightly painted, with amazing names (including, and bringing me back to Pullman, the Serafina Pekkala). Could a rescued dog (or indeed, a stolen dog) be hidden on one? And would it be possible, for reasons which would surely become apparent to me, to take one across the Channel? The big wide barges are relatively safe in open water as long as the sea is flat – but what about the smaller narrowboats? Curiously, I tapped into Google – and up popped an article about a retired couple who, against all advice, had done just that…

A stolen dog, shipwrecks, storms, narrowboats… war, too… I let the story be for a while, as I have learned to over the years, waiting for the brain to work its quiet magic and stitch it all together. I visited a canal museum. I took a narrowboat out for a weekend. I visited another Dutch barge and walked along more canals. And in time, I picked up my pencil and a new notebook and I began to write, freestyle, the first thing that came into my head… It began with Albert Skinner, the policeman, standing on a bridge looking at ducklings, for no reason than I had recently been standing on a bridge, looking at ducklings… I drew a picture of the bridge, the ducks. I drew a picture of a girl with wild hair. I called her Lotti (I had just read Penelope Fitzgerald’s book about Charlotte Mew).  The name seemed to fit.

Click click click…

And so the story grew.

Thank you to Natasha Farrant for this fascinating blog piece and to Faber Children's Books for including us on the blog tour!