It is a huge pleasure to welcome Jamila Gavin to the blog for the second day of our Pop Up takeover.  Jamila’s first book was The Magic Orange Tree, a collection of short stories.  Jamila won the Whitbread prize with her novel Coram Boy and her Grandpa Chatterji books were turn into a television series.  We are delighted to welcome Jamila to the blog.

You could argue that every story you write, every act you make, makes a difference – good or bad. That’s why Dylan Calder’s brief to his ten writers: to write a story about “difference,” was so brilliant, and thought provoking.

Dylan wanted to celebrate ten years of his amazing Pop Up charity, whose sole aim is to bring authors and their books together with children – and going that extra crucial step – to put a book into the hands of every child that attended one of their sessions.

Many of us who have been brought up with books from the cradle, will go to the grave in the company of books, but it is astonishing to know that there are children, in whose households there are no books. For Dylan, every gift of a book was a gift of making a difference.

When Dylan asked me to be one of his ten writers, a book which I had written years ago, The Wormholers leapt into my head. It was about Sophie, a non-verbal quadriplegic who had gone down a wormhole into a parallel universe and found freedom as a whale.

For me, her story wasn’t over. Sophie had continued to live inside me.

In The Wormholers she had been free to explore different time zones and universes; her body had found water, and been in its natural element. Yet, at the end, she chooses to return to her family in her own world, with all its difficulties. I had left in her wheelchair at the top of the stairs, with her bewildered parents asking, “How did you get up there?”

The chance to explore the next stage, albeit in just 3000 words, was something I couldn’t resist, especially when the request from Dylan came with an illustrator, Jacinta Read.

And so, we started work on In Her Element. Jacinta began to send in some wonderfully imaginative depictions of Sophie, and her room- mate, and the sea, and whales and, most gloriously, the colour blue.

 Sophie’s story, isn’t just about finding the place or home where you feel you belong, it’s about the extreme difficulties of disability being an obstacle to acceptance in the mainstream world. I felt it was also a metaphor for a wider range of obstacles to being part of society and belonging.  Issues of race, colour, and “otherness,” were themes which had always been at the heart of most of my writing from the very beginning. I was continually interested in where one felt “at home.” For so many, it will be where they were born and brought up, yet for others, it’s as though they were born into, if not the wrong universe, but another parallel universe.

When writing The Wormholers, I had become fascinated by the theories of Stephen Hawking, and his work on Time, other universes, parallel universes, imaginary numbers, and “wormholes.” As someone who had a phobia for numbers in school, and had soon been separated from the sciences into the arts, it also disguised my imaginative interest in such things, even without the aptitude.

But my initial interest in how people with such disability communicate, began with the story of Helen Keller. Born in America’s deep south in Alabama in 1880, she became both blind and deaf at the age of nineteen months, possibly due to scarlet fever. Her future looked bleak, as her speech too would undoubtedly be affected, even though she had already spoken her first words around the age of one. She seemed destined to be deaf, blind and, consequently, mute.

She was a frustrated and unruly seven- year old, when Anne Sullivan came into her life, sent to be her teacher by the Perkins Institute for the Deaf. This remarkable relationship of teacher and pupil was inspiring and even more so, because it revealed what a highly intelligent young woman Keller was. It was thanks to Anne Sullivan’s extraordinary belief in her that she grew up to go on to Harvard and on to a distinguished career as a writer, lecturer and campaigner. Most importantly, it made me realise that people can have all sorts of apparently debilitating afflictions, but which can cover a totally functioning and intelligent brain. I had noticed how people with disabilities could be treated as infantile:  they were spoken to as rather stupid, with louder voices as if they were deaf, even when they were not deaf. 

Perhaps we should be less judgmental about children being absorbed with screens.  For so many children, and especially those like Sophie, technology makes a massive difference. It can mean an independence almost undreamed of thirty years ago. It means that not only can a present- day Sophie lead an independent life, with access to the written or spoken word, but she can write her own stories too.