We are hugely excited to welcome Marcus Sedgwick to the blog for day three of our Pop UpTakeover to mark the publication of their special 10^th anniversary  10 Stories to Make a Difference books.  Marcus’s first published novel was Floodland which was awarded the Branford Boase Award.  His novel My Swordhand is Singing was awarded the BookTrust Teenage Prize and he was awarded the Michael L Prinz for Midwinterblood.  Here Marcus introduces some of the ideas that helped inspire Together We Win, his story for Pop Up which has been illustrated by Daniel Ido an exciting new illustrating talent whose influences include Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, J R R Tolkein and Roald Dahl.

Just once, I gave a talk about conscientious objectors, specifically the conscientious objectors of the First World War. I was speaking in a large hall to around 400 year 8/9 students, from three different schools, and I could see I had my work cut out – there are very few people who believe that all violence is wrong; most of us believe that sometimes you have to fight, even some of the gentlest people would concede that maybe in extreme circumstances, war might be necessary, for example. And my talk was about a group of around 30 men who had refused to do anything that furthered the war effort – while many COs went to the front lines and worked in the Royal Army Medical Corp, for example – the ‘absolutists’ I was speaking about refused any involvement, on the grounds that if they did anything to help the war, they may as well be killing German soldiers themselves.

What interests me about these men is the strength of such an apparently extreme belief. What internal power do you have to hold in the face of near overwhelming opposition to your view, to hold onto it? To hold onto it, I might add, despite not just moral censure or even a jail sentence – these 34 absolutists stuck to their view even when their death sentences were announced.

But, I said to the hall full of students, let’s look at this issue another way. Let’s try an experiment.

Is there anyone here, I asked, who thinks that women should not be able to vote? Put your hand up if so. There was a slight edginess in the room, a stirring. A where-is-he-going-with-this, perhaps. I don’t know, but no one put their hand up.

Fine. So put your hand up, if you think that black people should not have the same rights as white people. That they should be slaves to white people. Another slight edgy pause. People looked around the room, but no one put their hand up.

Okay, so put your hand up if you think women should not be allowed to do the same jobs as men. No hands.

Or, if you think Britain should rule India or various countries in Africa, please put your hand up. Still, no hands. Not one, in a room of a few hundred people.

Yet all these views, and many similar ones besides, were once commonly accepted as correct, and by the overwhelming majority of people in Britain. Now, the vast mass of people knows that such views are abhorrent, and even if there were some young people in the room with racist or sexist leanings, their knowledge that such views are no longer acceptable in itself made them keep silent – they know that most people believe them to be holding abhorrent views.

So what changed? What changed between slavery, oppression of women’s voting and employment rights and so on ­– and emancipation from these things? What changed was that a tiny, minority opinion fought to make its voice heard. It made its voice heard and it stuck to it opinion in spite of all and any objection from the masses. Throughout history, ALL change has come from the unorthodox. This is true by definition – a paradigm cane only be overturned by a revolutionary viewpoint.

So this is why I wrote Together We Win, to show that sometimes, a small number of people, sometimes even one person, can start the fire that leads to lasting change – they light the fire of awareness, that illuminates the path from oppression to liberation. Right now, we are at many tipping points, there is still a very long way to go in the various journeys for equality, but we should never feel alone, we should never feel that our voice doesn’t count. Every voice counts, and at a tipping point, it only takes one.

Those 34 absolutists were taken from medieval prison conditions in Essex, in a sealed train, to France, where, under martial law, they had the death sentence passed against them. They were given one more chance to recant – they didn’t. They said they would rather be shot by the firing squad. At the very last moment, the sentences were revoked, and they were sent to a penal prison camp on Dartmoor, where many died of disease, malnutrition, or beatings by the guards. Years later, one or two of them were interviewed by the Imperial War Museum; the frail voices of now old men captured on tape, allowing us a window into the mind of someone with the strongest conviction imaginable.

Why did you do what you did? asks the interviewer at one point. The answer? It was just something you felt you had to do. You knew it was right.  

A big thank you to Marcus Sedgwick for the blog, to Pop Up for its innovative 10 Books to Make a Difference and to Nicky Potter for her work in securing these blogs.