We are delighted to welcome Anne Fine, twice-winner of the Carnegie Medal and former Children's Laureate, to the blog to introduce her new book On the Wall and share her thoughts one of its lead characters, Finley.  On the Wall is published by Old Barn Books.

It’s perhaps as well that children don’t come, like sweets, as a Pick-and-Mix choice. We all know what we’d be tempted to choose. But mostly, instead, we end up with a pack of All Sorts.

I have a host of sisters. My mother only had to raise an eyebrow at one for the poor soul to fetch up on the edge of tears. But Mum could scold another till her throat ran dry, and all that sister would do was stubbornly stand, arms folded, till she could welly in with her own tirade and fearlessly argue her case.

So one of most interesting things when writing about the young stems from the fact that they have such astonishingly differing personalities, and such wide emotional ranges. Take Stolly, in Up on Cloud Nine - without a doubt the most eccentric child I’ve ever tried to portray. He makes a raft for his gerbils. He can’t help but tidy the queue at his bus stop. He even starts to build his own personal Wailing Wall. He drives everyone, including his best friend Ian, to distraction.

Yet Stolly’s still in mainstream school, and rolling along nicely. And that’s one of the things I find most fascinating about schools. They take in pretty well everyone, the All Sorts, and by and large everyone learns to fit in and rub along.

There are exceptions, of course. Children like Josh in The Ladder of Fear, (one of the short stories in Blue Moon Day), who has to be taught how to overcome his almost overwhelming anxieties about school. Or unhappy and awkward Tulip, in The Tulip Touch, whose own appalling classroom behaviour and frequent truancy stems from her horribly stressful home background. I’m sure the relentless show-off Titania, in the three comedies about the Mountfield Family (The More the Merrier, Eating Things on Sticks and Trouble in Toadpool) would prove a bit too much for most of those around her in her class.

But I’ve found it hard not to fall halfway in love with the young boy I feature in my new novel, On the Wall. Finley is moving up to secondary school. Those of his classmates who come from the same feeder primary already know him well. But those who don’t, and a goodly number of the staff now set to teach him, find themselves mystified by this unusually quiet and contemplative, but in no way shy, spirit. With his quite extraordinary gift for stillness and his seemingly cast-iron happiness, Finley appears to exist in his own private peaceable kingdom. What on earth makes the boy tick?

And how, by simply sitting unflappably on the wall of the recreation ground, does Finley end up having such a strong effect on both pupils and staff? For somehow, in his presence, nervous Juliet learns how better to deal with her previously relentless and intrusive worries. Overly excitable Akeem can be calmed. Even Miss Fuentes, suddenly bereft of her precious cat, finds his simple closeness on the bench beside her a tremendous comfort. It’s as if Finley’s acceptance of himself spreads outwards, to become an easy acceptance of how others are, giving them a confidence they find both soothing and healing.

Like many authors, I need a lot of time alone and a good deal of silence. Putting a character who has those same needs into a school became a sort of thought experiment. Sarah Maitland observed that most children tend to ‘disappear behind a wall of noise’. I chose to look more deeply into one who chooses to do the opposite. And I found it amusing and enlightening to work out, first, what fellow pupils and teachers would make of him, and how they might interpret his behaviour and even benefit from his presence.

Though there have always been children who come over as ‘different’ in children’s literature, this is a novel that wouldn’t have been written in quite the way it is before the sea-change in teaching whereby the nurture of the individual child began to be taken at least as seriously as the smooth-running education of the herd. And as a result, more and more of those of us who have dealings with young people are fully aware that disquieting numbers of our children now suffer from things like deep anxiety, or loneliness. For these, books can be a lifeline. We do, after all, read partly to know that we are not alone, and reading about someone else’s path out of an emotional mire can offer shafts of light, and ways to go.

A big thank you to Anne Fine for the blog and to Nicky Potter and Old Barn Books for the opportunity.