At the time I was at boarding school in Sussex, so the situation of the toy soldier — who falls out of a window and finds himself alone and far from home — echoes mine.
I liked to hang from a barb wire fence and bend a living tree branch towards a cow to let it browse on the leaves, proud of my courage in coming so close to such powerful entities. The school grounds seemed vast, a continent containing wonders, such as the derelict swimming pool that had now turned into a marsh as big as an ocean, hidden among twisting rhododendrons and towering pines and bordered by overgrown footpaths at the edges of which lurked pheasants ready to spring out suddenly from under your feet with a bugling shriek that would stop your heart.
Like the soldier I wandered through this landscape in search of adventures, friends, and creepy crawlies, and found them all in ample measure, along with the aching homesickness that came to me every night as it came to him.
I had played with toy soldiers at home, of course, but they were made of plastic, not wood. As I wrote, I knew I was writing a story for children, being convinced that a child could do this best; this is why I used the diminutive so often I thought of the reader as younger than me and included careful instructions on how to safely cross the road.
Signing my name R. Maslen was probably inspired by the names C. Lewis and J. Tolkien, my other heroes besides Moray Williams. Books mattered to me more than anything else, except perhaps the toys I used to act out my own fantasies, and I lived in hope of finding a book with the glorious title of The Bodley Head , unaware that this was the name of the company that published two of the Narnia books in hardback. The ultimate Lost Book, then, I guess.
