Lauren Child On Smile
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Thank you. Yeah, it's lovely to be here. So I'm going to talk a little bit about childhood because from a very tiny age, my older sister felt that my mother and father were getting things wrong and she didn't hold back from challenging their parental values.

her competency, she would regard, sorry, she would regularly point it out to them that they were incompetent. And on one occasion, she noticed that the tax disc had unglued itself from the windscreen of our car. And she became convinced that my mother's failure to display it would lead to our parents' imprisonment. And my mother said, yes,

You know, don't worry about it. But my sister said, but when they take you away, what will happen to us? And I could tell she properly understood exactly how these things played out. My mother had to pull over and stick...

the text is to the windscreen with the only thing she had to hand which was green shield stamps and as anyone who grew up in the 70s with no green shield stamps with award tokens for shopping were valuable things and you collect enough and you could perhaps buy a set of coffee glasses nothing my family would ever find a need for but they were very desirable to own um my

My mother and father's parental shortcomings were not so much my concern because my sister had that covered. I had wider worries. One of the big ones, obviously, was rabies. I'd never stepped foot in Europe, but I did know that it was absolutely teeming with rabid dogs. And I knew this because...

um you know foreign dogs were not allowed into this country without quarantine so when i heard there was to be a channel tunnel i was naturally very alarmed what madness you know these dogs would be rushing through the tunnel and um foaming at the mouth and they would be biting everyone and then there would be mass death

Unlike my sister, who is a child of action, I kept this worry very close and told no one until it finally came out one Christmas during a gang of charades. My uncle and father were acting out mad dogs and Englishmen and pretending to bite people's knees. And I found this to be in very poor taste, given what a serious affliction rabies is.

So I left the room and my aunt came to find me and she managed to eat this worry out of me. And she explained, you know, why this was not going to be so and this was not going to happen. And I believed her because she said it with some authority and the worry disappeared.

It was almost instantly replaced by the larger anxiety of nuclear war, which was not so easy to dispel. No one could explain to me how taking a door off its hinges and leaning it against the wall in your hall would protect me from nuclear fallout. To these questions, they just said, you know what? Don't worry about it.

But children have a pretty acute early warning system and fairly adept at reading the room. They gauge when someone is not really telling the truth. And it became clear that don't worry about it. It turned out to mean we have absolutely no idea. Something my sister had already figured out much younger than I. I very often write about...

Children actually from a child's point of view. So with their voice. And it's because the way they look at the world is very interesting. It's not linear. It's often reassuring in the way they cut through to the important things. There's no willful small talk.

I didn't intend to write for children though and sometimes if I'm honest I wish I'd stepped into a more glamorous world. A career working in the field of children's books is rarely what I would ever call glamorous. It's not unusual to find yourself in a room that smells distinctly of mashed potato and very regularly you're wiping mashed potato off the table that you're about to display your work.

Usually I'm talking to an audience who doesn't want to be there or hasn't chosen to be there at least. They often don't know who I am. And oftentimes they would be much prefer to be outside, perhaps hopping on one leg. And sometimes I feel exactly the same. My audience can be potato like in their reception.

Sometimes I can find myself answering questions which seem to have no bearing on the carefully constructed talk that I've just given. Perhaps a question like, when can I eat my sandwiches? Or can you tie my shoelaces? I'm quite sure Margaret Atwood never has to answer these kind of questions. When can I eat my sandwiches and can you tie my shoelaces?

And yet, for all this, I think I'm lucky with my audience because these exchanges with children break through any nonsense of my being more important than them. We are equal. We're discussing the vital things. Shoelaces, sandwiches, fluffy pencil cases, a dead pet, a lost guardian, a dad sleeping downstairs on the couch.

a playground for a joy, a sorrow, a worry. And then there are those things that children say that stay with me. Most recently, I was giving a talk at a primary school in Preston. It was about my latest book, Smile. The story is told in the voice of an 11-year-old called Clarice Bean. And it's about ideas, big and small, and

It's, you know, it's funny and touching and in part and sometimes sad, but it's the book which ultimately presents hope. I think hope in children's literature is very important. I don't particularly subscribe to rules for children's writing, set rules, but perhaps if there's one that I abide by, it's hope.

It's set in an ordinary sort of family. And it's about the ordinary of the everyday, just the things that happen, but also the extraordinary in the everyday, that how bad luck can turn to good luck, how things turn very quickly about the funny things and the difficult and the things that happen to us all the time. We're in the environment of home. You know, there are many things that we have in common. And...

As the mundane is unfolding, so too there can be bigger things. And for Clarice, there she is sensing the crackle of anxiety for her mother. And it's a growing anxiety about her father's health. And this is all going on in the family.

And it's something that infiltrates her life. And yet she still has to deal with all the other things, all the things to do with school and the wider community and her friends and the struggles, you know, with brothers and sisters and things.

Meanwhile, Clarice has also been asked to take part in a project looking at endangered animals, something she's very keen to do and children are often asked to do. But actually, there's a heaviness to this because we are looking at a creature going extinct. And at the same time, she's also worrying about her father. And the two things are sort of parallel in a way because she can no more help the whale shark that she's picked as her companion.

as her subject for her endangered species than she can her father. What can she do for him? And she picks this whale shark thinking, you know, it seems like a ferocious animal because it's the biggest fish in the ocean and they grow to 18 meters long sometimes. They have 3000 teeth and they are sharks. They're not whales, but yet they are vulnerable. This huge thing is so vulnerable and it is,

It is dependent on the zooplankton. And yet the zooplankton cannot survive if the oceans get too warm. And the whale shark may not survive without the zooplankton. And if there are too many zooplankton, there may not be enough phytoplankton because the zooplankton eat them. And if there aren't enough phytoplankton, then maybe there's not enough oxygen.

And it's this round and round, this game of consequences that we're looking at in the story. And there's a big subject, the importance of everything, the equality of everything, that one thing lives for another and the importance of the small. And I talk also about the power of the small. I mean,

I show them my knitwear that has been decimated by the tiny screeches in my wardrobe and these holes just held together with tiny bits of wool now. And that shows you the power of it. But there's also the power and the smallness of us.

and how we can feel so insignificant but in the whole scheme of things we are also very important and so anyway I give the talk and we

we discuss these things and then a little queue is formed and children come up to have their book signed or a little piece of paper written on. And some of them will ask me a question and others will duck their head and try not to make any eye contact. But there's usually a little flutter of children that gather around the signing table and then new questions are asked. And then this begins to

turn into a more abstract sort of chatting. And the chatting becomes quite elastic. And that's what I really love about it. There is no small talk. We are talking about the things we want to talk about. And there was one little boy who had sort of merged me with my 11-year-old protagonist. And he said to me, so Lauren, are you 11?

And I said, I wish, but I wrote my first book in 1999, so I can't be. And he said, oh, so you were 25. And...

I mean, apart from his arithmetic being very, very quick, it was one of those moments that I think about afterwards and hurry to scribble down quickly because, you know, it's so brilliant. He sort of got it. And yes, of course, I am 11 and I am 25 and I wrote the book from the point of view of an 11-year-old. And so I was drawing on my 11-year-old self.

I don't go into some kind of weird childlike trance. Some people have asked me that, do you live in a childlike state? No, but I am drawing on that part of me that remembers it and feels it. And I'm also 25 because he didn't know this, but I actually conceived the character in my mind when I was probably around 25. And so it all made sense to me.

And in any case, don't we slip between ages? I don't know if everyone feels like this, but a number of people I've spoken to say yes. I mean, as we...

you know, in different situations or depending on the way someone's speaking to us, we are 11, 25, 81, 62. We're all of those things. And, and yet he was saying something more powerful than that somehow, because what he was doing was properly connecting with me in that moment, because what did it matter what age he was and what age I was? He wouldn't have minded what I'd said back to him. And he,

I felt no age at all, which is my most happy state, actually. I always feel best when I'm unaware of it anymore. And it was very moving.

not only what he was saying and that connection made, but it took me right back to my child self, which we all have inside us because we all grow with our child self, whether remembered or not, those experiences are in the bones of us. And there's something very reassuring about it and his curiosity about

is reassuring because curiosity is so very important and it gets sort of drummed out of us. And Smile, the book, came out of my fears of climate change and I needed to reconnect with any sense of hope and joy. And I did that by remembering things from childhood, but actually looking at them through a child's point of view. And that curiosity is

and interest and excitement, along with worry, of course, along with worry and anxiety, but how they look at things differently. And if only we would nurture that curiosity and allow it, because of course, it's there to problem solve. It's there to create and it's there to understand. It really helps us understand other people and step into other people's shoes.

But I think more than that, it does inspire passion. And that is a precious thing because passionate people find a way. Thank you.