Midnight Blue

Recently I found some great photographs of 'Midnight Blue country' which I've been busy putting on my Facebook page.  Also I was asked to write about folk stories or legends which have played a part in my life, and this took me back to Midnight Blue as well, including the legend of Wild Edric, which I first came across in Charlotte Burne's 'Shropshire Folk-lore - A Sheaf of Gleanings'. 

It's hard to believe I wrote Midnight Blue twenty-one years ago - my first novel, and I've been writing ever since.  It's hard now to remember all the triggers that set me off. Wild Edric was certainly one of them, and so was Hampton Hayes, a crumbling Shropshire farmhouse, quarry-tiled, with ancient beams and deep-set ingle-nooks, which I lived in one winter whilst my own house was being done up.  It stood on what in the book became 'Highholly Hill' with a view of sunrise from every window.  I thought then, and still do, that it was the best view in the county, with the Callow across the valley, with its crown of Scots pines, the twin hills of Pontesbury and the rugged Stiperstones range topped by the rugged outcrop of the Devil's Chair.

The other trigger for 'Midnight Blue' was a book by balloonist Jim Woodman about a Kon-Tiki type balloon flight which he initiated in the Nazca desert to prove that manned flight could well have taken place a thousand years ago.  For a long time I'd been playing with the idea of a novel for children involving a balloon flight, and Woodman's description of firepits and smoke-filled balloons was all my imagination needed to set me writing.  

Look up his book if it's still around - the story of his flight makes fascinating reading.  And look up Midnight Blue as well. It's definitely still around, and to mark its twentieth anniversary since winning the Smarties Book Prize, it's hoped that an e-book version will come out later this year.