The Apprentices

"I love this book. I also love Smith by Leon Garfield. I can remember, when I was in primary school, a teacher saying, ‘You’d like these.’ I didn’t read them because I didn’t like the covers of those editions, but I read them later. The Apprentices is all linked short stories. There’s a story in it called “The Lamplighter’s Funeral,” which is so evocative. But the one that really I love is called “The Valentine.” It’s the equivalent of a girl being in love with a boy band: the unattainable romance. She’s in love with a corpse. He’s a very good-looking corpse, and her father is the undertaker. Garfield does 18th century. Not many writers do this period. I read a lot of nonfiction but I think fiction is a really good way of seeing the time, so I found his stories really useful. His language is so good. His storytelling is so good. When I was a child it was definitely being read in primary schools, but it was written in the 1960s so whether it would be for the same age of readership now I do not know. When I first came across it, I was reading The Moomins , and Gemma by Noel Streatfeild. I remember buying Gemma because the 1972 edition had a cover with a girl who had a miniskirt and white boots and the lettering was 1970s curly. For a similar age of readers, there were also Rosemary Sutcliff with more scholarly books, Penelope Lively , and Nina Bawden, who we will get to in a minute. If you’re used to modern storytelling, Leon Garfield is old-fashioned but I think his books are fantastic. I love it. I love the language, I love the clothes. It’s a very fertile space for me. Also, London has always been a world city. There have been German parts, there have been Italian parts, French parts… In the 18th century, there was a massive Black population, because of how the Empire worked and because of how industrial slavery worked. There was a Black population all over the country, if you look at paintings in the big houses. That slowed down at the beginning of the 19th century, when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished. I grew up in London, and London of 60 years ago was very different. You didn’t expect to see people like me in historical dramas. When I read nonfiction books and found that, actually, there have been non-white people in the UK for 2,000 if not more years, I thought, ‘This is exciting, I can go and write the fiction that I would have liked to read’—books that have people like me in."