The Butterfly Lion

"Well, The Butterfly Lion is not for an age group at all. It happens to have a lion in it, and happens to be about a small boy. More than any other small boy I’ve ever put in a book, that boy is me. I ran away from school when I was little. I was at boarding school and I ran away because I didn’t like the food, because I wanted to go home, because I didn’t like the lessons and I didn’t like detentions. And an extraordinary thing happened. About a mile down the road from the little school in Sussex, this lady leaned out of her car and said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going home.’ She asked, ‘Where is home?’ I replied, “Well, it’s in Essex.’ And she said, ‘That’s several hundred miles away! Don’t be silly, get in the car.’ “More than any other small boy I’ve ever put in a book, that boy is me” So I did. It was raining like crazy. She took me back to her house, took off my wet clothes, put my shoes in the oven, and gave me a sticky bun and a cup of tea. She was very kind, and I wasn’t used to that sort of thing. Eventually, she wondered aloud, ‘Well, what are we going to do with you?’ I said I didn’t know. She said she’d better ring up the headmaster, and I said, ‘No, no, no—don’t do that. I don’t want to get beaten.’ Then she wanted to ring my parents, and I said ‘No, don’t!’ Because they’d be cross too. So eventually she had the lovely idea of just taking me back to the top of the school drive in her car and letting me run in through the woods. No one ever knew that I’d run away. In that episode, she saved my life. Some things happen to you that you simply do not forget. Later, I came across an extraordinary story about a British soldier in the First World War who was wounded soon after arriving in France. One day, during his recovery in a little village 30 miles behind the lines, he heard shooting. Drawn up in the square was a circus; an old man was going round shooting the circus animals. “That is what I do: I weave truths into fiction” The soldier took the rifle from him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ The old man was crying. ‘These are my animals and I can’t feed them. No one comes to the circus. They haven’t had any food for 10 days and they’re starving. I can’t go on.’ The only animal left was a circus lion, and the soldier said, ‘Well, you’re not shooting that lion!’ And the true story is they walked that lion down the main street, to the local army headquarters—it was a tame lion. The Colonel came in and demanded to know what was going on. The young soldier said, ‘This man—this Frenchman—wants to shoot the lion! We can’t do that can we sir because the lion is the emblem of Great Britain. We can’t do it.’ And the colonel responded, ‘I think not.’ Anyway, naturally, they took that lion and sent it back to London where it lived another few years. I heard that story, and later found it to be true. Suddenly, I had an idea that I really wanted to develop about a young soldier and a lion. Bit by bit—this is how it really works for me—a story emerged. The Butterfly Lion is a perfect example of this. It works because stuff happens and I’m a weaver. That is what I do: I weave truths into fiction. And all these things, World War I, the lion, the stories, my running away from school, all these things had made such an impression on me, that I decided to weave them together."