Flamingo Boy

"This story came out of the blue. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. When in that situation, I don’t look around. I’m confident enough to know that something will happen. Something new. In this particular case, the ‘new’ linked up to something very old. The new thing is that only last year, we went on holiday to the south of France. We hired a car and drove to the nearest place we thought might be interesting, which was a place that I certainly had not been before. I’d heard about it and here’s where it joins up with an old memory. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We started seeing these white horses and black wolves, and pink lakes, and pink flamingos, and this whole world of salt marshes, which was utterly extraordinary. There was this amazing medieval town with intact ramparts all around. Outside the main gateway into the town was a merry-go-round with the horses and bulls. Suddenly, it felt like the set of a film. I’m not yet sure what the story is, but there was the place—and it was all completely new. Two amazing things made me write the book. The first was we went to this farm house. There was a lady who would take people out in a Land Rover around the Camargue to see the wilderness, this extraordinary nature. She was very knowledgeable and had made a life study of flamingos. She took us around and it was just extraordinary to be with someone who knew and loved them so well. There were not many hills here but she took us to the only place where you can actually climb up a little and look around you. We climbed up to this fort of bricks and stone. She said, ‘This is what is left of a Roman fort. 2000 years ago Roman soldiers came here and they built a fort to guard against people coming in from the sea.’ We know the soldiers wrote home and said things like, ‘This is a horrible place. It’s full of mosquitoes, and we really don’t like it at all.’ She was very funny about it. She told us. ‘2000 years ago, the invaders here were the Romans and they built this fort. In 1943, the Germans came here expecting an American invasion. They built a great concrete turret containing huge guns on top of the Roman fortification. But the Americans went and landed somewhere else! So they blew up their unused turret and guns and what was left after,’ she said, ‘is what you are now standing on, the Roman fort.’ I thought that was just a marvellous connection of two millennia of history. Lastly, she was passionate about the flamingos. During the last years of the Second World War, during the German occupation, many people in that part of the world were starving. They would go out on to the marshes and steal the flamingo eggs because they made a good meal for their families. During the occupation, the lakes dried out leaving the flamingos’ island nests unprotected and vulnerable to attacks by wild animals. So as a result of their eggs being stolen and losing the protection the water gave them from predators the flamingos left. After the war an English professor heard about this and decided to help. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He went down and stayed on this family farm (the one that we were on) and went out with the French people who all were really keen to bring their flamingos back. His advice and their advice was, ‘We’ve got to ask the government to make a law that no flamingo eggs will ever be stolen.’ Which they did. ‘And you’ve got to regulate again the water so that the islands will become islands again.’ Which they did. It all went very well, so they all waited for the flamingos to fly back and nest. Well, they didn’t. Then this English professor had a flash of inspiration. He thought, ‘Well, of course they’re not going to come back—they’ve got no homes to go to.” What this man did, with the help of lots of French people, literally hundreds of them, is go out there and build flamingo nests out of mud with their bare hands. Then, the most wonderful thing: they waited, and the flamingos did come back. It’s the most beautiful story of how man can affect the environment for good. Claire reminded me that this was the place where Romany people come and have a festival, a religious festival. And that whole area is very Romany in terms of population. So I really introduced into the story the idea that this carousel (merry-go-round) would be owned by a Romany family. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. I had my carousel; I had my Romany family. The heart of the story becomes something very personal. I have a grandson who is autistic, severely autistic. I thought it was about time that someone wrote about autism—but not about someone who was a genius. Very often, stories about autistic kids entail some amazing mathematical ability or other such. In fact, most autistic children are just like us: some are completely brilliant, and others aren’t. Universally, they’re very sensitive to the world, to their fellow creatures, to what they love. My character, this child, is not a genius—he just has a talent for loving. For loving these flamingos. Because he loved them, they trusted him. The book is largely about an autistic child, not just as a child, because that’s too easy. We tend to think of autistic children in terms of what we must do to look after them, but the truth is that autistic children grow old. What we really haven’t come to grips with is making sure autistic individuals are looked after throughout their lives—looked after creatively, and looked after well . It doesn’t get any easier when they’re older. So this is a story not just about an autistic child, but an autistic man, too. I wove it all together. In writing, so much is accident—so much is just tales people tell you, and then you steal them."