Double Shadows Blog Tour: Can You Police the Past?

Today, Thoughts from the Hearthfire is visited by the lovely Sally Gardner. She's here as part of her Double Shadows blog tour to promote the marvellous and myseterious-sounding The Double Shadow, released today. The hardcover looks gorgeous (with a lovely matte dust jacket - I'm such a book-stroker...) and I'm looking forward to reading this (it's somehow jumped to the top of my TBR pile *whistles innocently*).

Anyway, over to Sally and her take on the idea of Political Correctness in writing historical fiction for children.

The past is a foreign country, and we did do things differently there. There is a tendency to whitewash it in fiction – especially for younger readers. This robs them of the knowledge of the journey we’ve made and the lessons we’ve learned. You can’t pat-a-cake the past pretty, you have to be true.

The Double Shadow is set between the wars and in the 1930s they smoked a lot, anti-Semitism was prevalent in Britain as well as Europe, there was the use of drugs and alcohol, the facts of life were not taught and young girls were often in trouble. Things were swept under the carpet and not talked about, but in the writing of them you bring them out from under the carpet.

Then, if you upset a man’s moral machinery by being dressed in a sparkling skirt you would expect little sympathy for what happened to you. The two world wars can’t be made to look all right, they were a huge black cloud over Europe and they changed the fabric of our society. Not to talk about it is a terrible mistake.

Humans on the whole are very slow learners as history has proved. The wheel always goes back a little before it goes forward. Writers have a duty to be true to what history has given them, even when writing fiction and especially when writing for a young audience. There is an issue with patronising today’s youth. The dumbing down of history should not be condoned.

Thank you so much to Sally for sharing such interesting thoughts with us today. I agree completely: part of the excitement of reading is discovering different viewpoints and we can't do that if we re-colour and re-touch attitudes from past times (or from different places and cultures).

Don't forget to visit the other stops on the tour!