Pernickety-Boo by Sally Gardner

Sally Gardner has written a lovely and honest blog for us about Pernickety-Boo, her latest book. It comes from wanting a place to call home and to feel that sense of belonging. Thank you Sally for your words.

The idea of Pernickety-Boo came to me when I was in the middle of writing
another book. Unlike many of my ideas, this one came fully formed in the shape
of an umbrella, called Pernickety Boo.

Three things determined where and when the book would be set. The first was
the lost property office at Baker Street, when it was still at Baker Street. Second
was the Circle Line, when you could, if so desired, go round and round all day on
it. Which meant it was set in a time before mobile phones.

Now all I had to do was let Pernickety Boo tell his story. What he had to say
struck me as being at the heart of so many of us. The fear of being abandoned,
of never being found again. That no one would ever see or understand the
magic in us. Every year, over 80,000 umbrellas are lost. They have been around
(and been lost, I suppose) for over 4000 years. They are a brilliant piece of
engineering that we hold in our hands and take completely for granted.

Pernickety Boo comes from a sorcerer’s book of time-traveling spells. The
sorcerer is careless with the magic he has created and leaves Pernickety Boo on
the Circle Line to go round and round until he is handed into the lost property
office at Baker Street. There is in Pernickety a longing for that elusive place
called home, a safe place without harm, free from cruelty, surrounded by four
walls of love. Like Odysseus, that often takes a lifetime of searching. Even when
you think, as Pernickety does, that he has found a home with his beloved Sylvie
Moonshine, he isn’t sure that he will be wanted in the family when things go
wrong.

Pernickety has a lot in common with me when small. I was an inconvenient
child, being severely dyslexic in a time when no one knew what dyslexia was.
Without doubt that added to the sense of being completely lost, as well as my
parents’ divorce. My brother and I were shunted between two stations: my
father’s rather old-fashioned flat and my mother’s ultra-modern one. Neither
place, I can honestly say, did I feel wholeheartedly wanted or ‘at home’. My
brother fared slightly better, finding the home he loved with my stepmother. I
longed to be loved by my mother and my stepfather. I was, to a certain extent,
but the minute my sister was born when I was 11, my brother and I were seen
by my mother and stepfather as irritants to what otherwise would’ve been a
happy family of three. I think, rather like Pernickety Boo, for most of my life, I
have been looking for home, longing to make a secure place with walls made of
that rarest of substances: unconditional love.

As Pernickety Boo says, “Home, what a magical word. An H like a house, an O as
round as a hug, an M for mums and an E for ever”.  I believe many little people and not so little are all looking for the sunshine of the truly loved smile, a safe place in a worrying world.

 

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.