The importance of place and landscape in Ettie and the Midnight Pool by Julia Green
Julia Green recently attended our annual conference and her workshop was a huge success. Read on for her guest blog about the inspirations behind Ettie and the Midnight Pool.
The importance of place and landscape in Ettie and the Midnight Pool by Julia Green
My earliest encounter with the Lake District was in a book. As a young child, I pored over the delicate watercolour illustrations in The Tale of Mrs Tiggiwinkle by Beatrix Potter (oh, those perfect, child’s-hand-size books!). In this story about a hedgehog who does laundry for animals and birds, Lucie takes the steep path above Little-town farm, over the stile and up the hill – up-up – into the clouds. The tale is deeply rooted in its Westmoreland/Cumbrian setting. Back then, I didn’t know this was a real place, but the landscape stayed with me in my imagination. I saw it in the paintings of lakes and mountains by Heaton Cooper at my grandparents’ house in Sussex. I met it again in the poetry of William Wordsworth, and then for real, attending the Wordsworth conference in Grasmere when I was a postgraduate student at Oxford. This was the first time I climbed the rocky steep paths for myself and swam in icy tarns. It was a happy place for me, and I could revisit it in my imagination whenever I wanted.
This beautiful landscape is now just a couple of hours’ drive away from where we live on the North-East coast. It was the first place we went to for a break, when the Covid lockdowns were finally lifted. Walking in the woods and fells and swimming in the tarns, ideas for a new story began to stir in my head. Maybe because we’d come out of such a difficult time, my senses seemed heightened. I noticed everything, listened intently to the bird song, filled my heart with the fresh green of the trees and meadows, watched the purple shadows chase over the high fells. We swam in still, beautiful tarns which reflected the surrounding hills like a mirror, and I thought about worlds ‘above’ and ‘below’ the surface. We’d walked the paths up through Fletcher’s wood before, but this time we also explored the paths around and into the old slate mines, saw the piles of old slate, felt the shift in atmosphere near the caves and tunnels and ancient quarries. And this became the landscape of Ettie and the Midnight Pool and the inspiration for my new story.
For the first few drafts my working title was ‘The Quarry’, and then ‘The Quarry Pool’. I read accounts by experienced cave divers of their explorations in the tunnels and caves of the flooded Hodge Close Quarry. I studied photographs. I looked at the ordnance survey map of the area around Elterwater, Little Langdale and Tilberthwaite. In my notebook I drew a map of my own – a fictionalised landscape for my story. High Fell House, the lane, the fields, stream, tarn, the woods, and a flooded quarry I called Green Close Quarry.
I imagined a near-future world; a child living with her grandmother in a remote house high in the fells, in harmony with the natural world, growing their own fruit and vegetables; safe but isolated. The child’s mother can’t get back from overseas because of world events (war, sickness, closed borders). Ettie misses her mother, but she has a happy life. She has the kind of freedom to run and explore and play and imagine that fewer children have today. Her grandmother tells her stories. Teaches her about the plants and birds. It’s a beautiful way to live. But Ettie is growing up. She needs more. She wants to explore beyond the boundary wall. And she knows there are things her grandmother is not telling her…
When Grandma tells Ettie the ancient myths and stories, Ettie imagines them happening in the places she knows: the woods and fells and lakes where they live. The real-world setting – the landscape of the Lake District – is also a space for the imagination. When Ettie walks up through Fletcher’s wood (I borrowed the name from the real wood), she enters what feels like an enchanted place. Grandma talks to Ettie about the in-between times – dawn or dusk, when the light shifts. ‘We don’t know what we might see, now the world’s quieter and there’s more space for the wild…. Other things might show themselves …. Things we don’t know about.’
I’m sure I’m not alone in having walked in a place and felt ‘watched’, as if there are other things, just out of sight, on the borders of vision. When Ettie first sees the girl Cora, she thinks it’s a deer… and the association, like in Grandma’s stories about transformation, is woven through the story. Is Cora really there? She’s totally real to Ettie, but no one else in the story ever sees her, and the reader might imagine something else. I hope that readers immerse themselves in the landscape alongside Ettie, and that the realistic setting anchors the story and allows an imaginative space where anything might happen.
Place, landscape has been central to all my novels over the years. The wild places in Cumbria, the Outer Hebrides, Northumberland, Swaledale, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly have all inspired me to imagine what might happen there. Being outside in these places makes me feel happier, calmer, more at ease with myself and the world. Maybe reading about them can help my readers feel like this, too. I hope so.
Julia Green is the author of more than 20 stories for children and young adults. She has worked as a publicity assistant for a publisher, a library assistant, and English teacher, and is Emeritus Professor of Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University.
Ettie and the Midnight Pool, with illustrations by Pam Smy, is available now.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.
