Articles and Stories
The Importance of Hot Buttered Toast
When I think of my favourite scenes from my childhood reading I often think of food: midnight feasts at Mallory Towers; mushroom stews in the company of hobbits; hot buttered toast with Mr Tumnus. The peril and adventure has mostly been forgotten, yet I remember the cosy places – places where, for a short while, witches, ringwraiths and troublesome teachers are kept on the other side of a firmly shut door.
But it wasn’t until I wrote Into Goblyn Wood that I began to realise how important those ‘hot buttered toast’ moments really are. Sure enough, a story needs resting spots to break up the action and allow characters (and readers) to process events over a mug of hot chocolate. But I’ve come to believe that cosy moments do so much more than that.
I started writing the trilogy when my son was a toddler. Like all children, my son is most intrepid when he feels secure. So long as he knows I’m there in the background he’s free to forget about me and to lose himself in play and adventure. For me, those cosy moments in children’s books work in a similar way.
Hot buttered toast means safety, comfort and home. It is the ground from which we can launch into the wild freedom and adventure of the story. Those sizzling kippers and jugs of ginger beer, remind us that there is a safe place to return to – the familiar that allows us to venture towards the unfamiliar. Max’s journey to the land of the Wild Things is framed by the smell of his dinner (still famously hot on his return). It is an ordinary-looking wardrobe that leads Lucy into the Narnian winter. However much danger she might encounter there, the land of Spare Oom is always somewhere between the trees, waiting for her return.
In the Goblyn Wood trilogy I’ve tried to strike this balance of the familiar and the strange that so captivated me when I was a child. Hazel, the hero of the story, finds herself in all sorts of tangles: she gets swallowed up by an Elfin oak; stuck in a collapsing tunnel, and hunted by sinister horsemen. But her courage is sustained by a dream of home, and acorn dumplings aplenty. In fact, for Hazel, it is literally her growing sense of home and belonging that sets her own magic free.
Summoning his courage before setting out for Mount Doom, Frodo remarks: ‘I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find my wandering more bearable’. And that sums it up really. The comfort of a hobbit-hole, the safety of the Gryffindor common room, the trout sizzling in Mr Beaver’s frying pan – all these things remind us that there is a world worth saving and give us the courage to wander.
