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Interview with Gwynneth
Ashby
By
Margaret Franklin
Posted: January 2003
Gwynneth Ashby has travelled the
world in her hunt for material for her educational books, often enduring
incredible privations in far off lands. Whether bouncing through the
Australian bush with a rucksack, scaling the side of a volcano or inadvertently
using the men's communal bath of a Japanese judo team, this intrepid
traveller gains an insight into the lives of the local people. She then
weaves this into books alive with colour, humour, customs and conversation
for her young readers.
What were your early literary
influences?
My father's family were sports' fanatics; my mother's family
were the readers. I still have her well thumbed copies of the Anne of
Green Gables books, her Hans Andersen and Icelandic Fairy Tales. I went
to a very academic prep school - the two heads, (both Oxford graduates),
also taught my mother. In her time they were suffragettes, often going
to prison in the holidays. The maths and science teaching was abysmal;
the English teaching brilliant. Daily we had to recite by heart a verse
from the Bible and a verse of poetry.
What kind of books did you
read as a child?
Everything except fantasy; I was a catholic reader, dipping
into my grandfather's Strand and Pearson magazines (to find the Sherlock
Holmes stories) and coming away one winter afternoon with his spare
set of Dickens (minus The Pickwick Papers which my uncle always
carried around in his back pocket).
Did your reading influence your writing?
Yes, indeed. After Rudyard Kipling and The Girl's Own Paper,
a glossy magazine in which fictional girls had improbable adventures,
I had a Girl Guide type of story accepted for a magazine called Dick
Kevin's Adventurous Journeys. I shudder when I read it now. It ends
with the daughter of the C.O. of an Algerian oasis commenting: "Brown,
black, yellow, white we're all one great sisterhood, wearing the same
badge and everyone of us trying like Kim to be ' little friend of all
the world'." How children's writing has changed! About the same
time, I had a geography book published about John and Joan, two pompous
children and an equally pompous Uncle Bob who took them to different
places around the world, an artificial mixture of fact and fiction,
another type of writing which would be unacceptable today.
Your writing career started seriously when you
were at college…
If it hadn't been for chickenpox I might have continued with
a teaching career. With the prospect of three weeks in the college sanatorium
and not allowed to work, I removed every scrap of shelf paper from drawers
and cupboards and with a blunt pencil wrote a children's adventure story,
The Mystery of Coveside House. My father gave me an old 'sit
up and beg' typewriter on which I had lessons, at the same time copying
from (with numerous typographical errors) the almost undecipherable
sheets. To my amazement (and that of my family), Hodder & Stoughton
accepted it and gave me a contract for two further books. However, I
didn't continue with fiction writing; once again my writing was influenced
by my reading. About this time I read the current travel books: Ella
Maillart, Peter Fleming, Margaret Mead and, of course, the redoubtable
Freya Stark. These writers made me want to travel and after a period
teaching in the UK, I decided to combine travel with writing geography
books. I first worked for an educational publisher for a couple of years,
and when I went freelance the same publisher asked me to write books
on Norway, Sweden and Belgium. I was also commissioned to write about
Austria for teenagers - for children visiting the country on school
trips.
Now, though, you write almost exclusively about
Pacific Rim countries.
I fell in love with the Far East after a commission for a book
on Japan - I have written four books now about Japan. For the first
book, I travelled, as I still do, with boots and rucksack, from the
island of Hokkaido in the north to the Amakusa Islands in the south.
Everything described is from first-hand experience, totally different
from the artificial Uncle Bob book which I researched from other
books.
You published your latest book about Japan yourself.
Why was this?
After I had lived for four months in Shimabara, in Southern
Kyushu (when Mount Fugen was erupting) researching School by a Volcano
for the Longman Book Project for children of about 9 -13, I had so much
unused material that I decided to write a book for younger children,
We Go to School in Japan. Children all over the world are interested
in the similarities and differences between their school life and that
of children in other countries.
Where else have you written about in the Pacific
Rim area?
South Korea, again a place influenced by reading the nineteenth
century adventures of the traveller Isabella Bird. I lived in a remote
mountain village for a time and wrote a book, Korean Village,
which came out in time for the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, and which won
the Korean National Tourism Corporation award. Language was a problem
as nobody in the village spoke English, but like the Japanese, the people
were incredibly friendly and helpful.
Have you used your travel experiences for other
types of writing?
Yes, for travel features, radio plays and children's television.
After teaching Aboriginals at a North Queensland cattle station and
travelling up Cape York on an old pearling lugger to Thursday Island,
I had a play on children's television about illicit crocodile poaching
(for their skins). Teaching at Adi Cakobau School in the Fiji Islands
gave me material for a semi-dramatised script for BBC Schools' Radio.
Do you have any unfulfilled writing ambitions?
I should love to write my autobiography, but maybe I am not
famous enough!
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