Why I Had to Write THE GYPSY CROWN

You can’t manufacture inspiration. Ideas come sometimes like a bolt from the blue, and set your imagination on fire. It’s like a fever or an illness. You become totally possessed with the urgency of giving this idea life, and everything else fades into insignificance.

Like a strike of lightning, THE GYPSY CROWN came to me in a single blazing moment. As soon as I thought of the story, I knew I had to tell it. I already had three outstanding contracts with publishers, but I could not focus on those novels. I was too afraid that if I did not write this story, I might lose it forever. All I could think about were the Rom and the 17th century and the power of lucky charms. All I could do was write.

I think the reason why this idea came to me in such bright perfection was that it forged together a number of lifetime passions and preoccupations. I had loved charm bracelets from the time I was a little child, and used to sit on my great-aunt’s lap while she told me the stories behind the charms on her very old gold bracelet. It was an heirloom, passed down from mother to daughter for six generations, with each owner adding more trinkets.

The oldest and most interesting of all the charms is also the most ordinary. It is a pebble. It was picked up long, long ago, by a young woman who would in time become my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Her name was Charlotte Waring, and she picked up the stone from the banks for the River Thames the night before she left England forever. She was to travel to Australia to work as a governess for the famous Macarthur family, and all through her long and dangerous journey she carried that pebble in her pocket, a reminder of the life she had left behind, and the new life she hoped to make for herself. In time, Charlotte Waring would become the author of the first children’s book ever published in Australia – after surviving a life that would have broken a weaker woman.

I loved that story, and asked my great-aunt to tell me it many times. Now the charm bracelet belongs to my mother, and she tells the stories to my children. One day they will tell it to their grandchildren too, and so we are connected across the centuries to that brave young woman who, in 1826, picked up a pebble from the shore of the River Thames. I always knew I wanted to write a book about a charm bracelet, and about the power of stories to connect us to each other. It sat in my ideas folder for years and years, waiting for another idea to come along and rub against it, and generate that special kind of electricity that sparks a novel.

It was my niece Emily who gave me that igniting spark. I had written a series of short books for my sons, inspired by a list they prepared of their favourite things to read about. (Ben’s list - dragons, magic wands, pirates, skeletons, and treasure – became DRAGON GOLD and Tim’s list – knights, castles, wishing rings, pizza and hot-air balloons – became WISHING FOR TROUBLE). My publisher wanted another, and so I asked Emily for her five favourite things to read about. She answered, without hesitation, ‘Mermaids, fairies, princesses, ponies, and tropical islands.’ I just thought, ‘Oh, no!’ Bookshops have shelves groaning with books about mermaids, fairies, princesses and ponies. I didn’t see how I could do anything fresh and new and exciting with Emily’s list.  What was something I could write about that no-one else in the world had ever done?

The idea came to me like a bolt from the blue. Gypsies! And in that moment I saw the whole story in my mind’s eye. A Romany girl just like my niece Emily, who loves magic and horses and the romance of the past, and a Romany boy just like my son Ben, cheeky and adventurous, who can never keep still for a moment. Cousins, three weeks apart in age, just like Ben and Emily, who find themselves caught up in the adventure of a lifetime, having to save themselves and their families through their own wit and courage. Romany children, outsiders in society, who lived to their own rhythm and their own rules, wandering the countryside, misunderstood and maligned. It would have to be set in the past, I thought, a time when it was truly dangerous to be of Romany blood. And then I remembered, in a flash, that the last time gypsies had been hung in England was during the brief and bloody reign of Oliver Cromwell …

If I had not always been fascinated with gypsies, I would not have known this arcane piece of historical lore. But I have been interested in the Rom since I was twelve years old, and had collected, over the years, a great many books about them. Books with titles like ‘The Gypsy Dream Dictionary’ and ‘Gypsy Witchcraft and Magic’.

When I was twelve, my father decided to become the first man to circumnavigate Australia non-stop. He and his crew sailed in the long-vanished wake of Matthew Flinders, right round Australia, without putting to shore once. My father was an adventurer. When he was not sailing through tornados on long ocean yacht races, he was building a boat in our garage, breaking in wild horses, wrestling cows to the ground, bringing us home exotic animals as pets and travelling the world. Or so it seemed to me.

He was gone for more than a year. It was hard on all of us, but particularly on my mother. She sent my brother and my sister and me down to spend the long, hot summer holidays with Dad’s mother. One day I asked her, ‘Nana, why does Dad go off on adventures all the time?’ She sighed and answered, ‘Oh, it’s the gypsy in him, darling.’

I do not know if she meant that, somewhere in our past, we had a Romany forebear, or if she just meant Dad had always been restless. I never will know. However, to my brother and sister and me, her words became a shorthand way of explaining our wildness, our boldness, our love of travel, our dark gypsy looks: ‘It’s the gypsy in us.’

Writing THE GYPSY CROWN was one of the most enthralling, difficult and joyful things I have ever done. It totally dominated my waking and dreaming hours, took me and my children on an adventure halfway around the world, and opened new doors for me in all sorts of ways. THE GYPSY CROWN has been sold in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, Italy and Germany, and won the Aurealis Award for Excellence in Australian Children’s Fiction for 2007. It has inspired countless children to crowd into bookshops dressed up as gypsies, and best of all, proven to them that stories of the past are not dull and dusty and moth-eaten, but something that connects us all.