The Necessary Wilderness

The Necessary Wilderness David Almond (bio) Thank you very much. It's great to be here; it's fantastic to be asked to come across the Atlantic to Canada. It's very dark inside here. It's like a wilderness. One of the interesting things about coming to North America is just opening my mouth. I remember the first time I got off the plane (it was actually in The States, but the same thing applies in Canada), and the first thing I said, had no kind of impact. I was talking yesterday to Tobin Anderson about accents in England, and he said, "Of course every time an Englishman opens his mouth he makes another Englishman detest him." Which is perfectly true. When I open my mouth—and I see it happening particularly in certain areas of the south of England—I often see people thinking, "You're not supposed to be the man we're meeting. . . ." because I'm a wild man from the north and you can tell that from my accent. Of course here on the other side of the Atlantic you can't tell. You just think, "Oh, it's David Almond." So one of the great things is that sense of, I am just being me when I come here. It's fantastic. Another thing that Tobin reminded me about last night. We were talking about images and villages. And we of course bring our own images and villages across with us. I was talking to someone yesterday and I said, "I live in a village," and immediately followed it with, "but it's not the village you're thinking of." Because as soon as you say, "I'm English, I come from a village," the construct of the perfect English village with the apple trees and the duck pond, arises in your mind. That's not like my village. I moved from the city to the country about eight years ago. In Canadian terms the distance is tiny, but in English terms it's massive: it's twenty-five miles—we moved twenty-five miles into the country. And I remember one of the first times we went out in the village. A doctor invited us to a little party, so we went along and everyone was incredibly civilized and polite and I got talking to one man and he said, "Oh, you're from the town, are you?" I said, "Yeah, I'm from the town." He said, "Do you know the new [End Page 107] bungalows over there at the edge of the village?" he said. "Yeah," I said. He said, "Well, if you went into the basement of one of the bungalows, you'd find a big room. It was our armory in the '70s. We put all the guns from the village into that armory, for when nuclear war came, because we knew all you townies would be coming out to take over our country." And I realized that I was twenty-five miles away but in a perfectly different kind of world. I had moved into what looked like the wilderness, but it was just a very different kind of civilization. Anyway, this is all very civilized, isn't it? Here we are at a university in Toronto, all very neat, all very well turned out. People sitting in rows like this in places like universities, you realize that they look like lines of print. You're arranged just like lines of print on a page. I remember as a kid looking at lines of print on a page, and I'd find it worrying, because it all looked so perfect—the perfection of print. I remember thinking, I want to produce that, but I worried that I'd never be able to. How could I produce such perfection? But I know now that the perfection of books is an illusion. Inside them there is a kind of wilderness. It's like looking out at you. You all look too perfect; you're beautifully arranged; you're sitting in rows. But we all know that if you're any good at all, there's a kind of wilderness inside...

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