IT GIVES ME the greatest pleasure to accept this award: greater than you could possibly know. But first I must admit to a misdemeanour. You have not given the Phoenix Award to the complete text as it was written; so I shall try to make amends by reading you a portion of The Stone Book, transcribed from the original manuscript.1
I always date each day’s writing, and put the time of the start. Therefore, we have, in the relevant section: 11 June 1975. 15.11. “Father came down from playing his music to mother. He sat at the table with Mary and sorted the stones she had picked with little Esther that day.” And so on, until: “Father took a stone and broke it. He broke it cleanly down the middle. The inside was green and grey. He took one half and turned so that Mary <01.18. Thursday 12 June 1975> could not see how he rubbed it.” The manuscript flows, with only one word corrected, for two pages, until: “‘And I’m asking parsons, if it was Noah’s flood, where was the urchin before? How long do <BY BED IN WARD 26. 02.35. 12 June 1975> stones take to grow? And how do urchins get in stones? <02.40. 50”> It’s time and arithmetic I want to know. Time and arithmetic and sense.’ <02.42. 40”>”
The next sentence is dated forty-five days later: Sunday, 27 July 1975. 19.49. “‘That’s what comes of reading,’ said Old William. ‘You’re all povertiness and discontent.’”
There you have the complete text. It may not be literature, but it is a document which I treasure.
What had happened was that, as I was writing, Katharine, my thirteen-year-old daughter, had interrupted by calling out, “Can you come a bit quickly?”
My wife, Griselda, seven months pregnant, had haemorrhaged. The house where we live is remote. I remember flashes of what happened. I dialled for an ambulance, then for the doctor. The ambulance arrived, having travelled nine difficult miles, twenty minutes later. The doctor arrived at the same time. Griselda was rushed to the ambulance. The doctor stayed with me. He told me that my wife would probably survive, but he could say nothing for the child. There were three other children to be distributed safely before I could go to the hospital, fourteen miles away. The blanks in memory, and the utter calm I manifested, and the moderate speed and the care with which I drove to the hospital indicate shock. And what happened next must have been also an aspect of shock, but with strange results.
I found myself sitting in an ante-room to the labour ward. And I was holding both the manuscript of The Stone Book and a pen. The real world had been anaesthetised; but the world of Mary and Father and Old William was untouched. I looked at my watch, noted time and date, and continued smoothly with the sentence that had been invaded some five hours earlier. I was again interrupted, to go into the labour ward. And again I found myself sitting, this time by the bed and holding Griselda’s hand and talking quietly, that world still in shock, while my other hand went on with its work, noting time and date, and, I saw later, logging the contraction times within the text. Then the birth, and its aftermath and concerns overcame even the ruthless hand.
I drove home in the early summer morning to find a house that looked as if it had been attended by the mad axe-man. Three days and nights of practicality and concern went by without sleep. After forty-eight hours, the baby, Elizabeth, was declared to be out of danger. I found myself sitting in a chair, with no crises, and no immediate problems. I realised that I had not been to bed for three nights, and rejoiced in an ambition achieved. I had conquered the need for sleep. Thirty-six hours later, I woke up, creased by the chair. And every reaction had set in, so that I could not write again for six weeks. But, before I passed out, something had happened in connection with The Stone Book that I have to recognise as an example of Jungian synchronicity.
The Stone Book itself had grown from a long-held need to celebrate the language and culture from which I came, and that had had no voice in literature since the fourteenth century and the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Chapel is ten miles away; and my father did not need explanations when I read the text to him in the tonalities of modern Cheshire dialect.
The characters of The Stone Book are my historical family. I have traced the Garner name on that one square mile of Cheshire hillside to a William Garner, who died in 1592; which is not bad for landless peasants who needed no documentation. And if a peasant family is in one place in England in 1592, it is safe to infer that they were there long before.
All through my childhood, every Sunday night was spent in the lamp glow of my grandfather’s cottage, as his sons and their families paid their respects. No one takes notice of a child sitting under a table. And so randomly by osmosis, I absorbed the history and anecdote of a clan.
When the idea for The Stone Book struck, all I had to do was to tap, and rearrange, those memories. The holes I filled with a novelist’s experience. So The Stone Book is historically correct, and, where history fails, the emotion is true.
After I left the hospital on the morning of Elizabeth’s birth, the day staff came on duty. The nurse who was attending to Griselda asked whether she was Alan Garner’s wife. Griselda sighed in resignation and owned up. The nurse then revealed herself to be my cousin Rita, whom I had not seen for thirty years. Rita went on to say that her daughter had always read, and reread, my books: not simply because of the ties. She actually liked them. As a result of this enthusiasm, the previous week her grandmother had given her a photograph of a family group, taken in 1890, that consisted of our joint ancestors, gathered around the seated patriarch, Robert, and his wife.
Rita asked whether I should like to see the photograph. Griselda, mere hours after the trauma of a premature birth, showed the reflexes of a writer’s wife. She asked Rita, who lived next to the hospital, to go home and bring the photograph before I returned.
I arrived at the ward, no longer desensitised to reality, to find myself looking, for the first time, at Robert and Mary. I knew, intellectually, that it was a print from a glass plate that would have called for a thirty-second exposure without a blink from anyone in the group. But, emotionally, I saw the intense gaze of my people focused on me, demanding in silence, across almost a century, that I speak for them. They must not die.
Instantly, the whole of what is now The Stone Book Quartet precipitated, complete, a super-saturated solution, scarcely to change. I did not have to think, but to remember, and to use my skills in its shaping.
When it was finished, I thought that I had got it wrong. I had lost my writer’s objectivity and had spoken in a voice that few would understand or find of any interest. It was too personal. Yet, of all that I have written, so far, The Stone Book Quartet has brought in the most deeply expressed responses, from all manner of people, in every part of the world. The question is always the same: how did you know it was like that for me? I can only wonder. Is the way to a universality best found by going straight through one’s own being? It would seem so.
And that is not all. The unsought things have happened, that could not be foreseen, yet humble the writer, and make all the prices that have to be paid be as nothing when set against the gains. Of these, what I treasure most is that a teacher at an Inuit village school in Northern Canada used the books as a class reader with the children who were growing up between worlds. Their response led her to develop a project in which the children talked to their families, especially to the old, and gave new life to the traditions of their own dying culture. The children found a place that was theirs, and the old were restored to respect.
I took the battered photograph away, made a high-quality copy for Rita and kept the original. It was essential. If Elizabeth had gone full-term, Rita would have been on holiday when she was born, and there would have been no photograph to summon me. In my own post-traumatic state, I felt the command to get this, if nothing else, right. Yet I still had it to do. When it was finished, I asked my father to read the typescript. I had never done this before. I had always given him a copy of every book, but he gave me no reason to believe that he had read them, though his pleasure was obvious. This time, though, it was his displeasure that was to the fore. He read. And immediately he demanded to know why I had let the family skeletons out of the cupboard, and who had told me, in such detail, about them. It would have been impossible to have tried to explain. But my joy, in the sense of a purpose accomplished, was complete. The areas of my father’s extreme irritation, I do not call it anger, were the parts that the novelist, not the historian, had written. A family of manual craftsmen had been served by a different craft of the hand. The earliest surviving example of writing by a Garner is that of another William: a scratched cross.
It is a tradition bordering on mandate, within the craft families, that each generation should do better, or at least other, than the one before. I was the failure. But, by granting this award, you have marked the journey from the signature of a cross to the symphony of a stone. And the travellers in between, and I, thank you for it.
1 This lecture was delivered to The Children’s Literature Association of America, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, on 7 June 1996.