There really were green children in England once. A monk called Ralph of Coggeshall told how two green children had turned up in the village of Woolpit during the reign of King Stephen, in the twelfth century. They were found hiding in a pit during harvest time. They were frightened. They couldn’t speak English and wouldn’t eat any food. The lord of the manor took them in and after a week or so they agreed to eat raw beans. Eventually they learned to speak English. They said they had come from a place called St Martin’s Land, where it was always twilight. They had been looking after their father’s cattle when they heard bells ringing. They had never heard bells before. They followed the sound into a cave and came out in England. The little boy died quite soon but the girl grew up and married a man from King’s Lynn.
I’ve always been haunted by this strange sad little tale. I’m not the only one. Herbert Read told their story in a novel. Kevin Crossley-Holland and Alan Marks made a picture book about them. Some people said the children came from underground. The philosopher Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy said they probably fell from the heavens.
But the reason I was fascinated wasn’t because they might be fairies or goblins or something from Lord of the Rings, but because I change colour too. I have a strange blood condition that means when I am under stress – for instance late delivering a book – I go bright yellow. Like a walking, talking daffodil. I don’t feel any different when this happens, so the first I tend to know about it is when people stare at me in shops as if I’ve just stepped down from Mars or up out of the grave. When I was a teenager maybe it should have made me feel like hiding, but I always remembered the story of the green children and it made me feel as though changing colour was all right really. Weird and maybe embarrassing, but also mysterious and interesting. Maybe it meant I fell out of the sky.
The other thing from my life that is in this book is teleportation. I definitely did it once. When our eldest son was little, we were still quite young and silly ourselves. We went on holiday to a farmhouse in France without really checking if it was safe or not. It turned out we would be sleeping in a loft that was reached by a very steep staircase. The gaps between the railings on the banister were very wide – easily wide enough for a toddler to slip through and fall on to the stone floor below. We thought it was romantic and beautiful. It was also extremely dangerous – a sheer drop to a stone floor. One afternoon I was playing with my son up there and got so absorbed in the game that I forgot to keep watch on him. When I looked up he had toddled over to the top of the stairs and – I still can’t even type this without feeling sick – he was just stepping through the railings into the empty air. The next thing I knew I was holding him by the arm and he was dangling in mid-air over the fatal drop. I have no memory of how I crossed that room. I was in one place. Then I was in another. It’s impossible to cross a room quicker than someone can fall, but I did it. I really did slightly teleport.
One last thing that is real in this story is Dafna’s Cheese Cake Factory. It’s owned and run by a tiny woman called Mrs Lev. Her superpower is making astounding cakes, but she also once saw off an armed robber just by giving him a very dark look. All of us are superheroes when we really need to be.
Last of all, this is where I get to thank my inspirational editor Sarah Dudman, who doesn’t rest until I’ve done my best. Venetia Gosling, who protected us. Talya Baker, who wouldn’t let us get away with anything. My thanks too to the remarkable Dr Mary Bunn, who spared a little of her very precious time to tell me all about how viruses work. And above all to Heloise and Xavier, who read every draft (Xavier invented the Chocolate Frisbee), and to my wife, Denise, who sticks by me through pink and through yellow, through two-thousand-word days, and days with no words at all.