Andy Mulligan was brought up in the south of London. He worked as a theatre director for ten years before travels in Asia prompted him to retrain as a teacher. He has taught English and drama in India, Brazil, the Philippines and the UK. He now divides his time between London and Manila.
Ribblestrop is Andy Mulligan's first book. It is receiving good reviews, and was first published in the UK on 6th April 2009 in paperback.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Publishing one book doesn’t mean you’re an author. I still think that the definition of a writer is someone who lives by their writing, and I still draw a fat salary from teaching children, out here in the Philippines – where I advise you to come, by the way. It’s the most enchanting country that I’ve visited.
But Ribblestrop is out now, and we’re all bracing ourselves for a mauling from those who think the book stinks. I would love to say ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks’, but I do, because the book took a long time to write, and those characters have become my personal friends. I’ve lived with them for four years or so, and am very fond of them.
Yes, it’s true, I need to get out more. I have a class of children out here in Manila who tell me that most days, just as they laughed when I asked them what a ‘hi-pod’ was. But Sam, Ruskin, Millie, Sanchez, Anjoli, Tomaz – it’s like playing with action-man – I never played with dolls, naturally - you can make these characters do what you want.
They do fight back, though. ‘Ribblestrop’ went through numerous drafts, and I tried to get Mille and Sanchez to say things to each other that they refused to say. It is a lovely business: you dream up a character, and then it takes on at least a bit of its own life, and starts to rebel. Ribblestrop 2 is no different. I am wrestling with its ending at the moment, and will those children do as they’re told? I turn my back, and Anjoli’s in the lake again, risking his life. As for Miles – will he leave that gun alone? The second ‘Ribblestrop’ is, so far, an exciting juggling act, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Ruskin’s brother has arrived – a strange squib of a child with a dazzling intellect. There’s more football, but the Ribblestrop side is dangerously weakened by the late return of Sanchez – stuck in South America. Inspector Cuthbertson is out there, with more disgraceful plans. And, as I say, there’s Miles…a blitz of a boy who could lead the school, or himself, to total destruction. I hope to have the first draft ready for my editor by the end of April.
People are drawing my attention to the violence in the book. I’ve just read ‘The Guardian’s’ review and it lists the atrocities. It’s quite true that the children are forever doing what we know we’re not meant to do, from throwing fireworks to pointing guns at each other. And yes, people catch fire and get smashed up in cars… I think I’ve always been fascinated by violence and accident, probably because I’m not a very violent person: I never enjoyed rugby and carefully avoided school fights. I’ve always had an acute sense that life is uncontrollable, though – I was involved in a terrible bus crash as a child and I walked unhurt out of the wreckage, my life saved by the fact that I was one metre in front of the child behind me. Saved by nothing else but co-incidence, and impressed forever by the knowledge that, however carefully you plan your day, there might just be a car hurtling round the corner towards your bus stop. How do we function when this is the case?
Just before Christmas, I was crossing the busy road that cuts through Manila’s business district and I’d paused to buy flowers from a seven-year-old street boy. I told him to keep the change and, in his joy, he ran back to his friends and was flattened by a four-wheel-drive racing at the green light. He survived, and is playing basket-ball again, but this horror of accidents seems to be getting worse. Life is so, so dangerous.
Now - like every teacher - I’ve been aware of laws coming in to prevent accidents and all of them are well-meant. I remember a newspaper story, years ago, about a poor schoolboy whose parka hood got caught in the automatic doors of a bus – another bus - as it pulled away. It dragged him under its wheels, and the inconsolable mother devoted the rest of her life to ensuring every bus had a special mirror fitted to its nose, so that the driver could check his doors for pedestrians. Whilst I could understand that, and ‘if that new mirror saves just one child’s life!’ is an unanswerable argument…you have to admit that it’s also the way of madness. Imagine buses bristling with a hundred mirrors. What if a mirror clouts a cyclist? – the mirrors must be rubber, the glass must be plastic, the cyclists must wear their own set of mirrors, or the cycles should be in grooves that keep them away from the buses that should be changed to trams (but trams are scary things, and how many of us have crossed a tram-track without imagining what one of those wheels would do to
our foot or fingers). I remember Quentin Blake’s brilliant cartoons for a railway company, which showed foolish children leaning out of carriage windows and having their heads knocked off – but I still love India’s trains more, where you can stand in the doorways, and lean out, and even get up on the roof and travel in the breeze. Yes, I know there was a story recently about a huge wedding party traveling that way up to Kolkata, and they all got wiped out by a low bridge, so I know there’s nothing funny about accidents, and that human life is precious. But I still defend and relish risk, and recognize the fundamental need to take it. The child who doesn’t is dead in a different way.
Has this got anything to do with Ribblestrop or have I lost my thread?
Ribblestrop is really a big ‘what if?’ and a joyful tearing up of the safety-manual.
A close friend and I used to imagine starting our own school, and the fun we could have. I have worked in some monstrously efficient schools, where you gave up wanting to do anything exciting. And we’ve all experienced teachers whose lessons plod so wearily that boredom is like physical pain – atrophied teachers, repeating the same old guff. The teacher who taught me Virgil and Caesar when I was eleven years old – how had he lost all sense of the magic in his hands? Why was it that my French teacher only managed to make me feel useless? – was I so difficult? I was hungry for anything!
Schools should be the most exciting places on earth, and I’m not trying to retrospectively avenge myself on teachers who may have been at the end of their tethers, disappointed by years of resentful pupils. But my friend and I would think about the school we would run, and would be thrilled by the anarchy we would be unleashing. A chemistry teacher who’d lost the goggles, and mislabeled the bottles! An outward-bound teacher who’d brought the wrong map. We used to think of the school we’d create, knowing we’d have no money to pay anyone decent – and knowing that any kids who’d come would be the type no other school would take. It all seemed like a fantastic recipe – and that’s how ‘Ribblestrop’ came to be.
And the first draft would have languished forever in my drawer, if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have gone to work in Brazil, and spent a couple of miserable months in a school that I really didn’t take to and ran away from, thus returning to the UK jobless. Unbelievably, I wound up in one of the loveliest schools in the UK, which is in Cornwall. I had done a six-year stint there, and moved on – so to be invited back due to a chance, mid-term vacancy still seems like a miracle. I found myself working with a particularly rowdy, friendly, clever, lazy class of year 9 children, whose mission was to distract me and derail my lessons. Every time we opened ‘Romeo and Juliet’, it was, “Sir – tell us about Brazil”. “Sir, is it true you got head-butted in Falmouth?” – and, whilst most teachers deflect these challenges, I would often be seduced into thinking the students genuinely found me interesting. The question that changed rather a lot was, “Sir, haven’t you ever written a book?”
“Well,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
Having told the story to thirty children, I discovered that one of them was a boy whose mum was ‘in the business’. He offered to take the manuscript home, and within a fortnight I’d met various people, and had various telephone conversations, and I had an agent. It was one of those agents who don’t mess around. She told me what was wrong with the book as it stood, and a couple of years later I was walking into Simon and Schuster publishing house to sign papers. Best of all, I was being taken to lunch in one of those smart London restaurants.
I teach at school, and I write in the holidays.
I try to write in the evenings and at weekends, but it rarely happens. Teaching fills your head with so many things, and to empty it so that Millie and Miles can break up the furniture…I find it impossible. When school finishes for a half-term, or a good long Easter break, I follow a very civilized writing regime. I have a room without a view, and a desk just big enough for the laptop. I turn the electric fan on and put lots of water in the fridge. I try to do between six and eight hours, even if it’s not working out. Then, as the sun drops between Manila’s glorious high-rises, I take myself down to one of the city’s best hotels – the Shangri-la, where I have a special corner. There I languish in its fabulous lounge, and I read over what I’ve done. By the end of the night, the way forward seems clear, and I wake up to another stint of writing. The only problem is I find there are so many things that want to be written. ‘Ribblestrop’ is the important child at the moment, of course. But there are half-written things, and things that were finished years ago that long to be dusted down and reconfigured. There’s new material too, because every time you read a book some idea occurs.
I hope you enjoy, or enjoyed, the book. Since you’ve gone to the trouble of accessing this page, I hope the lines above have given you some insight into what prompted it.