They’re not so much rings as knuckledusters, and the chunky silverware that Jacqueline Wilson is famed for wearing almost makes for a perfect symbol.
Wilson is diminutive, soft-featured, unfailingly jolly and looks for all the world like your favourite ever teacher or librarian, though her choice of trademark accessory certainly packs a punch.
And so it goes with her writing. Aimed at young adults, her 111 (yes, 111) books all bear the same warmly charming style. Yet in among the lovable heroines and ebullient characters, there often lurks a knuckleduster of social realism – foster care, cancer, bullying, grief, divorce. Like Judy Blume before her, Wilson has used her young characters as Trojan horses into topics that young readers found overwhelming, upsetting or difficult to assimilate.
Every single day, she is approached by readers. “It had always been the daughters, but now it’s the mums begging for selfies,” she laughs, noting that occasionally, they will “dive into a shop doorway, get out their make-up and start applying it”.
Her fans always tell her the same thing: “You are part of my childhood.” It’s a hugely privileged place to occupy in a stranger’s life, I suggest.
“It’s so heart-warming, and a bit astonishing,” Wilson beams softly. “There’s something about writing in the first person, as if it’s one girl confiding in the reader. It’s easier to make an emotional connection that way. And it’s wonderful – children write confiding all sorts of things. They tell you about their friends going off with someone else, or their hamster dying.
“I didn’t get to meet authors when I was a child. Children’s authors were expected to go around meeting people. But recently, I’ve been asked to do prefaces for books by Noel Streatfield and Edith Nesbit, and I adored those books as a child. The very idea that some people might think of me the way I thought of them…”
Much as she’d like, she cannot write back to everyone, and briefly considered compiling a standard letter for fans.
“Imagine if you went into school and said, ‘I’ve a letter from Jacqueline Wilson’ and someone else had the same one, it would be so pointless, or so horrid,” she reasons.
Jewellery
In many ways, Jacqueline Aitken the child goes a long way to explaining Jacqueline Wilson the woman. She didn’t have any jewellery growing up because her mother thought it “common” for young girls to wear jewellery. When her first book was published, she treated herself to an amethyst ring and buys herself a ring after every book release (she moved from gold to silver because “all that gold together looks a bit vulgar”).
Wilson says that while walking to school as a child, she would daydream of being interviewed by journalists for being a famous author. “I had a half mile walk to school and I’d solemnly interview myself,” she laughs. “Obviously I’ve done lots of legitimate interviews but it’s still a little bit as if I’m back on that walk to school.”
An only child growing up on a council estate in Kingston upon Thames, she played by herself mostly, making up imaginary games and characters.
“My parents didn’t get on, and it showed me in a way that life isn’t just cosy and comfortable,” she admits. “I do tend to write about kids who are the odd ones out, who have something to cope with. Maybe one day I’ll write about a girl who has loads of friends, lovely parents is very academic, sporty and good looking – but I don’t think so.”
At Jackie, it was a pure joy to be writing for them. We got to see the private questions girls would write in with
Wilson began working aged 17 on Jackie magazine at its inception, after she penned an essay to publisher DC Thompson on school discos. (Legend has it the magazine was named after her). The experience gave her unique insight into a younger girl’s mindset.
“At Jackie, it was a pure joy to be writing for them,” Wilson recalls. “We got to see the private questions girls would write in with, and the question most often asked, in the Swinging Sixties, was, ‘How far should I go with my boyfriend?’ You had to be careful of what you were writing because some parents were a little doubtful of kids reading Jackie, even though it was ultra-respectable in and of itself.”
‘All sex and drugs’
This, in a roundabout way, is a motif that has marked Wilson’s career: some have described her books as “all sex and drugs”, though she cannot for the life of her recall an instance of either in any of her books.
For book number 111, Wilson has returned to arguably her most cherished creation, Tracy Beaker. Last year, she delighted fans by releasing My Mum Tracy Beaker, in which the fierce and funny foster child Tracy had grown up to have a daughter of her own, Jess.
“Most of my characters fade from my mind once the book is written, but Tracy has stayed,” admits Wilson. “So why didn’t I find out what sort of a mum she would be? I knew she would be a great mum. I hate the idea that just because you haven’t had good parenting, that would sort of prevent you from being a wonderful parent. I know for a fact that’s not true.”
In My Mum Tracy Beaker, Tracy was unemployed and living on a rundown council estate in London. Criticised for perpetuating negative stereotypes about children in the care system, Wilson then consulted real-life care leavers about where Tracy might be in a follow-up.
In We Are The Beaker Girls, Tracy has found her footing, working in a successful antique shop. She and Jess are living happily by the sea when a young runaway, Jordan, enters their life.
Appetites and interiorities
Writing her first book for young adults in 1969, Wilson observes that she needs to keep a constant eye on the appetites and interiorities of young readers.
“With the first draft, I write for the sake of the story, and I rewrite it thinking: ‘What would interest the average 8, 9 or 10-year-old here? Would it interest a 13 or 14-year-old?’ I’m much more severe about these things these days.”
Does she see the average 10-year-old as being more astute, or even exacting, than previous generations?
I try not to make my characters speak in a modern way, and I don't use slang
“I think it’s a weird mixture of young people being more knowledgeable but also more protected as well,” she reflects. “At 10 or 11, we went off in the summer holidays and were told not to come home until teatime.
“I try not to make my characters speak in a modern way, and I don’t use slang. By the time the book is written, it’s bound to have gone out [of fashion] anyway. I have to be really wary. It’s the equivalent of dad dancing, pretending to be trendy and then getting it all wrong.”
In recent times, Wilson has also turned her hand to children’s fiction in historical settings, locating Dancing the Charleston in the 1920s and The Lottie Project, among others, in the Victorian era. “I do find it so refreshing, they’re not going to be on mobile phones or obsessed with social media or have eyebrows in the latest style.”
Victorian villa
Now 111 books in, Wilson wants to continue writing, though she is considering “slowing down” to one book a year.
She will also make a cameo in the forthcoming adaptation of Four Children and It, filmed last year in Ireland. Aside from that, it’s a relatively quiet life in her Victorian villa in Kingston upon Thames, where she lives with her dog and some 20,000 books.
“I have a strange life in that there are three sections of it. The life I’m leading down [in promotional mode] is very glamorous, when you’re in hotels and going up on stage talking to lots of people. Then there’s my life at home when I’m concentrating on writing and I’m lost in my own world. And then I have a lovely private life where no one thinks of me as a writer – I’m just Jackie; I take part in pub quizzes and have supper with people and walks with my dog.
Would she consider moving into writing for adults, as Judy Blume did in recent times?
“I don’t think I’ll go that way,” she says. “All my friends and family are saying I should rest on my laurels and enjoy myself, but I genuinely do enjoy this. I don’t think I could ever stop.”
We Are The Beaker Girls by Jacqueline Wilson is out now via Doubleday.
