Joan Aiken – Stories without a Tell By Date

Joan Aiken may well have imagined that many years after she wrote them, these books would continue to tell the story, not just of her own alternative world, but of the one we live in today. She put all her knowledge of history, human nature, and her hope for the future into this series of twelve books, written until the last days of her life, and possibly hoped to leave us a message, or indeed a warning…

Our lives may have been turned upside down recently, but she was ahead of us in her imagination, particularly in her best  known series The Wolves Chronicles whose predictions seem destined to become part of the fabric of our own history.  If you haven’t come across them already, this may be the ideal time to discover them, for as she said, it is better to imagine things before they actually happen, then you are prepared.

Joan Aiken was a writer for all generations and entire families, who left a last gift – a final book  for fans who had followed this series set in her own alternate world, for over fifty years, those who had grown up with the books and who could not be left without a farewell.  Sadly this last book was posthumously published, like Terry Pratchett’s final book,  The Shepherd’s Crown  and Amanda Craig in her review suggested that an author’s last work: “can also act as a covert last will and testament in which what an author really believes is made more explicit.”

It is certainly a strange coincidence that Joan Aiken’s  final heroine – The Witch of Clatteringshaws – the second heroine along with the much loved Dido Twite – of this short and sweet conclusion to The Wolves Chronicles – is also, many years before Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, a down-to-earth social worker witch,  who visits her flock on a flying golf club, and is charged with the task of saving her kingdom. Were these fictional alter egos bringing a last message from their creators, offering their own hopes and dreams for the future?

The two writers share more than the coincidence of themes – they both employ a rich store cupboard of mythical and historical references and literary jokes for the well-read follower – they are both also sharing their real world view, however it may be disguised in fantasy, and in both their last books they are moved to speak more explicitly, perhaps free at last to unleash their prophecies and to prepare us for what may be coming.

Joan Aiken even added an afterword to hers, completed just before her death in 2004, acknowledging and apologising for the shortness of the book, saying ‘a speedy end is better than an unfinished story.’  This was a story written in old age, but one she was determined to complete.

Aiken always had an extraordinary prescience, an ability to imagine changes in the world before they happened. This time she saw the world going backwards – her England at the end of her alternative historical sequence, has reverted from the mock Victorian century begun in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to parallel Saxon times in the last two books of the series – almost to the pre-historic age with the inclusion of some strange and magical creatures – the mysterious Hobyahs, and the flying Tatzelwurm.  The Hobyahs, completely unseen but violently destructive of all in their path, might just as well be a kind of virus, but in her world Joan Aiken offers a cure – the power of song, from a united, happy, singing marching army:

  “A tempest of sound swept across the valley. And the hordes of Hobyahs who had come out after sunset, eager to surge up the hill and demolish the happy, careless warriors, began to dwindle and shrink and crumple. Their faulty little prehistoric nerve systems could not stand up to the strong regular beat of the music; they whimpered and shivered and began to dissolve like butter melting on a griddle.”

Joan Aiken’s disunited kingdom has been drawn and quartered into separate regions, the north and the west connected only by railways with border guards – a foretaste of the divisions to be caused by Brexit perhaps, and then by a devastating pandemic?  Aiken’s invading armies are more like the waves of lost immigrants we see today; her hopeless army of Wends who arrive in the North to do battle, after cheerfully fraternizing rather than fighting with the English troops, decide that this would be an ideal country in which to settle, and Joan Aiken imagines them as the early cheese-making  inhabitants of Wensleydale, whose Scandinavian culture then becomes part of ‘Our Island’s Story’. It turns out that we can do better together than in conflict.

The solutions to dangerous situations in the ‘Wolves Chronicles’ stories always involve community and communication, whether through language in song or story, or even in the shared thought-transference that is able to unite the enslaved children in the underground mines of IS.

In a previous book, Dido and Pa, we had met the homeless children of London, the lollpoops, who had to beg or work to pay for a night’s shelter, but who nevertheless created their own circle of trust with their Birthday League, an invisible bond of friendship and shared knowledge. But in the following story of  IS these orphans are lured into captivity with promises of a journey to a wonderful Playland – incredibly, since the book was first written, homelessness and gambling addiction have become two of today’s everyday stories of childhood; now since they have experienced isolation from school friends, being kept at home by a virus, most have come to value even depend on online communication, but have also learned its dangers. In Joan Aiken’s world, lost and abandoned children discover how to  silently combine their thoughts, to communicate through the airwaves in a way they call feeling ‘the Touch’, so they are able to create their own astonishing communal force and find freedom together.

This in itself was extraordinarily prescient for a book first published in the early internet days of 1992; then Facebook was unheard of, and in fact only started a month after Joan Aiken’s death in 2004 when the last of this series was published, but she had already imagined a society where children who were cut off from each other by the dangers of street society, or as recently, by a wave of devastating illness, could find a way that they would be able to communicate through the ether.

But she saw every kind of joining together as important. At the end of Cold Shoulder Road it is the women and children who form an unshakeable ring of song around the villains and demonstrate that communication is stronger than conspiracy – united they sing:

Although some reviewers have questioned Joan Aiken’s darker vision in the later books of the Wolves Chronicles, her stated philosophy – that there should always in her children’s writing be a ray of hope at the end – carried her through to offer in the final book a last crazy Shakespearean Jig of a tale to sustain her readers, despite the dramas and dangers that have passed before.  Her alter-ego, Dido Twite, ever practical and philosophical, always willing to help those who are unhappy or unable to help themselves, ends the last book on her own note of joyful forgiveness, celebrating everything she has gained from her endless journeys and adventures, and even from her murderous Pa, one of the great villains of Joan Aiken’s creation.

Dark this kingdom of her creation may have been, but it is no darker than the real England of today; what Joan Aiken and Terry Pratchett shared was the gift of fantasy; they were able to show through their storytelling the hopeful vision that fiction can offer us, and how it can illustrate the patterns of history in stories aimed at both adults and children – stories for anyone who has ears to hear.

As she said:

  “Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It’s a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it. Therefore, if you write about something, hopefully you write about something that’s better or more interesting than circumstances as they now are, and that way you hope to make a step towards it. “

People need stories, and once read they may never be forgotten, as it seems readers of Joan Aiken are discovering, for as she put it herself,

‘Stories don’t have a tell by date…’

  *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Read about the last Joan Aiken here and all of the ‘Wolves’ series

Start at the end why not? A marvellous introduction to the world of Joan Aiken…!

Tributes to Joan Aiken in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times

*   *   *   *

Song illustration by Peter Bailey from the cover of The Gift Giving

a collection of favourite Aiken stories from Virago

in 2022 Puffin Books celebrated the 60th Birthday of the first of these fantastic Books

with a special New Edition of

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase