‘Joan Aiken changed my life…’

It is always hard to approach the anniversary of the 4th of January 2004, as every year takes me further from my mother’s death… but in fact, through all these years I have been with her constantly – ‘looking after the books’ as she asked me to, so this is also a good moment to be thankful for all that I have been given, and for the wonderful task she left me…

This year is especially memorable, as I am celebrating her centenary – the anniversary of her birth in 1924.

The greatest pleasure of being Joan Aiken’s daughter, and curator of her estate, has been answering readers letters; requests, enquiries, searching into mysteries, recovering lost stories, and trying to explain the inexplicable in her books – sometimes fielding crazy rumours and random nonsense in the ever expanding farrago of the internet – and sometimes having the extraordinary pleasure of meeting the people, whose lives, like mine, she has changed.

One of these is a fan not just of Joan Aiken, but of her cheeky ‘alter ego’ Dido Twite, who corresponded with her over a period of five years. She was one of the people I particularly hoped to reach by creating the Joan Aiken website, so I could reply to some of the letters Joan had kept, which obviously gave her special pleasure, and some of which are shown on the webpage above.

On that page I wrote:

“Joan Aiken loved to get letters from her readers, and as she was a terrific letter writer herself, some of these correspondents turned into good friends. I couldn’t write back to all of you when she died, but I wanted to let you know how much pleasure you gave her, and share some of your best letters here, and also some of the secrets behind the books that a few of you may already have found out for yourselves… “

One of these, is that the books themselves provide a lifelong companionship.

What I understand that readers feel, what I feel when I read my mother’s books, is that she is writing just for you. Joan Aiken put so much of herself, her thoughtful personality into her books, that once you have heard her voice, you will never be completely without her guiding vision again.

In the same way, she filled her books with the memory of her own mother’s voice, here describing the heroine’s mother, Masha, in Blackground she shares the same powerful feeling of connection:

I still have that postcard, with the mark at the top, from where it had been pinned up in her mother’s kitchen; it was saved in an old handbag, ready to be taken on the next journey.

One of these young correspondents, now a writer herself, did see her own letter on the website and so was able to get in touch. She described her devotion to the books, her five year correspondence of letters to and from Joan, and told me something I completely understood, and that I possibly could have said myself:

“I never quite managed to explain that her characters assuaged my own loneliness.”

Presently she came on a visit from America, and we met, and I was able to show her the letters she had written, which my mother had kept from years before.

Afterwards she wrote:

“I try to tell Lizza what her mother’s books meant to me — mean to me — but I stumble, because even now I’m not sure of the extent of their meaning. There have been other books, of course, that have wrapped themselves around my entire existence. I cloak myself in their characters and wear them around. These books are different from each other, and I am different reading them, living them, but taking them on, amounts to the same thing. Like Dido Twite, like Joan Aiken, like the rediscovery of myself on the page at Lizza Aiken’s kitchen table, these books all say the same thing. They say, “You are worthy. Be brave.”

And so, twenty years later, on Joan Aiken’s behalf, here I still am…

And below in the comments are some more grateful messages about Joan – do add your own?

Visit the website – maybe your letter is there? http://www.joanaiken.com/pages/letters.html

Read more: Being Joan Aiken’s Pen Pal Changed My Life –