World Book Day at Sedgeford Primary School, Norfolk

Pic above by Paul Marsh, courtesy Lynn News. 
Link to Lynn News story

All other pics courtesy of Peter Johnson at the school  

For World Book Day, (March 2) I was Writer in School at Sedgeford Primary and there was a bit of an African theme going on. ('Bound for Jamaica' (my children's story about the Atlantic slave trade published by Collins Education) with KS2 and Tortoise's Dream, an African folk tale by Joanna Troughton, with KS1. The exciting prospect of working in Sedgeford 1st school as a writer reminded of two poems which I've explored and enjoyed with young children on world book Days past. You can read them here

http://garethcalway.blogspot.co.uk/p/poem-of-month-2016.html

First session

I realised very early on that I was going to enjoy this gig. Sedgeford is clearly a very writer-friendly school. I arrived to find Mr Johnson the KS2 teacher talking to his class about his love of old books. There was evidence everywhere of enthusiasm for writing and reading with wall displays of work done by the children on Ted Hughes' Iron Man. I began by telling the children how I spend my day, showing them my pencil and writing notebooks (piles of them covered in scribble) and typescripts (never finished, always covered in corrections and needing yet another print out.) I explained how great it is finding out about the subjects we write about and the children certainly had experience of checking facts and exploring on the internet  I told them about the giant library in London where I go to read rare books and manuscripts and showed them my British Library Readers pass, explaining how you have to show it everywhere you go in that building. I also described how I'd visited Bristol (many times) to see the magnificent houses the baddies in my story built with the money they made out of African slaves. I explained how even when I  have finished my story and am happy with it that a publisher often then makes suggestions and that, in the case of my book 'Bound for Jamaica', this one went  for some time with an entire committee - all with different priorities- involved. But that in the end made the book better for its readers.

'Bound for Jamaica' is an adventure story about a boy who is kidnapped as a slave from his home in Africa, sold as a slave and taken in a 'slaver' across the Atlantic Ocean to Jamaica. Here he works on a sugar plantation owned by the evil slave-owner Jardine. After many hardships, his only hope is to escape - or die.

Between the years 1500-1800, 12 million Africans were taken into slavery in this way. So this story happened every day for 300 years. The real history of the slave trade is given in supporting non-fiction chapters. 

I read the story (which I finished in 2011) and as I did so realised that I've never myself read the book to the age group I wrote it for before.  Teachers have but not me. It was great to finally find the readers I'd imagined listening intently in front of me and also very nice when Mr Johnson complimented me on the ending. (He also said it left the way open for a sequel - it certainly does and it's already at the scribble stage!) We ended this very enjoyable session with the children discussing where the story might go next and there were some very thoughtful and imaginative ideas. I hope to read them in due course! I was impressed at how concerned the children were about the boy and his plight and some of their solutions were actually tried at the time and were certainly possible, others weren't but were heart-warming.  We decided that their teacher was not at all like Mr Jardine the slave driver but very like Mr Cooper, the man who helps the boy.

Second session



My previous experience with KS1 is that you rarely get beyond the first five minutes before the roly-polys and cartwheels of delight take over. (I said in my pre-day blog that  "I might manage to get some drama and movement based on the above poems and then some words for their own creatures. That's the 'best laid plan' anyway!") But the reality was very much better than that. Their teacher Mrs Gressieux arranged the room so that the story was really a happy and shared experience. The story she suggested - from Africa, Tortoise's Dream - enabled the children to join in with me throughout, enjoying the magical sound of words and the vivid descriptions of colourful animals. (Mrs Gressieux - unlike me - also knew what a yam looked like - decades of markets while she was teaching in East London, she said. I mention yams a lot in Bound for Jamaica but I've never been quite sure what they are! So I learned something today as well.) There was a room full of excited people and the teacher and me were as excited as the rest. It was even more fun than looking things up and writing.




Next was then a photo shoot with a local newspaper during which we all held up a book we liked. The boy sat next to me was excited about the Book of Birds he had "I love this book!" he said and said he wished he could see the bird on the page he was showing me. "That's a barn owl," I said, " we have those round here, so you might well see one for real." Would you believe that when I went for my cycle ride in the sunshine later that day I saw one flying around Fring Churchyard like a magnificent scent glider?

I finished the morning with a recitation ( the class joining in) of my Toucan poem, a description of my first memory - being attacked by a toucan at Bristol Zoo aged two.  Mr Johnson provided a big colourful picture of a toucan which helped bring the poem alive and made the point about how a toucan's giant beak makes other creatures think it is a lot bigger than it actually is.

That is what words can do. Make you a lot bigger than you actually are. So we spent the last five minutes thinking of one word descriptions of the toucan.

I told both groups how I can hear them playing and shouting during their break times as I live and work very close to the school. And also said that the pretending they do as they play is really all I'm doing when I write a story or a poem. Words and writing and telling stories aloud is an adventure. Enjoy it! These children certainly do.

Your favourite book? Mr Johnson asked me mine and I said Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose'. What's yours?

Bound For Jamaica Press Release

West Norfolk ex-teacher Gareth Calway’s first children’s novel is published this November. Bound for Jamaica is part of the new Collins Education Read On series whose aim is to encourage reluctant readers to get excited about written fact and fiction. Bound For Jamaica is both, combining an exciting story about a young African boy’s kidnap and transportation into slavery with a real history of the Atlantic slave trade in supporting non-fiction chapters.

“This is the book I left teaching in 2007 to write,’ said Gareth (56.) ‘It needed full time research and rewriting– including many days at the British Library (and meetings with the CRE*) - which went on for literally years longer than I envisaged. I supported myself in the meantime by writing and series-editing the highly regarded best selling KS3 English text book series – Aiming At Level ... - but finally got the vast and tragic subject matter of Bound For Jamaica into its final shape as 4000 words of fiction and fact this year.” The final book is as distilled as a film script – maybe it will become one!
Gareth first got interested in challenging received views of history while a student of English and American Studies at UEA in the 1970s and married an Ely woman (and fellow UEA graduate) in 1979. They moved to Sedgeford in 1986: their daughter was born at QEH at the end of that year. Gareth taught English and History at KES from 1986-1994 and later at Smithdon High School, Hunstanton, until retiring to write full time in 2007. During his teaching career he had written and published seven volumes of poetry and a comic schooldays novel River Deep Mountain High which has also sold well.
“The main thrust of Bound For Jamaica is to tell the truth about a period of British history we understandably shrink from owning. While a teacher, and as a parent of a daughter motivated by a strong social conscience, I noticed that our history curriculums and stories tend to examine endlessly how we licked Hitler ( yes we did and I’m as proud of it as anyone but...) and avoid how we behaved during the 100 years when we led the slave trade. I wanted to emphasise that while Bristol for example earned 40% of its great wealth in the 18C from the slave trade, there were also heroically moral battles fought against it by Bristol people like Hannah More and John Wesley as well as by English-based Africans like Olaudah Equiano. Also, (what I never realised) the research revealed that it was Africans who were selling other Africans into slavery in the first place, however appallingly racist and inhuman the treatment of slaves once they were on white ships and plantations. And (despite the way the word is often used as synonymous with slavery) under our Empire (as opposed to the unregulated horror of colonial exploitation by individual entrepreneurs buying and selling human beings as cargo) the trade was made illegal and the British Navy actually spent 50 years blockading the slave coast to stop other countries continuing a slave trade that by 1800 had sold 12 million into slavery. Finally, I also derived some satisfaction from the fact that men and women from places like Heacham, Norwich and Lynn were signing anti-slavery petitions as early as the 1770s.


* The CRE was engaged in a completely new initiative at the time - it was part of their work to promote teaching and learning on the Transatlantic Slavery Trade in the school curriculum. My contact was Sharon Walker who read every draft of the present book and continued to advise and encourage me for the 5 years of its composition.