Edward Cox’s latest novel The Song of the Sycamore is out now from Orion, and in this piece, the author casts his mind back nearly forty years to an event that kickstarted his imagination…

 

With the release of my new novel The Song of the Sycamore, I’ve been thinking a lot about where it all began for me. There’s a question which I’ve always found difficult to answer: What inspired me to be a writer? I’m sure there are many inspirations that led me down this road, but I now believe the moment of inception can be traced back to a single event. My writerly origins are steeped in biggest lie I ever told.

Picture the scene: 1980, I’m eight years old, and my family has just moved from the squalid and sinister East End of London to the sprawling green freedom of an Essex country village. Even at so young an age, I’d never been happy in London, fearful of my surroundings, always an anxious child, but this country village was so serene in comparison that I honestly thought I’d discovered paradise. My house was surrounded by fields and woodland! I was allowed to play football in the road! As far as I was concerned, I’d moved to Narnia, and it was, perhaps, the first time I’d ever felt truly safe. But that feeling hit a hard full stop when I started at my new school.

On my first day, the teacher stood me in front of the whole class and made my introductions. “This is your new classmate,” she said. “His name is Edward.” So far so good – thumbs up all round! Then she said the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard a teacher say: “I should warn you that he comes from London and all the boys from there are terribly rough and tough. Be careful around him.”

As you might imagine, this warning did not smooth the way for an easy time in the playground. There was one boy, let’s say his name was Phillip, and he was my year’s alpha male. Phillip and his gang really wanted a piece of this supposedly rough and tough kid from London. For the next two weeks I spent nearly every break time running and hiding from them. No one wanted to make friends with me, no one would even talk to me, so I ate lunch in toilet cubicles, sat at the back of the classroom, kept my head down, hoping that Phillip and his boys would stop trying to pick fights.

Incidentally, it was while sitting lonely at the back of class that I discovered the bookcase filled with copies of Herge’s The Adventures of Tin Tin. Today, I own the entire collection of these stories because reading them back then formed an important source of escape during a hard time instigated by the stupidest teacher who ever taught. A teacher, it’s worth pointing out, whose statement about me was in itself a lie. I’ve never been rough. I’ve never been tough.

Anyway, there I was, lonely and friendless, and it became apparent that if my situation was to improve then I would have to take matters into my own hands. I needed something showy, something so impressive it couldn’t fail to turn my enemies into allies. Opportunity presented itself on the day Stupid Teacher was telling the class all about meteorites.

You have to understand, what I did next was driven by a deep need to make friends and desperately flawed logic. While Stupid Teacher prattled on and on about meteorites, clearly not understanding the subject, an idea came to me. By the time she asked her pupils for questions, the lie was already on my lips and my hand was in the air.

It happened in London, I told my audience (because to my eight-year-old’s impeccable reasoning London was a million miles away and therefore nobody could possibly check my “facts”). On a dark night, I told them with a straight face, a meteorite landed in my back garden. A really big one, too, I assured them, at least as big as a car. With the fury of the Gods, the impact caused such a roar of thunder that windows rattled in their frames and the house shook. And not only that, the meteorite was glowing red and so hot that my dad had to cool it down with the garden hose.

As if, right?

But no.

Now, I take responsibility for lying, but Stupid Teacher should have called bullshit straight away. Instead, she acted like she had struck oil and asked me question after question. I wasn’t prepared for this level of gullibility from an adult, so the lies kept coming and my mouth wouldn’t stop flapping. I was in too deep to turn back.

Stupid Teacher didn’t understand my sole point of reference for this topic was Steve McQueen in The Blob. She didn’t find it strange that I seemed to believe meteorites were cosmic pieces of magic stone. How could she not question my description of a meteor strike so large it should’ve levelled a hundred mile radius, but which, according to an eight-year-old, caused no more damage than to ruin the lettuce patch in the small garden of a terraced house in east London?

Surely, telling her my dad buried the meteorite because he feared it was holding alien eggs should have tipped her off to something being amiss. But it didn’t. And Stupid Teacher was so impressed by this child’s crappola that she went out of her way to escalate the situation into the realms of downright absurdity.

My story became legend in the staffroom, spreading like wildfire from teacher to teacher, pupil to pupil, all of them believing it was true. And then… and then the situation took a truly bizarre turn when my dubious tale reached the Headmaster’s office.

Now, the Headmaster at my school was a four-hundred-year-old cricket fanatic who fought in World War II. He had survived one of the worst periods in human history. He had seen it all, and there was no nonsense about him. How? How could he believe me, as well? And not only did he believe me but he also ordered me to write down my “true” story with as much detail as I could “remember”. Oh, what had I got myself into!?

However, around about this time I noticed a change in Phillip and his cronies. They still wouldn’t play with me, but they stopped chasing me around at break time. They let me eat lunch safely in the dining hall. They wouldn’t talk to me, but they were talking about me, with a kind of begrudging respect for the kid from London who survived a meteor attack. This seemed like a positive step forward, so I embraced my lies and wrote everything down with as much flair and bullshit as I could imagine. I mean, I really let rip because I honestly thought this would be as far as it went.

You see, I had no idea what Stupid Teacher and the Headmaster were planning until I arrived at school one day and discovered, to my horror, that I was to be the lead act in morning assembly. A copy of my unlikely tale was thrust into my hand, I was dragged up on stage and ordered to tell my lie to the entire school.

My memory of the event is quite clear even after nearly forty years. I remember feeling hot and guilty to begin with, but then special, like I was being seen for who I really was and not judged on the ridiculous aspersions cast by Stupid Teacher on my first day. By the end, I forgot I was lying and revelled in this moment where around two hundred people were listening to me. And I thank them all for believing my amazing but frankly unbelievable story, because when I finished, their applause and appreciation filled me with a confidence that I still channel to this day when I’m doubting myself as a writer.

If there is a moral to this whole, sorry affair, then it is an ambiguous one. After that assembly, I was sitting in the playground, wondering how much trouble I’d be in if my parents found out what I’d done, when Phillip approached me with his gaggle of henchmen in tow. But instead of issuing the usual threats, he became the only person who has ever questioned the validity of my story. He asked me if it was true. I considered standing my ground, but I could see in Phillip’s eyes he already knew the answer, so I took a chance. I confessed to him that every word I’d spoken on that stage was a big ol’ lie.

To my astonishment, Phillip collapsed into laughter. He and his friends thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard, and they admired me for having the stones to lie to the entire school. It gave me a cool factor, and they welcomed me into their gang. I had finally made friends, was even famous in the playground for a while. My problems were solved.

Outstanding work, right?

I dunno. Life’s confusing when you’re eight. Of course, I would never advise anyone to take this bizarre route just for the sake of finding acceptance, and I know I shouldn’t feel as comfortable as I do with what I did. As for Stupid Teacher, I don’t think she ever discovered that I lied, so I’m glad the joke’s kind of on her, too, because she never saw that she’d done anything wrong.

But here’s the thing: there’s a complicated grey area when it comes to lying, so I don’t believe my big fat whopper should form a cautionary tale on how truth is best. This is how I survived at a new school. Now, I look back at the whole experience and realise that to think so quickly on my feet, to spin a yarn so convincingly, showed a little early talent. Right there, in 1980, a storyteller was born and he set off on a journey which continues today with the release of The Song of the Sycamore. Sure, I had to lie to two hundred people to get where I am, but many more than that have read my books and they’re all ok with my stories being made up.