THE UMBRELLA TREE
You might have noticed that I'm raising money to self-publish my story The Umbrella Tree. So what is this story? And why am I publishing it myself?
It all started when I was a tiny, twenty-one-year-old person. I was living in St Ives in Cambridgeshire and I wasn't sure what to do. I knew I was a writer (I'd known that since I was seven) but wasn't sure what I should actually be doing. I definitely wanted to write for children so I volunteered to be a kind of unpaid learning support assistant in my local infant school. It was called Thorndown Infants. I went there three afternoons a week for about a year I think.
My jobs included washing out paint-pots, tying up shoelaces and helping children blow their noses. My favourite bit however was story time! At the end of each day I would get to read a story on the carpet area. Sometimes with Reception. Sometimes with Y1. Sometimes with Y2. It depended what day it was. At first I would just read one of the books from the shelf. But very quickly I realised that for me, it was better if I told the story rather than read it. It was better to have eye-contact with the kids. So I would memorise each page and then recite it as I went along. After a few weeks of this though, I found I could also “improve” the story to fit the audience. And eventually, of course, I just started making up my own stories.
One day, I was heading out the door to go to school when I noticed that my cat (who was an annoying black cat, called Oscar) had climbed the tree at the front of the house. And worse – it appeared to be stuck. After watching it meiow for five minutes, I decided I would have to climb the tree and rescue it. And so I did.
So that afternoon, when it came to story time, I had a funny story of me climbing a tree to rescue Oscar. The following day I told the same story to a different class and so on. And each time I told the story, it got longer and more elaborate. Soon there was a whole family getting stuck up a tree. And not only that, I'd experimented with all the different types of tree it could be. It was a chocolate tree, an apple tree, a teapot tree until eventually I settled on Umbrella Tree mainly because of the possibility of a cute ending.
Soon after this time I started travelling around primary schools telling my stories. The Umbrella Tree was always a hit with the youngest children, particularly Reception. The story continued to grow and change and improve. Every now and again I would make a mistake and have to go with it. Often I would realise afterwards that the mistake was actually a really good idea.
The thing that made this story from all my other ones though was that I had no reason to replace it. Over time, my stories and material for older children had to get replaced because every time I returned to a school I would have to come up with new material and new ideas. They would remember when I'd visited last year and remembered what I'd told them.
But when it came to Reception, every year there would be a completely different group of stick small people. And so I would tell them The Umbrella Tree.
I reckon I've performed The Umbrella Tree to about a quarter of a million people in the last 29 years. About ten years ago it stopped changing. I decided it was finished.
I decided it needed to be published.
Unfortunately, my publishers aren't interested in publishing anything that isn't for my usual “Funny Life” audience and so I couldn't get them to read it.
Eventually, I decided to publish it myself.
My hope is that with an actual book of The Umbrella Tree I'll be able to sell it when I visit schools. So from now on, there will be something for the smallest, stickiest children too.
You can help make this happen by going onto my kickstarter page and pre-ordering a copy or six of the book.
Thanks so much for your support.
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