Old storytelling in a new world with Jacqueline Wilson
Best-selling children’s author Jacqueline Wilson talks to Graham Young about university, Enid Blyton and Facebook.
There’s a rare sense of excitement about meeting someone like Jacqueline Wilson.
In February, the former Children’s Laureate was named the most popular library book author of the last decade.
It’s no mean achievement that 64-year-old Jacqueline has become the leading 21st century echo of a modern generation now dealing so openly with “issues” from divorce to illness and abuse.
A bestselling author with critical awards to match, the exact nature of the power Jacqueline wields, from writing nationally treasured books such as Double Act, Girls in Love, Vicky Angel and The Story of Tracy Beaker, cannot be quantified like the number of eggs in a dozen.
But, in this age of austerity when many parents will now be fretting about whether or not they can afford to send their children to university, it seems pertinent to begin our conversation with a Shakespearean phrase.
To degree, or not to degree, that is the question...
Signing multiple copies of her brightly coloured books in a sparse, upstairs stockroom at WH Smith in Birmingham’s High Street, the sparkling-eyed Jacqueline pauses briefly for thought.
Brought up in a council house in Kingston-on-Thames, she never went to university.
But does it really matter? She has still become the ultimate high achiever with a Cambridge-educated daughter, Emma, now Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the same university.
“I have always regretted the fact that I didn’t have the chance to go to university and I think it would have been splendid,” says Jacqueline.
“For years I did wonder about trying to go as a mature student.
“I do think nowadays, particularly when there’s absolutely no guarantee you’ll get a job at the end of doing a degree, to saddle our young people with such huge amounts of money to pay off is very difficult.
“I don’t know what the answer is.
“But certainly for the universities they’re having immense cuts so that’s difficult, too.”
Another pressing issue for parents is the success of internet sites like Facebook which are advancing “her” children towards the adult world more quickly than ever before.
“I am of the generation that thinks it’s weird, in that why not actually see your friends rather than send messages to them?” says Jacqueline. “My publishers made sure that I have a Facebook page. And I think I’ve got a lot of Facebook ‘friends’. But it’s not something I would personally join in with.
“For young people it’s clearly very important, but I do think they need to be very much clued up as to what you can post and what you can’t and you have to protect yourself.
“There have been false Jacqueline Wilson Facebook pages where somebody pretending to be me has sent, in the most irritatingly illiterate words, little messages to ‘fans’.
“Yet some people thought they were genuine, so this is the trouble. If you can’t see a face speaking words and it’s just messages you have no idea whether they’re genuine or not.”
