Riding My Father’s Elephant
Diana Reynolds Roome
Published on SiliconMom
For anyone who loves kids – or stories – there’s often a tale lurking in some corner of the mind, waiting for a time when it can be whipped into shape and sent off to a publisher. How hard or time-consuming could it be, after all, to write a book for children?
Here’s what I found out.
It started off simply enough, when cleaning out my mother’s house in England several years ago. My sister was going through a bureau drawer, and handed me a brown envelope with three sheets of paper inside. I’d hardly read a word before I knew what it was. My father’s distinct script cast me back instantly to childhood, as I saw myself snuggling into bed in the “nursery,” a large moss-rose wallpapered room I shared with my little brother. We were begging Daddy to stay a little longer and tell us a story.
His repertoire, as far as I could remember, consisted of one. But it was a story so grand it equaled ten lesser tales. Hearing it, I’d been transported to Imperial China, sped along in a rickshaw, roamed the mysterious markets of Peking and ventured through the great door to meet the venerable insomniac Imperial Elephant. My father’s manuscript held the story’s forgotten details, obscured by the decades since I had grown up and he had died. I knew instantly that I wasn’t going to let the story disappear again. Though my own children were already years past the age of bedtime stories, I wanted to recreate it for my sister’s new grandson, plus the future children of our family. I also knew it was time to share it with a wider audience.
First I translated my father’s wryly-humorous Edwardian style into a language more accessible to today’s children. What then? I wanted to pair with an artist who would see the story’s potential for splendid detail, but few publishers give a writer that choice – even if I could find one to accept the story. Still, I had someone in mind. While working in London, I’d come to know artists Niki and Jude Daly, and we’d kept loosely in touch after they moved back to Cape Town where they both became successful illustrators and writers for children.
When Jude Daly said she would like to illustrate it, I was overjoyed. But I was going to need patience: a picture book (typically 32 pages) took an average of a year to complete. She was currently working on one, and had another lined up. She could begin on my book in two years!
As I waited, the story continued to evolve. Lapping up feedback from insightful readers, I was discovering what makes a story work. I spun it out to fit the required format, adding episodes, a riddle and a bedtime potion (derived from the milk, honey and ginger I’d given my sons when they couldn’t sleep). I learned the importance of creating a narrative that would come to natural crests, offering more varied scenes for the artist to depict. The protagonist (in my father’s version a young man) morphed into a child. This was a transformation. Now the story became the adventure of a spoiled boy who discovers his own capacity for kindness as a result of his encounter with something vastly bigger than himself.
Along the way we approached a UK publisher, who accepted our double-act – two years after I’d first started on the project. Almost another three years would go by before the book actually appeared in Europe. It was six months more until it was published in the USA, with a handsome dust jacket that beamed its reds, blues and yellows from the bookstore shelves.
The Elephant’s Pillow has the ring of legend, but I have never been able to find such a story anywhere else. My father was a colonel who was stationed all over the world, including India and China, before the heavy action of WWII in Greece and Burma. He seldom talked about his years of travel. But any mention of faraway places with strange sounding names seemed to open up a magic box of imaginative possibilities for me.
From there my father’s once-confined Imperial Elephant has at last emerged, and found its way to new young readers in many parts of the world.
It took immense effort and a long time to get the book out – but then slow and steady is what we expect from an elephant’s progress, especially when a child’s imagination is riding on it.
About the author:
As a devotee of the East, Diana Reynolds Roome was surprised to find herself moving West to California where she lived for 25 years. She still travels to England (her home country) regularly, and wishes for limitless time to explore other parts of the world too. Diana has written for Parenting, Reader’s Digest, and Newsweek, and a regular health page for the Mountain View Voice.