Deborah Lyon: ‘Children don’t need everything sugar-coated. They live with grief, humour and peril already’

‘If sadness has a smell, thought Tim, this is it.’ The line appears early in Deborah Lyon’s exceptional debut, as her 12-year-old hero brings his grieving mother a cup of tea.

His father and grandfather died in a storm at sea five years before, and since then Sarah – paralysed with depression - has retreated to her bedroom. ‘The room was stuffy and smelt sour,’ Lyon writes, ‘her dark hair spread like a cobweb across the pillowcase, dressed in a white nightdress. She reminded him of an old oil painting in a gallery.’

It is an unusually poignant moment to encounter in children’s fiction, where themes of grief and loss are more usually softened or avoided altogether. Lyon’s view is that youngsters are no strangers to sadness.

“From an early age they see illness in their families, experience bereavement, witness friendship fallouts or the breakdown of parents’ relationships. Shielding them entirely from these realities in books does them a disservice,” she told me this week.

Instead, Lyon threads those difficult truths through a narrative alive with mischief, warmth and frolicking good adventure, so that sorrow is counterweighted by laughter, loyalty and discovery. “If a book only shields them from sadness, it stops being truthful. They deserve truth as well as wonder.”

She is right, of course.

And it is this bold but cautious balance that makes Timewaif & The Roman Road, her funny and warm-hearted time-slip adventure about loss, bullying and the strength of friendship, so powerful and utterly refreshing.

Penned for readers aged eight to 13, the novel follows Cumbrian lad Tim Wainwright, a boy without a father and whose mother, Sarah, has hit rock bottom: ‘It’s not always a good day for Mum. Sometimes she retreats, goes into her shell.’

Tim’s closest ally is Annie whose loyalty and quick wit give the story its spark. She matches Tim’s quiet resilience with her own fearless defiance, refusing to let the cruelty of the Mumberson twins’– his relentless school bullies - go unanswered.

Fleeing his tormentors one day, Tim stumbles into a sea cave, leaps across an enchanted hopscotch board and emerges in Roman Britain, where the familiar fells are alive with legionaries, traders and tribes on the edge of Hadrian’s empire.

The book stands in the long tradition of British time-slip fiction, from Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden to Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time. What distinguishes Timewaif is Lyon’s genuine intimacy and connection with place and history. She has lived in Cumbria for nearly two decades and has climbed more than 170 of Wainwright’s summits in that time.

‘It was a balmy sunset, warm with spring blossom bursting into colour, yellow gorse speckling the fells like sunbursts, birdsong amplified by the mountains,’ she writes. And later, ‘The 17th of December came, snow threatening in a heavy sky. The bus pulled into Ambleside, twinkling with Christmas lights. Tim led the way … down to Borrans Park by the lake, where the ruins of Galava lay at the head of Windermere. It took Tim a moment to get his bearings, but the surrounding fells were unchanged as ever, enabling him to orientate himself.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea for Timewaif came from an inscription on a Roman tombstone - commemorating an actuarius who died in battle there – that was unearthed near Ambleside fort in 1962.

The tombstone fired Lyon’s imagination. A walk through the ruins of a fell-top fort did the rest, setting Tim’s adventures against the landscape she knows so well.

Lyon’s attention to detail isn’t lost in Roman history, either. And nor, thankfully, is it dumbed down for younger readers. In one scene, for instance, Tim is guided through a bathhouse ritual by the slave Antonius: ‘First, the tepidarium, the warm room… Next, the caldarium… Then into the cold room, the frigidarium, where you go in a freezing plunge pool to stimulate and refresh the body.’ The history lesson is there - in this scene and throughout the book - but it is cleverly (and, as I later learned, purposefully) disguised as dialogue and description. “The best way to teach children history is to slip it into a story they can’t put down,” Lyon told me. “If they’re caught up in the characters, they hardly realise they’re learning.”

Aside from the seat-of-your-pants jeopardy, the book’s dialogue and banter - especially between Tim and Annie - is warm, believable and often very funny, even in the darkest moments. When the Mumberson twins sneer at Sarah, cruelly repeating how she was seen wandering the village in her nightdress and calling to her late husband on the swings, for example, Annie calls out their lack of empathy and Tim deflects with a comic roll-call of insults (‘Muppets? Vile? Evil? Dumb and Dumber?’) that makes her laugh.

Then comes his self-mocking bravado: ‘I’d knock their blocks off, Annie. It’s just, I’ve not really got the block knocking-off physique.’ Waving his hands up and down his slight frame, he is met with Annie’s diplomacy: ‘You’ll get the better of them in other ways. I know you will. We will. We’ll work it out.’

Since its release, the book has become a staple in numerous classrooms across the Lake District. Tim Robertson, the former Director of the Royal Society of Literature, meanwhile, has called Lyon “a born writer”. Her book is “absolutely wonderful… I found myself caring hugely about the characters, totally exhilarated and at times moved to tears,” he wrote. High praise, indeed.

That Timewaif has been so warmly received should come as no surprise given Lyon’s background. She left a career in corporate communications to raise four children in the Lake District and has written professionally for years. Her debut title, Lake District Unlocked, a children’s travel guide to Cumbria, was published in 2010. A graduate of Oxford University with a degree in English and French Literature, she also holds a Master’s in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.

Lyon is ambitious for the series. The Roman Road is the first of six planned adventures that will take Tim from Roman Britain into the Viking raids, Shakespearean London, the world of the Romantic poets and the Second World War.

When I ask Lyon about that striking early line - ‘If sadness has a smell, thought Tim, this is it’ - she defends it.

“Tim thinks at one point about another children’s story, The Secret Garden. ‘If only I could find a gate like that, I’d take my mum through it and she’d grow strong.’ That is what The Roman Road is about for me,” she said. “Children already live with grief, humour, peril. They also live with hope. I wanted to give them a book where bravery is possible, where history is alive, and where they can imagine themselves stepping into it.”

Words by Tim Arden for Belters News