About The Author
Vivien Alcock - The Children's Writer
The children's writer Vivien Alcock, who has died aged 79, did not have her first book published until she was 56, although she had been a fertile storyteller all her life. The youngest of three sisters who filled their childhood with reading and drawing while their mother spent long periods in hospital, it fell to Vivien to tell the last story at bedtime. Both her siblings - and the cat - were asleep before she had finished, and to make up, she determined that, at some point, she would write while there was still someone awake to hear.Once started, she wrote fluently and confidently. There were more than 20 books in the next 20 years, through which she became a widely admired, though too little-known, author, with a gift for blending fantasy and reality - and a particular understanding of the inner feeling of teenagers, especially those who observe quietly from the sidelines.
But writing came second to Vivien after art. Born in Worthing, Sussex, she went to school in Wiltshire, and then to Oxford School of Art, but left in 1942 to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service before finishing her course. Not, as she later said, because it made any difference to the war, but because it made a great difference to her.
While serving as an ambulance driver in Belgium, she met her future husband Leon Garfield, then working as a medical orderly; they married in the face of strong opposition from both their families, especially from Garfield's orthodox Jewish parents. Leon was a bio-technician but, like Vivien, wanted to be a writer, and with his earliest books, Jack Holborn (1964), Devil-In-The-Fog (1966) and Smith (1967), he was soon established among the distinguished writers for children at the time.
While Leon wrote, Vivien worked as a commercial artist, apparently recognising that you could only have one such creative force in a house at a time. It was only as his success began to wane that she produced her own novels.
The intention to write was rekindled when her daughter Jane was a child. Telling her stories led Vivien to her first novel, The Haunting Of Cassie Palmer. Published in 1980, it had many of the qualities that came to distinguish Vivien's work: the complexities of family ties, the need for friendships and the value of kindness. In the book, Cassie, the seventh child of a seventh child, wants nothing more than to be normal. When she accidentally raises a ghost from its grave, she finds she cannot get rid of it with power, but only with pity.
Fantasy and reality blur again in The Stonewalkers (1981), when two teenagers are threatened by the stones they accidentally bring to life. Like Cassie, the heroine Poppy finds they teach her that love and compassion are the powers that heal and resolve.
If any of this sounds cloying or sentimental, it is not. In both these stories, and in many of her later books - including those without fantasy, such as The Cuckoo Sister (1985) and The Trial Of Anna Cotman (1989) - Vivien observes all with a dry humour, never diminishing the near despair that not belonging or fitting in can create. It was a far cry from the more overt problem novels that flourished at the time.
Vivien could also be just deliciously imaginative, as in The Dancing Bush (1991), a short novel for younger readers about a bush that comes to life in the moonlight. Perhaps surprisingly, her books, which continued at the rate of almost one a year throughout the 1980s and 1990s, rem- ained fresh and apparently effortlessly contemporary.
Vivien was very modest and very shy. Although always polite, she positively enjoyed being retiring, and would certainly have hated the kind of public parade now associated with being a children's writer. When her publisher threw a party to celebrate one of her books - thinking to honour her in a fitting manner - she was clearly uncomfortable with the limelight.
Jane survives her, as does her granddaughter Jessica, to whom her last book, The Boy Who Swallowed A Ghost (2001), is dedicated.
· Vivien Alcock, writer, born September 23 1924; died October 11 2003
But writing came second to Vivien after art. Born in Worthing, Sussex, she went to school in Wiltshire, and then to Oxford School of Art, but left in 1942 to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service before finishing her course. Not, as she later said, because it made any difference to the war, but because it made a great difference to her.
While serving as an ambulance driver in Belgium, she met her future husband Leon Garfield, then working as a medical orderly; they married in the face of strong opposition from both their families, especially from Garfield's orthodox Jewish parents. Leon was a bio-technician but, like Vivien, wanted to be a writer, and with his earliest books, Jack Holborn (1964), Devil-In-The-Fog (1966) and Smith (1967), he was soon established among the distinguished writers for children at the time.
While Leon wrote, Vivien worked as a commercial artist, apparently recognising that you could only have one such creative force in a house at a time. It was only as his success began to wane that she produced her own novels.
The intention to write was rekindled when her daughter Jane was a child. Telling her stories led Vivien to her first novel, The Haunting Of Cassie Palmer. Published in 1980, it had many of the qualities that came to distinguish Vivien's work: the complexities of family ties, the need for friendships and the value of kindness. In the book, Cassie, the seventh child of a seventh child, wants nothing more than to be normal. When she accidentally raises a ghost from its grave, she finds she cannot get rid of it with power, but only with pity.
Fantasy and reality blur again in The Stonewalkers (1981), when two teenagers are threatened by the stones they accidentally bring to life. Like Cassie, the heroine Poppy finds they teach her that love and compassion are the powers that heal and resolve.
If any of this sounds cloying or sentimental, it is not. In both these stories, and in many of her later books - including those without fantasy, such as The Cuckoo Sister (1985) and The Trial Of Anna Cotman (1989) - Vivien observes all with a dry humour, never diminishing the near despair that not belonging or fitting in can create. It was a far cry from the more overt problem novels that flourished at the time.
Vivien could also be just deliciously imaginative, as in The Dancing Bush (1991), a short novel for younger readers about a bush that comes to life in the moonlight. Perhaps surprisingly, her books, which continued at the rate of almost one a year throughout the 1980s and 1990s, rem- ained fresh and apparently effortlessly contemporary.
Vivien was very modest and very shy. Although always polite, she positively enjoyed being retiring, and would certainly have hated the kind of public parade now associated with being a children's writer. When her publisher threw a party to celebrate one of her books - thinking to honour her in a fitting manner - she was clearly uncomfortable with the limelight.
Jane survives her, as does her granddaughter Jessica, to whom her last book, The Boy Who Swallowed A Ghost (2001), is dedicated.
· Vivien Alcock, writer, born September 23 1924; died October 11 2003