Over the years, it was like a club, or a secret society. I would meet writers, or commission pieces from them – this was in the days when I was literary editor of The Times – and eventually I would ask them if they knew the work of Alan Garner. Perhaps I would have sought them out because I hoped for an affirmative answer to this important question. More often than not, I was right: and when I enquired, their eyes would light up, they might even clasp my hands in theirs, and we would know, there and then, that we were bonded together. For life. If you are a one of those people – and I bet you are – you will know what I mean.
So that’s how First Light came together. I sought out the members of this extraordinary fellowship and asked them to join me in celebrating Alan. Some of the contributors I knew well; when I emailed my friend Philip Pullman, I wasn’t surprised he agreed to take part – he was the very first to say yes, which I took as a good omen. Or David Almond: I’d spent a happy afternoon with Alan and Griselda in London not long ago, when Alan was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, on the very same day, as it happens, as David. Listening to them speak together in their respective dialects is something I’ll never forget! So David’s yes did not surprise me.
But there were to be plenty of surprises along the way, not least because in gathering my list of potential Names I had help from Alan and Griselda, and of course their reach was even wider than mine. So when they suggested Bob Cywinski, an eminent physicist at Huddersfield University, I confess I was surprised. But needless to say I trusted the Garner instinct – and I was right to do so. You may be thinking: a physicist? What’s he got to say about Alan Garner? But you will be as moved and engrossed by his piece as I was when I first read it. My invitation to the poet Maura Dooley came when I found myself in her office at Goldsmiths, and noticed a shelf full of Alan’s books. “What a project!” typed Robert Macfarlane, eagerly, when I contacted him. Bel Mooney heard of our doings, and was soon aboard the good ship Garner.
My joy at following the trail of names only increased when my writers began to send in their work. Piece after piece came in, and each time I thought, this can’t be as good as the last one I read.... but it was! Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Gregory Maguire, Helen Dunmore.... each writer (each scientist, each historian, each storyteller!) cast a new light – First Light – on Alan and his work. When you read this book you’ll go back, as I have done, to Alan’s own books, and start reading them all over again, as you’ve probably done many times already. You’ll learn about his school days. You’ll learn about his archive, safely housed in Oxford’s beautiful Bodleian. You’ll hear from his children. You will be, as I have been, astonished and delighted. The pleasure of being the editor of this book is that I am permitted to say that it’s brilliant. Seriously.
Crucially, there is still time to get your name in the back of it. We may be fully funded, but the money you contribute will help support the wonderful Blackden Trust, the organisation set up by Alan and Griselda Garner to celebrate and preserve the 10,000 years of Cheshire history that can be traced through the acre of land on which the Garners’ remarkable timber-framed house now sits. Literature, education, history and archaeology all come together in the work of the Trust. Don’t just look forward to First Light – be a part of it! As I have said before: join us. You won’t be sorry, I promise.