Children’s laureate on faith and books

 

By Simon Hart

 

A conversation with Frank Cottrell Boyce, children’s author and screenwriter, leads to many interesting places – among them Blackfriars, the base of the Dominicans in Oxford. Frank is recalling his student days at the start of the 1980s, when he was regular at Blackfriars’ sung evening Mass and heard one particular homily that left a lasting impression.

 

“This young lad with a big accent got up and preached about saints and what a great inheritance we have in them,” Frank remembers. “It was very knockabout and had loads of puns in it, and it really stuck with me. My first book, Millions, is about a little boy who’s obsessed with saints. It was that sermon which put that image in my head.”

 

While that student is now the UK’s children’s laureate, the young preacher is our very own Archbishop Malcolm McMahon. “When Malcolm came here, I told him about that and he found a copy of the sermon and sent it to me,” Frank smiles. “It was really funny so hats off to Malcolm – he started off my children’s novels!”

 

A parishioner at St Joseph’s, Blundellsands, Frank has never shied from discussing his Catholic faith. As for how it influences his writing, though, that is “like asking a fish what it thinks of water as it’s so integral. The process for me is an act of faith. When Danny Boyle asked me to write with him the script for the Olympic Opening Ceremony that was an unmoveable date and we both said, “Yeah, that’ll be fine”. That, in itself, was an act of faith.”

 

In some ways, he reflects, writing is like any other job in that the key is “turning up” each day. On some days “you have an amazing sense of presence”. More often “you end up going to bed with a crushing sense of failure, but you’re holding out for that moment. That’s a good parallel with your spiritual life. You go to Mass and may be bored but you’ve kept in training for the day when it’ll suddenly open itself up to you, or the day when you’ll desperately need it, or the day you’ve got something massive to say thank you for.”

 

As a boy, Frank was a parishioner at the now-closed St Alphonsus’ parish, Everton Valley, and then St Bartholomew’s, Rainhill. He sources his love of reading to long afternoons in Kirkdale Library with his mother, Joan – “somewhere quiet” during early boyhood, when he and his brother shared a room with their parents in his grandmother’s two-bedroom flat.

 

Today, early-years reading has been the focus of his three-year spell as children’s laureate, which began in 2024. Frank, who led a Reading Rights Summit at St George’s Hall, in January, explains: “Nobody has really been speaking up for early years because reading is always seen in the context of education, and we don’t start education until four or five. People talk about educational attainment or cultural enrichment and those things are very important, but I think happiness is much more important.”

 

He regards books as more valuable than ever at a time when young children are “bombarded with images” on screens. “There’s a big difference between happiness and distraction,” he argues, and he recounts a visit to the Baby Development Laboratory at the University of East London. “Watching mums read to babies with their heads wired up was miraculous. You watch their thought patterns synchronise.”

 

His own mother’s influence – with those trips to Kirkdale Library – helped words become his currency. (For the record, it was his grandmother that turned him into a Pic reader: “she used to read it manically!”)

 

Words have since taken Frank to Hollywood and back, yet Liverpool remains home. The 65-year-old reflects: “There used to be a pub on the corner of London Road called The Legs of Man and I remember my godfather saying, “If you sit there long enough, the whole world will go by”. It’s that thing where if you stay in one place, you might see more than people who go travelling. If you sit still, you see things like people ageing, places changing, the things that are invisible to people always seeking pastures new. It’s a great place – it’s got stories, values, words.” Rather, you might say, like Frank himself.