Why isn’t it Savant?

Hi, All

Last Blog I told you how Savant came to be written. And I left you with the cliff-hanger of how the book that’s coming out ISN’T Savant (though I hope to get you reading that in the not-too-distant future).

But why isn’t it Savant?

Here’s the story…

One of the people I got to read Savant, to hear what they thought, was my very erudite eldest son. I happen to respect his opinion greatly. One of the things about my sons is that they are each skilled in many different disciplines. Polymaths, you might call them.

This son travels round the world operating the incredibly complex sound systems for famous rock bands. He doesn’t do village halls, oh no! He does stadiums. Sydney Opera House, the Hollywood bowl, the O2, that’s his daily bread.

But at the same time he has a keen eye for the artistic side of the world. In a way, his work IS artistic, making sure the audience hears an artwork from the musicians.

Anyway. He read it. And he said he liked it – yes – but I mustn’t publish it. ‘Never publish your first book dad’, he said. ‘Your second book will be much better.’

Second book? What second book? 

I had not the first idea!

I’m now not sure how the ideas gently germinated in my mind. What I do know is that I had always been fascinated by Anglo-Saxon times, what we sometimes call the dark ages. They were called the Dark Ages because after the Romans left Britain in 410 AD, the process of recording the history of what was happening here in backwoods Britain – (we didn’t have an ‘England’ yet) virtually stopped. All we know is from archaeology, and tales and stories passed down orally, to be first recorded by people like Bede, centuries later.

What I did know was taught to me by the most amazing primary school headmistress. I went to a tiny village school, and Miss Saunders was the full time teacher of the older children. I think she was a polymath, too. In assembly, she used to tell us Bible stories by parading up and down the school hall, acting them out.

In English, she gave me a lifelong love for spoonerisms (look it up!), for which I’m known by all my friends.

Ah! But then, in history, she taught us about a time long-ago, when a British King called Vortigern invited two Anglo-Saxon chiefs to help him out with Pictish raids on his villages.

Their names were Hengist and Horsa, though they wouldn’t have pronounced it like that. They and their tribes came from the North Sea coast of north-west Germany, very roughly what we know today as Schleswig-Holstein.

And they never went home. And the name of the Angle tribe became the name of England, and their language turned into the language you’re reading now, and most of you will be, at least in part, descended from those tribes.

So that was where I started.