NICOLA MORGAN

Most authors have two jobs – writing, and the career that pays the bills – but Nicola Morgan has three or four. You may know her as the dynamic lecturer and author of the best-selling Blame My Brain, who will visit schools to inform us about the vagaries of the teenaged brain. You may also know her as the writer of over fifty Magic Readers books for nursery age children, in Egmont’s I Can Learn series.

Alternatively, you may have the good luck to encounter her through her prize-winning historical fiction for 11+, which include The Highwayman’s Footsteps and The Highwayman’s Curse. Inspired by Alfred Noyes’s famous poem about the doomed love between a highwayman and Bess, the innkeeper’s daughter these are gripping, gorgeously-written tales of high adventure in the wilds of eighteenth century England and Scotland. Such is their assurance of tone and narrative that it’s a surprise to discover that it took Morgan, 46, twenty-one years to break into being the published author of fiction.

“I’d thought – and I’m so ashamed of it – that to write for children you would have to do a simple story in simple language,” she says. “When I realised you could do deep things in interesting ways, it was a liberating moment.”

The turning point for her was reading David Almond’s Skellig, which one of her two teenaged daughters pressed on her while on holiday. She was amazed, and realised that the “pretentious, arty, plotless literary fiction” she’d been trying to write for adults, was rubbish. Mondays Are Red, about a teenager who wakes from a coma to discover he has synaesthesia (the condition in which words have colours) followed, and was immediately accepted.

“Before, I was writing for myself, not writing for readers,” she observes. “Many writers say you should only write for yourself, but I disagree. On one level, your heart has to be in it, but if you’re writing for children, it’s for the reader to enjoy. I believe reading should be for pleasure.”

Morgan is indeed a pleasure to read, for her prose and for her plots. Personally, I was so traumatised by Fleshmarket, about a boy trying to get over his mother’s mastectomy without anaesthetic in 19th century Edinburgh, that I couldn’t carry on after the first chapter-  but kids love it, and it became her breakthrough novel, winning prizes.

The daughter of two teachers, she grew up in a succession of boys’ schools as a tomboy (her heroine Bess’s pistol-packing skills in the Highwayman books stem from this, though she claims to lack her physical courage) and suffered from lack of confidence even when she got into Cambridge to read Classics. She knew she wanted to write, and desperately wanted to avoid becoming a teacher in her turn but, after university, found herself doing it to earn a living. Her training in teaching dyslexics was what led her to become a literacy expert fascinated by the human brain, and she now gets a “tremendous buzz” out of visiting schools. In person, she is an intriguing mix of a highly disciplined, forensic intelligence and the passionate creativity which makes her characters so engaging. Despite continuing to switch between careers, she is a born story-teller of that special breed to which Leon Garfield, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Sally Gardner belong, who makes a historical setting as vivid as our own.

To have persisted writing fiction despite twenty-one years of rejection and drudgery is an indication of her determination in the teeth of doubts and uncertainties. Perhaps it is this, as well as her school visits, which makes her understand how difficult life is for modern teenagers.

“You can define a teenager in two ways,” she says. “One is universal to all cultures and generations, which is that it’s a state of life in which you’re not a child and not an adult. There are special circumstances, such as living through a war, which can make that transition much faster, but you still have the teenaged brain, and anyone who can remember that time will remember that anger and heightened emotions are a part of it.

“The other is what’s going on now with teenagers. Exams are putting them through huge stress and unintentional pressure, at a time when they are looking ahead towards independence in hope, anticipation and fear. They know that no matter how hard they try, if they don’t pass certain exams they’ll have a life that’s less good, and the competition for this has simultaneously become tougher, so that some will fail.”

Morgan is fascinated by this tension between permission and oppression, and two of her novels – Sleepwalking and The Passion Flower Massacre – are about brain-washing, either through a futuristic chip implanted in teenager’s brains, or by the use of drugs in a religious cult. More subtly, The Highwayman’s Footsteps and The Highwayman’s Curse examine the conflict between citizens and outsiders in the 1760s. Gentle, sensitive, high-born Will flees across the Yorkshire moors from his harsh father and cruel brother to find Bess (daughter of the original Bess and Highwayman in Noyes’s poem), wounded and desperate, holding him at pistol point. Both suffer from the fear of failing to live up to parental expectations, and in the second book there is the added burden of anger passing down generations which comes to a terrific climax as they race to rescue an innocent girl chained to a rock with the boiling tide coming in.

Each novel uses a genuine historical crisis – the Hexham riots in the first, and the Wigtown Martyrs in the second – to illuminate the character’s lives and choices. A longed-for third in the  Highwayman series is brewing, in which the nascent love between Will and Bess may at last find expression, but in the meantime it has everything a young reader (especially boys) wants, from short chapters to the kind of enjoyment that comes from encountering characters you care about, and recognise.

“The 18th century is the perfect combination of the horrible and the modern,” Morgan says. “It’s dark and rich in gruesomeness, but you know that the Enlightenment is coming.”

The Highwayman’s Curse by Nicola Morgan is published by Walker Books £6.99