Louisa Young: how my family inspired a novel

But when you talk to Young about her own past, you don’t get a life story so much as the abandoned plots of a great many fantastical novels. What was the inspiration for My Dear I Wanted To Tell You? Well, several decades ago Young came across a photo of a man, a certain Corporal Riley, in the archives of the pioneering First World War plastic-surgery centre at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, southeast London.

“I saw his face and just stopped. He looked just like a friend of mine. A handsome man suffering hugely has a very strong effect on any woman. That kind of image does not leave you.” Young would, much later, borrow Risley’s name for that of the hero of My Dear I Wanted To Tell You.

But what was she doing in the archives of the First World War surgery centre in the first place? Researching the life of her grandmother, Kathleen, the widow of Captain Scott, he of the doomed Antarctic expedition, of course. “She was one of these fantastic Englishwomen who do stuff,” Young says — including, during the war, sculpting in plaster the broken faces of soldiers as aids for their doctors.

After that, we move on to Young’s childhood in the grand London home formerly owned by the author of Peter Pan. This is where she grew up, with her five siblings and four cousins. Were they made aware that this was where J. M. Barrie dreamt up his stories of gangs of children like them?

“Oh, yes. It quickly moved from ‘If you don’t brush your teeth, Peter Pan will come and get you’ to ‘Brush your teeth or he won’t’. But I was never Wendy. The Peter Pan character I really liked was Tiger Lily. She was nobody’s squaw; she just did her own dance and everyone did what she said.” Young’s father was an hereditary peer but by the time she grew up Young had tired of that rarefied life and moved from Kensington Gardens into a squat. There she lived for seven years, riding Harley-Davidsons. During this time she also wrote a shopping column for Tatler: “A very annoying job.” She had a baby with a Ghanaian charity worker and became a single mother.

There’s a lot more in between, but before I forget, I must mention the publishing phenomenon that is Lionboy, the series of adventure books for children that she co-wrote with her young daughter as “Zizou Corder”. Lionboy garnered six-figure advances and has now been translated into 36 languages. You see my problem with fitting it all in?

Let me pass on one more biographical detail before we catch up to the novel again. When Young was 11, she dismayed her urbane family with an attack of religiosity and a demand to be christened. She chose her godparents herself, and why does it not surprise me that they were John Betjeman and Henry Kissinger, both family friends? Louisa Young is what happens when you have a poet laureate and an international statesman to guide your formative years.

“I chose the cuddly, clever guys, and that’s what they looked like to a young girl. John Betjeman was adorable. He was just what you would want. He gave me a locket in the shape of a Smartie.” On the other hand, Dr Kissinger was a little less cuddly. “My knowledge of politics wasn’t very high. Henry had been a very good friend of my parents. He said he was honoured to be my godfather, but feared for my moral soul. I’ve still got that letter somewhere.”

A few years ago Young was asked to curate an exhibition at the Wellcome Trust, and during this time stumbled across a postcard form that wounded First World War soldiers were allowed to send home to their families. The wording is standardised, except for a few gaps for names and the extent of the injury. It begins: “My dear I wanted to tell you.”

“I just thought, what would you send on this form to your loved ones, sitting there with your face half blown off after years in the trenches, having the most appalling time. Of course, you lie.

“That got me thinking about the whole thing, of daddy never talking about the war. If they relayed the filth and horror back home, that would pollute the very thing they were fighting to protect.” Together with the image of Riley, this postcard gave birth to the idea for the book. But if most veterans would not speak of the war, many could not show their faces on their return.

Because of the nature of trench warfare, there were an extraordinary number of head injuries. These men were helped by doctors experimenting and innovating as best they could. Never had they been faced with such quantity and severity of disfigurement, but the numbers refined their skills. They adapted a technique introduced in India 4,000 years ago, growing flaps of skin around the face. In doing so they invented modern cosmetic surgery. “The suffering and courage of these soldiers is extraordinary because what these surgeons invented was genius, but also appalling.”

Young would love to track down the family of the real Riley to discover his fate. “There are stories of a lot of them becoming cinema projectionists; they went for the invisible jobs. I expect a lot of them sat in darkened rooms and drank a lot. Whenever I see someone whose face has been badly damaged who is out and living, my heart swells with pride for their courage, because we are so unforgiving as a society. We invent flaws, buy ourselves falseeyelash inserts or whatever the latest fad is. All the while there are some phenomenal surgeons and patients who carry on just to have a face that won’t frighten children.”

One of the characters in Young’s book seeks surgery out of pure vanity. Young tells me that she sympathises with this woman, but then the subject launches her into a magnificent rant. No Botox for Young then? “I’ve got an agreement with friends and relations that if I ever suggest I will have cosmetic surgery, they will strap me down, take my money and send it to a cleft-palate charity. No way.

“The industrialisation of female vanity is shocking. Convince someone that they’ve got an enemy and they’ll pay you loads of money to get rid of it; that works for politics exactly the same way as it works for self- hatred. Now suddenly it’s pubic hair. It was fine until ten years ago, now it’s a multimillion-dollar industry telling women that they should have a weird do on their parts. Someone’s made a fortune out of that bright idea. If we all put the same amount of work into solving real problems rather than women’s appearance, the world would be transformed.”

To anyone who has read Lionboy or any of Young’s previous adult fiction, this book is quite different in its depth and range. The success of Lionboy is part of it.

“Absolutely. It gives you confidence, in your 3am moments of darkness and self-doubt, you say: ‘Calm down, you are competent; you are published in 36 languages.’ That is liberating.” The other matter is simple age. Her once-tiny Lionboy co-creator, her daughter Isabel, is now an adult. At 18, Isabel is the same age as the young heroes in the new book.

And at 51 Young feels that she has written, “In a way, my first adult novel. I think it’s to do with not giving a s*** any more. I’m a grown-up now, not scared to say what I think. I’m not worrying about pleasing anybody.” I don’t, I venture, think that she seemed to do much of that when she was driving to her squat on a Harley.

“It’s different when you’re young, it’s bravado. When you’re a grown-up you really do have better things to do.” I think Henry Kissinger really shouldn’t have worried so much about her.

My Dear I Wanted To Tell You is published next week by HarperCollins at £12.99. To order it for £11.69 inc p&p call 0845 2712134