THE children’s novelist Jacqueline Wilson had to check herself constantly when she was writing her most recent book, taking care not to use words such as “cripple” or “freak”.
Those words, she says, were acceptable when she was a child but are not today. The way she tells it, writing Katy — her retelling of What Katy Did, the classic Victorian novel about a girl who becomes disabled after an accident — involved crossing a verbal minefield.
“We are very politically correct these days,” Wilson, a former children’s laureate, says. “When I was a child, shops would have collecting boxes and there was a model of a girl with a caliper on her leg holding the box; you could talk about that little ‘cripple’ girl without any offence. If we used the word now, people would be rightly offended.
“Words keep changing and . . . older people sometimes keep wrong ones in their heads. Nowadays there is some objection to using ‘wheelchair-bound’. You are supposed to ‘use a wheelchair’; you are not ‘in a wheelchair’. I had to think about all this.”
Since her book was published earlier this year, Wilson has been deluged with letters from disabled children and adults thanking her for rewriting the story. The original, by Susan Coolidge, was one of Wilson’s favourites when she was a child but today she feels it has “an inappropriate message”.
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“In Victorian times it was perfectly acceptable to moralise and say that if you were bed-bound, the thing to do was be very good, a little angel of the house, and you might be rewarded by walking again, which nearly always happens in Victorian children’s books [and which happened to Katy],” she says. “I could not help but feel this was dishonest for children in wheelchairs, who probably know — because doctors share medical details with children now — that if they have a spinal injury, they are unlikely to walk again.”
Wilson’s Katy is the same naughty tomboy Coolidge imagined, but Wilson says: “I wanted her to go through huge anger and distress after she had her accident, as anyone would, and I wanted the qualities that got her through to be sheer cussedness and determination and getting the courage to go back to mainstream school.”
She wanted, she says, “to show you can still be a cool person if you are disabled, you can still wear interesting clothes and have lots of friends. But I also wanted to be truthful: some people make horrible comments; some people patronise and treat you differently.”
To find out what life is like for a young disabled person, Wilson spoke to Nicola Miles-Wildin, who played Miranda in the opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympics.
“She had short blonde hair with a blue streak, wore red sequinned jeans and red patent Doc Martens and I thought, ‘This is the image we need of someone in a wheelchair, not someone looking like an invalid wrapped up in a blanket,’ ” says Wilson.
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“She does not have a spinal injury; she had infantile rheumatoid arthritis and can walk a bit. She goes round schools with an acting group and they act out scenarios and have a discussion with the kids as to the words people use and the attitudes they have.
“Sometimes the nicest people think the way to treat someone who uses a wheelchair is to say in a jocular way ‘Come on, Trouble’ or ‘Don’t run me over’. It is like calling women ‘lovey’.
Then there are the practical difficulties, such as schools with no lifts. Wilson adds: “Things like when you go on a train journey and you book ahead and someone is supposed to meet you with a ramp but isn’t there when the train pulls in. One of Nicky’s friends was reduced to easing herself out of the chair and crawling up the platform, even though she was all dressed up for an event.”
From her research, Wilson advises schools to set up an informal meeting between the young person and form teachers to ask: “What would make your life easier? We cannot work miracles but what do you need? What is hardest or most embarrassing for you?”
As to whether disabled children will thrive best in mainstream schools — like Katy — or special schools, Wilson says it depends on the child and the school. But she tells a story of a girl she knew who was nearly blind but went to a mainstream school and then Cambridge.
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“She had caring but no-nonsense parents who said, ‘It’s your problem: get on with it, solve it.’ When she went to Cambridge, she discovered a lot of other girls had brought their cuddly toys. She had never had one, so she took herself off and bought herself a Peter Rabbit. That showed she was thinking, ‘Right, I am going to have one too,’ and that attitude has stood her in good stead.”
It’s a cussedness that Wilson’s Katy would be proud of.