The long line

People sometimes ask me why the children in my books are so often afraid, as if fear were an odd thing to hand a young reader, and I always want to answer with a kite. When I was small my uncle made wau, the big moon kites, and he taught me that the whole craft is in the line and not the kite at all, that anyone can make a bright thing and only patience can make it fly. The first lesson, the one I hated, was that you do not hold the line tight. You hold it loose. You give it out. A kite pulled in hard against the wind will only dive and break itself on the padi, and a kite given a long line will climb until it is a speck and a sound and a thing the whole village looks up at. The giving out is the frightening part, because every arm's length of string you release is an arm's length you cannot take back quickly, and the kite goes where the wind decides.

I think this is what we do, or what we ought to do, when we write for children about the things that frighten them. We give them a frightened hero not to scare them further but to let out the line. A child already knows that the world contains things that do not ask permission before they arrive. They have felt the house go quiet in the wrong way. They have stood at the edge of something too big to name and found that no grown-up would name it for them. What they have not always been given is a person their own size who feels exactly that and does the next thing anyway, who is afraid at the top of the hill and climbs it, who cries and then, still crying, keeps walking. That character is the long line. That character says: you can feel all of this and still go up.

I do not use the word for the heaviest of these things, the one adults reach for too quickly and children rarely say aloud, and I do not use it because I do not think a young reader needs the label to recognise the shape. They know the empty chair. They know the toy that nobody plays with now. They know that some mornings a person wakes up and cannot find their own voice, and that it can take a long time, longer than anyone warns you, to find it again. I write about all of that without once naming it, the way my uncle never told me the kite might fall. He only taught me how to let it climb, and how to stand there, arms aching, while it did, and how to bring it home gently at the end of the day without pretending it had never been up there in the wind at all.

So when the letters come asking why I frighten children, I do not think I am frightening them. I think I am handing them the line and standing beside them while they learn the weight of it. The bright thing will fly. It will go further than anyone sensible would allow. And the child holding it, the smallest person in the room with the most stubborn idea in it, will feel the pull of the whole sky and decide, all on their own, not to let go.

Kites and courage go together in A Kite for the Quiet Between Storms, in which Sivi Varo follows her mother's unfinished kite into a growing silence.