Lauren Child : "Children just want to be treated normally"

• © Polly Morland

World best-selling children's author Lauren Child and her publisher Hachette are signing a partnership with UNESCO to raise funds for “My Life is a Story,” a project to provide education, and give a voice, to deprived children. Ms Child told education journalist Brendan O'Malley about the project and the children she visited in a refuge in Mexico:

Interview by Brendan O'Malley, journalist specialized in education .

One of the things they said to me there was that they would really like to be connected to children in other places. They feel alienated because they have been living on the street – though they are in a refuge now.
So we thought we could ask children a set of questions, so that in England, Germany, France, Mongolia, Vietnam, wherever, they all get asked the same thing, from questions about home, family or school or things to do with just everyday life. But we also ask them what is your favourite story and if you were to make up your own story would you put yourself in it, or who would your hero be. Then we hope to put their stories on the web – with translations - and maybe film them, so we can hear them in their own voice. It is about linking children together, from across the world, through their stories.

Why did you want to help these children in particular?

It's the way they are often treated – I'm talking about street children particularly, because they are the ones I met in Mexico, at the Renacimiento shelter – it's the way they are regarded by passers-by. They told me about an extremely nice neighbour who would give the older ones some food, and he would plug his television in outside the shop front where they sleep and let them watch it. That's a really kind thing to do, because all the neighbours hated him for it, as it encourages the children to stick around and they don't like them being there. I suppose they [children] just want to be treated normally.

Do we think too much in a single-track way about poor children, that they don't just need to be made less poor, they need more than that, a sense of joy in their life, for instance?

I think that is absolutely true, we often jump to conclusions that they are all going to say I just want some money or I want to be fed and it's not what they say. One of the things that moved me most in Mexico was talking to 11-year-old boys who said the best thing that had happened to them since they moved into the refuge was that somebody walked them to school and collected them from school. I suppose if you are a child just living on your own it must be really reassuring to have an adult take care of you.

Working for children who have been shut out in some way seems to strike a chord with you, is that because of something that happened to you in your life?

There was a time in my life when I felt all the pieces were falling out. I had to leave the flat I was renting in north London and didn't have a deposit to put down on anything. And it got the point where I phoned my friend and told him I couldn't come to his wedding, because I had to go back and live with my parents in Marlbrough. The whole thing just became this nightmare. But he said we are going on honeymoon for three weeks, you can have our place. And I remember him walking down the aisle and giving me the keys to his flat. It was the nicest thing anybody had done. […] When you live out of a bag for many months, and I did, oh God, it was really horrible. I thought if it feels like this when you have really nice friends, how must it feel in a really bad place? You are just very vulnerable. So you have to be careful not to judge people that get into those situations.

So tell me a bit about That Pesky Rat and why you are using that book to help the UNESCO programme?

When you don't have anywhere [to live] you begin to lose a bit of yourself. I remember when I would walk back to wherever I was staying I would walk past windows lit up in the evening and when people haven't drawn their curtains and you look in through the window it looks very, very cosy and you start longing to have a place that is just home. And I started to think about a character who is maybe going through that and I wanted to use animals because I was writing for young children. So I decided to use a rat because it is probably an animal that most people despise, so I think the idea is to make children think about how one should not look at the outside of somebody – he's more than rat, he could be you.

What happens to the rat in the story?

He lives in a bin and keeps coming home to find his belongings have been thrown out, so he imagines what it would be like to live in various homes and he ends up with an old man – who's short sighted and thinks he's a cat. It's a comedy, it has a happy ending, but there is a serious point. It just felt like the perfect story for this project.
It's definitely a read aloud, the sort of book a parent reads to their child. So I thought if we can repackage it – with information about the My Life is a Story project explained in simple terms – and persuade the publisher to give all their royalties along with mine, this will be a good way to raise money to keep things going.

So how much do you hope to raise?

I think if we sell 20,000 copies we could make £90,000. It could go a long way to help a few projects, so we are starting with four, in Mexico, Guatemala, Mongolia and Vietnam. They are part of UNESCO's Education for Children in Need programme, which tries to help street children, boy soldiers, refugees and other excluded children.
The idea is to get them into literacy and numeracy by firing up their imagination – whether it is through ballet in Brazil or story-telling in Senegal. […] I didn't want to just send money […] I wanted to do something practical.

• 23-06-2008