Fly Me Home
Page 17
Just then I heard someone shout my name.
‘Lee-lu!’ It was like the sound of a bell donging, the way my name was being shouted. ‘Lee-lu! Lee-lu!’
I looked up and I saw my dad’s dear face. He stretched out his arms towards me and I ran to him. I couldn’t believe that he was real, that he was really there, until I felt his arms around me. They encircled me and lifted me off the ground and I felt as though I was flying.
‘You’re here,’ I kept saying. ‘You’re here, you’re here,’ but through my tears it sounded like I was saying:
We’re home.
We’re home.
We’re home.
Epilogue
We never saw Bo again.
But sometimes, on the days I least expect it, I see a shape of something between the bin and the lamppost.
The first time it was a pine cone – one that was a different shape and size from the one Bo gave me. I have found feathers there; pressed leaves that I’ve never seen before; sometimes another piece of moss.
Bo has not forgotten us. Maybe one day in the future we will see him when he comes to leave us something.
Maybe.
The things no longer have any powers for me because, as Bo told me, I don’t need them any more. They won’t make anything happen. But I keep them anyway.
To remember Bo. To remember a time when I found wonders that gave me powers. To remember a time when I found a power within myself.
I treasure them.
Acknowledgements
Huge, billowing thanks to:
My agent, Clare Wallace, not only for her insightful edits and always being brilliant but for bringing this little book-baby into the world at the same time as her little baby was about to arrive too! Your support has meant the world to me.
My editor, Carmen McCullough, who made this book just so much better than it was. Thank you, Carmen, for being so generous with your ideas and enthusiasm – you’re a wonder!
The superb teams at Darley Anderson and Penguin Random House, with special thanks to Mary Darby, Emma Winter, Ruth Knowles, Sophie Nelson, Wendy Shakespeare and Jan Bielecki.
Tokunbo Osunbayo, who I can’t thank enough for her generosity in answering question after question and always sending back considerate and thoughtful responses, which helped me no end.
My new writing buddy, Adenike Awosanya, who has been a sunny ray of help at the last minute.
My dear friend Leila Woodfield for her invaluable insight into police procedures and patiently explaining it all to me.
My wonderful Ho-Yen, Davies and Arnold family and my family of friends who support me, tell me to keep going, offer up their spare rooms, couches and air beds to me for school visits and always make me laugh.
Dan for helping me every day to be a maker of things.
And finally the wonderful readers and writers who I meet in schools all over the country – you always inspire me to write and to keep writing. Thank you.
A note on The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
Leelu reads a line from The London Eye Mystery by the brilliant Siobhan Dowd (here) when she is in the book corner on her first day at school. It’s one of my favourite children’s books!
Read on for
exclusive essays by Polly
about why she wrote
Fly Me Home.
A Walk in the Woods
I have always loved being close to trees. I grew up very close to a patch of woodland – in fact, I was very lucky to go to a primary school that was right next to the woods – and I return to them at any point that I can.
When I was back visiting home as a grown-up one Christmas, I went for a walk in the woods with my husband, Dan, and my mother-in-law, Sue. The days had been dark and hole-like as they always are during that part of winter, but for those few hours of our walk the light was wonderfully clear. I’d never seen the woods look so beautiful.
After being away from them for a while, they felt like a sort of magical wonderland. Glass drops of water hung from skeletal black branches. Indeed, everything felt like it was glistening and suspended, as though it had all been waiting for us to discover it.
We picked up pine cones and pointed out to each other the lichen upon the knotted patterns of tree bark. We wandered from tree to tree, only stopping to bask in the rays of sunlight that managed to find us through the tangle of branches above.
It was during that walk that I began thinking about a story of a girl who’d never known woodland like this. She’d come on a long journey, perhaps, and had to leave part of herself behind. This tiny gossamer part of an idea made me remember the times I had taken my Year One class to the woods.
At the beginning of autumn term every year, we would take our year group to a tiny wood in south-east London called Sydenham Hill Woods. A lot of them had not been before and many had come over from different countries that had completely different kinds of landscape. My pupils would be in awe of the place, by the shape of an oak leaf, by the feeling of moss.
I remember vividly two children running over frantically to me on one of our trips. ‘We’ve found something!’ they told me. ‘We’ve found something!’ They dragged me over to a patch of leaves and then both, heads down, studied the ground desperately. It had disappeared. They scratched their heads but carried on looking. ‘It was just here,’ they told me. ‘Right here.’ I waited for a while and was almost about to walk away when they started shouting and pointing desperately.
It was a red and white toadstool.
For them, it was pure magic.
‘I don’t feel I belong anywhere’
My dad was born in Guyana in South America. He moved to London, along with my grandparents and my uncle, aged eleven.
I grew up hearing my dad tell the story of him arriving, and hating, a cold grey London and very much missing the colour, warmth and vibrancy of Guyana. Last year, for the first time, we travelled back to Guyana together. I saw the street where he grew up, walked along the sea wall that made up his journey home from school, tasted the foods that he loved as a child.
I could very much understand, finally, what my dad meant when he would tell me how, after growing up in Guyana, he found London such a cold and unforgiving place when he first arrived.
My grandparents and my uncle travelled out from Guyana before my dad, because my dad had to stay behind to take an exam. (He was going to join them after a few months and lived with his aunt, uncle and cousin in Georgetown until then.) The idea of a family splitting and reuniting, which is a central part of Fly Me Home, sparked from this.
Fast forward to my dad growing up, marrying my mother, fathering my sister and I, and us growing up in the UK and feeling very much ‘at home’ here, and I arrive at the period when I was teaching my Year One class in Camberwell.
I was faced, for the first time in my life, with a large number of children who were going through the very same experience that my father had when he was a child. They had emigrated to London and were missing their warmer, more colourful home countries but nonetheless were forging a new home in London. Most of them came from Nigeria or Eritrea.
I very much wanted to capture these children in the story of Leelu. In my mind, her family is from Nigeria, although I purposely have not named the country in order for the reader to bring their own experience to this.
The idea of what it means to have a ‘home country’ and also what ‘home’ means on its most basic level to people has been circling in my mind for years. My father said to me during our trip to Guyana that he didn’t feel he belonged anywhere – he felt like an outsider now to Guyana because he had left there, but also an outsider in the UK because he had arrived there, being different. It made me feel unaccountably sad that he felt like this.
I told him that he did belong – he belonged with us, in our family, the place that we created.
About the Author
Polly used to be a primary-school teacher in London and while she was teaching there she used t
o get up very early in the morning to write stories. The first of those stories became a book called Boy in the Tower.
She’s still writing stories and, though these days she doesn’t teach, she does often visit schools … only now they’re all over the country.
She lives in Bristol with her husband, Dan, who designs the covers of her books.
Connect with Polly
Visit her website: www.pollyhoyen.com
Follow her on Twitter: @bookhorse #flymehome
Also by Polly Ho-Yen
BOY IN THE TOWER
WHERE MONSTERS LIE
FLY ME HOME
RHCP DIGITAL
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
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First published by Corgi Books 2017
Text copyright © Polly Ho-Yen, 2017
Cover artwork, author photograph and interior illustrations copyright © Daniel Davies, 2017
The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–448–19824–5
All correspondence to:
RHCP Digital
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL