GENIE, GENIE, GENIE

Anne talks about the original 'Genie' trilogy

I'm at my happiest reading, so there has to be a reason for me to stir myself and get writing. But one day I realised that the Scottish primary school syllabus my daughters were following had no geography or history. They were entirely ignorant of foreign lands and different cultures.

Heigh ho. Out with the pen.

That's why I wrote A Sudden Puff of Glittering Smoke. Then my agent said, "You do realise you'd get a far better deal if this were the first of a trilogy?"

News to me. But I thought I would give it a go and the resulting short books feature three very different genies from, in turn, a ring, a lamp, and a bottle.

A Sudden Puff of Glittering Smoke shows the richness of ancient cultures in other lands. The idea for the second, A Sudden Swirl of Icy Wind, came when my mother found her six year old grandchild testing out his new Christmas pop gun by firing at the shepherds and the three wise men in her crib on the sideboard. "I want him to stop," she said. "It's upsetting me. But I don't know how to explain why." And somehow that set me off on the story of Captain Flook, who learned how to respect other people's religious practices.

It took forever for the third idea to come. But A Sudden Glow of Gold is my favourite of all, and reads, I hope, like something from the Arabian Nights. Indeed, scattered through all three stories are Persian proverbs from a Victorian collection I came across purely by chance in the library and may have been the first to open for sixty years. The proverbs colour the stories, and still, all these years later, people come up to tell me how they were haunted - maybe even changed - by this old saying, or that:

• Life is a splendid robe: its only fault is its short length.
• Riches are like camel dung: they do no good till they're spread.
• Where Hope is lost, Patience must reign.
• Nobody calls his own buttermilk sour.
• No family rocks only angels in its cradle.
• I have fled from the rain and sat down again under the waterspout.
• The wise man raises his roof beam before he brings home his camel.
• Far easier to build two palaces than to keep one tidy.

Here, steeped in the culture of the time, is wisdom. ("Wisdom walks slowly, but her steps are sure.") And still it's dripping down to every child in Britain who takes these books from the shelf, or studies them in projects on other lands. The book I found them in will have been chucked out years ago. (Some librarians can be all too quick to get rid of books they no longer believe to be 'relevant'.)

But the more we know about old times and think about what lives have been like before, the more we think about what lies beneath our own so often rushed and unthinking days.