Resolutionary writing

GARY Murning, full-time, professional writer, can’t actually write. Not with a pen, anyway, and, these days, not much with a keyboard either as he no longer has the physical strength to hit the keys.

For Gary has muscular atrophy, a condition he was born with.

But, physical problems aside, Gary, a published author, can most certainly write and, he says, his physical limitations may have even helped him find his own literary voice.

“I use voice recognition software,” says the writer from Eston, Middlesbrough.

“The real benefit I find from using this – apart from the obvious – is that it actually allows me to literally listen to my prose as I am writing.

This has, over recent years especially, really helped me develop a lyrical quality to my writing, I think.”

So not only is there no self-pity – “I don’t think of myself as a disabled writer,” he says – but an embracing of what it helped him explore, especially the world of imagination and, more practically, the fact he is unable to work and the time it gives him.

Gary’s first published novel, a gritty thriller, If I Never, was well received.

The publishing company soon declared an interest in more tales in the same line. After years as a struggling writer, Gary was tempted to write what his publisher wanted straight away but found he couldn’t ignore the need to write his second novel, Children of the Resolution.

Eventually, after much agonising, he took the decision to publish it himself.

This personal, even semi-autobiographical, novel tells the tale of Carl Grantham, as he is sent first to a “special” school for children with disabilities before moving to an integrated school. This really happened to Gary, now 44, in the Seventies, as educationalists attempted to revolutionise the way children with special needs received education.

What he took from that was not all positive, as becomes clear in his novel, but it was an experience he would not change.

“I knew I couldn’t write it as a straight autobiography,” he says. “I’m too much the novelist. But I did want to give a sense, as uncompromising as possible, of what it was like to experience what was a pretty revolutionary time in education.”

Gary explains how it felt to go from a special academy, Norton School, as a small child to Endeavour School in Ormesby, Middlesbrough (in the book the school is named Resolution, set in the fictional Almsby). Endeavour was built between Netherfield Primary School and Ormesby Comprehensive.

“The idea was to have an open door policy,” said Gary. “The pupils would intermingle and those who were academically able would be gradually integrated into the mainstream schools, the ultimate aim being fulltime inclusion.

“It was all very idealistic and, to be frank, not very well thought through.

One of the first warning signs was that little things like table height had not been designed with children in wheelchairs in mind.

“The open door policy soon had to be knocked on the head. Thefts occurred and the finger of suspicion was pointed all over.”

One of the educational revolutionaries was the former headteacher of Ormesby, Phil Willis, before going on to be Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and the party’s shadow education secretary.

Lord Willis, who inherited the project, obviously read the book with interest and clearly approves. “Children of the Resolution is more than a novel,” he says, “it is a commentary on the work of educationalists, practitioners and politicians who see education through their own eyes and experiences rather than those of the real participants, our young people.”

Reading Lord Willis’ quote before reading the book, I had expected the novel to be a bit more of a polemic, a little more tub-thumping. In fact, it is an entertaining, well-written story about the joys and travails of childhood more than anything else.

“You know, I think the one thing I really want people to get from Children of the Resolution is just how common an experience childhood is,” says Gary. “There’s absolutely no denying the whole ‘special school’/integration climate in the Seventies was new and fresh and bloody unique. New ground was being broken, positive sat next to negative.

Nonetheless, and blessedly, readers are already starting to comment on this, kids are kids whatever their environments, and I think this is something we still forget today far too often.”

Still, Gary, who grew up in Eston, does have strong, positive opinions on integrated education. He explains that his first “special” school was full of good people but felt old-fashioned.

Carl, the character in the novel, has a more negative attitude than Gary himself. The character thinks of it in terms of a Second World War prison camp, full of German nasties. When Carl goes of to the integrated school, he begins, slightly, to leave his internal life and becomes integrated. He feels it as a liberation.

Gary himself, despite being more than aware of the pitfalls Carl has yet to experience, has a clear, positive opinion of the concept. “Do I believe in integrated education? Absolutely, yes. I do think it’s extremely important, though, to avoid at all costs a one-size-fits-all solution. That said there were one or two who, looking back, I wouldn’t have paid in bottle tops. The really sad thing is, though, I’m not entirely convinced that all the lessons that could have been learned all those years ago ever were.”

So what made Gary become a writer? “I’d read Stephen King say that pert young women were always propositioning him at book signings,” he laughs. “More seriously, I had not completed sixth form college due to illness and, consequently, I had time.”

• Children of the Resolution (£11.99) is available from book stores and online.