introducing Jane

Under the Fountain is Kathy's project first and foremost, but there are quite a few people who are helping this story become a published book. One of these is Jane, our illustrator. Here's Jane's story:

Although I always loved to draw and paint I never had the time. My mum bought me a book and some paints one Christmas, but working full time with kids I never got the time.
So my painting career really started when I left the UK for Dubai and it was there that I had the time to fulfill my desire to paint in water colours. I signed on a course and off I went into a world of exploration, colour and self expression. That was nearly eleven years ago.

After Dubai I moved to Singapore and for nine years I carried on with my art, experimenting and learning new techniques. For the past two years I have been studying the noble art of Chinese brush strokes.

It has only been this past year that I have started to illustrate books. It all started from a friend who had a "vision" and apparently I was in it! My friend phoned me all excited about her idea to write a book and it was me who she felt would be able to help with the illustrations. Together we came up with some great ideas. This book is still in progress and I hope it will be published this year.

How did I get involved in Kathy’s book? I know Alison – we were both members of the same dive club in Singapore and found we had a mutual love of art and the underwater realm. Before I moved back to the UK we used to meet up to draw and found ourselves all sorts of artistic challenges for example the aquarium and the bird park! One day Alison mentioned Kathy’s book and so my work began…

teamwork

Along the way I have had a lot of help from people with the various formats the book has taken. That’s where Alison has come in. (Here we both are at my computer, Alison's on the right, I'm on the left).

Alison, my former neighbour when we both lived in Devon, now lives half way across the world in Singapore. We have kept in regular contact over the years by email, skype and see each other whenever she’s back in the UK. This photo was taken in September. She has helped me with editing but also as source of knowledge on diving, and the underwater world. Here’s over to Alison:

“Kathy had told me about her book idea a couple of years ago and I had all but forgotten about it when she asked me to look over her manuscript. She was in a hurry to pull it into shape as she had a friend she wanted to give it to, and needed a second pair of eyes. I think we spent about an hour and a half on skype that time!

Since then, the story has undergone changes. Some changes were made on the basis of comments received by people who had kindly read the script and given feedback – details were added and a section taken out. But fundamentally the story, characters and the message are the same. On a micro level, the script was read again and again, word for word. Proof reading is an exacting task! My hope is that no-one will find one single error (or inconsistency)!

Early on I was able to share my experiences of diving with seals with Kathy. I learnt to dive over 20 years ago in the UK. One year, I dived with some friends in the Scilly Isles off the Cornish coast and had several encounters with seals. Those were really special dives. Seals are amazingly agile and graceful underwater, and so quick! We dived with some fairly young seals who wanted to play – tugging at our fins and then swimming off, and then returning. They have the most beautiful eyes and I will never forget a young seal coming up to me, just a metre away and we gazed into each others’ eyes – what a privilege.”

How the story began

Twelve years ago my daughter was diagnosed with Leukaemia, she was eight years old. After trying to explain to her about the disease, and how it was treated, the first thing that she said was “I want to meet someone with the same thing as me.” At that particular time there wasn’t another child in Bristol Children’s Hospital with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. The next thing that she wanted was to read a story about a child that had leukaemia. There was very little around apart from the colouring book about the Hickman line, “The Wiggly” book. The book was informative and child friendly but not really about “someone.”

We spent the long summer inside the four walls of a hospital ward acting out many fantasy stories. Most of the time we used favourite soft animals, Barbie dolls and numerous plastic figures, with some attempt on my part to sew clothes for the dolls and animals.

Time went on and horses became much more a focus of our lives, so although I wanted to write a story for children with leukaemia, it went onto a back burner while I thought of different kinds of stories for a daughter who was fit and healthy and trying to adjust to being back to the world of school.

Little ideas for a story continued to flit around in my head until the son of a friend was diagnosed with ALL just over a year ago. There was a terrible irony in this, as the friend had been very supportive in the fundraising we had done for CLIC when my daughter was going through treatment. The impetus was there to write something, something that was more than just an explanation of what it’s like to have leukaemia, but something that would also give a sick child the chance to read a story with a positive self image for themselves as the hero of a story. And so, I began to write…