It’s still pretty cold here in Australia, but my heart is warm. One reason for this is my wonderful writing friends who are always so willing to share. Today I’m delighted to welcome Belinda Murrell who has dropped in to tell us what it is that warms her heart. Welcome Belinda.
What Warms Belinda Murrell’s Heart
There are three things that warm my heart most of all, and that is my family, travelling and books. So when you can combine all three – now that really warms my heart! For many years I was a freelance travel writer, indulging my passion for exploring and writing travel articles. When my children came along, I was determined to keep enjoying my itchy feet, dragging my kids on fun adventures around the world.
This included a two year stint of travelling throughout Europe and all around Australia, when my children were aged six, eight and ten.
During this time, we home schooled the kids, which of course included lots of reading and sharing books. Here are some of our favourites:
The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke
This is one of my best children’s book memories. The Thief Lord, set in the enchanted city of Venice, is the story of two orphan runaway boys, Prospero and Bo, who find friendship and protection with a gang of street urchins, living in an abandoned cinema. The children are supported by Scipio, the Thief Lord, a mysterious and charming teenage boy who purports to be an elusive master thief. My whole family read the book before we visited Venice, then we planned a treasure hunt exploring the canals, palazzos, bridges and alleyways of the city searching for many of the book’s key scenes and settings – from the Piazza San Marco, the Duomo and the Ponte di Rialto, to Sculo san Rocco, and the cobbled Campo Santa Margherita guarded by a dragon. The Thief Lord brought the city of Venice alive for all of us so we could almost imagine the winged lions growling, and the mermaids dragging themselves up from the canals at midnight to drink from the fountains.
Heidi by Johanna Spyri.
Where else would you read this classic book but in the Alps? We spent three weeks living in an old timber house in the Swiss village of Klosters. Outside the snowflakes would float down all night, the church bells would ring out through the valley, and we would gather inside around the fire drinking hot chocolate, eating apfel strudel and reading books. Everyone had to take turns reading Heidi out loud. Despite the age of this book (it was published in 1880), my children loved this story of Heidi’s simple life growing up with the goats and her crotchety grandfather, high in the Swiss alps. Our Swiss adventures included visiting the winter cow barns down in the village to buy fresh milk, having snowball battles, tobogganing in the back garden, skiing over the snow-covered meadows past the tiny alp huts and jingling through the countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh. It was a time of simple pleasures surrounded by incredible beauty – a place where cold is fun!!
The Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling
During our travels, we had a Harry Potter read-a-thon where everyone in the family had to read the whole series of seven Harry Potter books from start to finish, one after the other. We had long, intense discussions about the characters and the story. There were arguments if someone was reading too slowly and holding everyone up, or if someone let something slip ‘oh, no, I can’t believe Harry did that!’. There were tears when favourite characters died and shouts of excitement when it looked like Harry, Hermione and Ron might be winning. My children wore velvet cloaks, shouting out Latin spells and having lively magic battles, with twigs for wands, or ‘flying’ on homemade Quidditch brooms. As part of our pilgrimage, we visited Alnwick Castle near the Scottish border, which was the grand setting for Hogwarts School in the movies and imagined our favourite characters flying around the turrets and battlements. Our epic HP readathon was a truly enchanting experience.
The Locket of Dreams by Belinda Murrell
Of course I couldn’t be away for two years without writing. One of the books I worked on during our travels was The Locket of Dreams, the first in my time slip series, set partially in Australia, and partly in 1850s Scotland. This book was inspired by a story my grandmother told me about how her own grandmother was sent to Australia as an orphan during the mid-nineteenth century. As a family we explored the wild, west coast of Scotland, the tumbledown castles of my Mackenzie ancestors and the crofts and villages of the Black Isle – researching settings, dialect, myth, fairy tales, historical detail and the Mackenzie clan. It was so exciting to travel back to our roots and see where my family had come from so many years ago, then use these experiences as the inspiration for a children’s book of my own.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
As a lover of all things Bronte, I dragged my family to celebrate my birthday at Haworth in West Yorkshire. For me it was an inspiring experience to visit the Parsonage where the Brontes lived for most of their lives, to see the furniture they used, clothes they wore, and miniature books they wrote as children. Theirs was a tragic story – their mother Maria died of cancer when Anne was a baby, two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth died at 11 and 12, then Branwell, Emily and Anne died within a few months of each other in their late twenties, leaving just Charlotte and her father Patrick. Yet in their short lives, in this lonely, isolated village – Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote such amazing books. We wandered down the narrow cobbled streets of the village, scrambled over the stiles to the misty, blustery moors, and explored the crowded graveyard. My birthday pilgrimage to Haworth was completed with a celebration lunch at the Black Bull pub where Branwell misspent much of his time and talents. A hearty meal of roast beef, Yorkshire puds and two kinds of potato in front of a roaring log fire – now that warms the coldest of English springs.
So now we are all back home, living in Sydney and firmly entrenched into the usual routine of careers, school, sport and homework. But every now and then, we pore over the photos and talk about the many amazing experiences, memories, adventures and books we shared as a family on our travels.
