JESSIE BURTON’s Hidden Treasure is a story of two children whose lives collide when they find an ancient treasure with the power to return to them the most precious thing they have ever lost. Read on for a Q&A with the author.
Where did the inspiration for Hidden Treasure come from?
Every day for seven years, I had to cross the River Thames to get to high school. I clearly remember – a bit like Bo in this book, as she takes the omnibus over Battersea Bridge – how I would peer down, staring into its waters. How deep they were, how alive they seemed! We had to have rowing lessons on that river, and the only thing I liked about those was being on a boat in the middle of something that felt timeless, so much bigger and wild than I was. A church bell tolled, and through the morning mist a laugh across the water belonged to a ghost. If I narrowed my eyes, erasing the tower blocks and modern housing that dotted the banks, I could be 500 years out of my own time.
And looking back now, I wonder if Hidden Treasure started then, somewhere inside of me, and it has simply taken me 25 years to tell it? Putting Hidden Treasure together has felt like a homecoming. In some cases, quite literally. Because it wasn’t until I finished my first draft that my mother, on hearing that I was writing about the river (I keep my books as secrets for a while), casually dropped into conversation that my paternal great-great grandfather, and his father before him, had both worked as watermen on the Thames. I’d had no idea this was the case. For centuries, watermen were like the black cabbies of the river – apprenticed for seven years to a special guild, men with their own boats, masters of the tides, rowing Londoners from shore to shore for pennies until their shoulders ached.
Mum showed me her pencil-sketch of the chaotic family tree she’d worked on. It turned out that both these watermen-ancestors shared the same two first names as my husband. Later, I discovered that the road I’d invented for Bo’s house – ‘Gladstone Street’ – actually did exist, and not only that, it was positioned exactly the same as my fictional street, right on the edge of Battersea Park. I had not spoken about my book, nor consulted a single map, historical or otherwise, before plucking its name from my imagination. Nor had I ever walked that area physically. I’d just wanted a strong word, and I liked the words ‘glad’ and ‘stone’, as echoes of what finding a treasure-gem could make you feel. I also discovered that my real water-family had lived six streets away from my fictional water-family. They’d lived on Rollo Street. It’s not there anymore, so it was almost as if the river was calling down collective and personal histories, mingling truth and fiction and vanished things in a way that could not be rationally explained. A writer’s paradise.
The river is almost like a character in your story – what can you tell us about its significance?
The river is a treasure chest of memory, of lost things. It has a power. that you can’t control. You have to respect it. And sometimes, the flow of the river chooses to give you treasures, or even your own self. When you stand by the river in London, it’s as if time stops. You can tell it’s full of secrets. It’s been a character of my home city all my life, just like Bo’s. Every time I was stuck, I went for a walk by the river and felt free again, in silent conversation with the vast spirit that coursed through London every day. Bo began to take fuller shape in my mind, a 12-year-old with a good eye and a tendency to imagination. One day, the river even washed up a fountain pen to me, right by my feet. It was like a sign, telling me to keep going.
The world you’ve built in Hidden Treasure feels so richly detailed and immersive. How do you approach world-building, especially when incorporating both fantastical elements and realistic settings?
I became obsessed with the banks of the Thames and its tides. I learned about the history of river mudlarks, and drew profound comparisons between the act of searching through the dark river clay for glints of light and beauty and history, and the act of piecing together a story from the fragments of your imagination. They say write what you know. I write what I remember, and what I need. When I am ‘world-building’, I am seeing places and people in my mind’s eye, and it takes many drafts to capture that atmosphere and put it onto paper. Magical things need to be accepted as quite possible, and that can take work. You need to earn the reader’s trust that your realistic world has space for strange and wonderful things to happen.
Bo and Billy are both searching for something important. If you could find a magical treasure, what would you want it to do for you?
I would love to fly. Secondly, I would love to time travel, with the absolute guarantee I can come back to my own time. But generally, I’m quite happy with how things are!
What part of the book are you most proud of, and what was the most challenging aspect of writing it?
I think I always knew I would write this particular book: I just didn’t know the how or the hour. This was a story I would have wanted when I was 10, just when I was falling in love with other novels of ordinary children and extraordinary things, magic and history and family, spiralling together into tales I would read past bedtime, under the covers with a torch. I hope I’ve succeeded. It only took me 32 years!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessie Burton is the author of the Sunday Times no.1 bestselling novels, The Miniaturist, The Muse and The House of Fortune. Her third novel, The Confession, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. The Miniaturist was also a New York Times bestseller, selling a million copies in its first year, and was adapted for television for BBC One. She has written two children’s books, The Restless Girls – a reimagining of The Twelve Dancing Princesses fairytale – and Medusa, the latter being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Jessie is now published in 40 languages.
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