Anna Ciddor writes about the inspiration behind her time skip children's adventure book, Moonboy.
On 21 July 1969, just before 1pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time), the world came to a standstill, and millions of eyes locked onto tiny, blurry, black-and-white images on TV screens as American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon…
When I started writing Moonboy, I asked people in a Facebook group to share their memories of seeing that first moon walk, and their responses were passionate and overwhelming:
‘I watched it with my whole extended family and my Pop cried because he never thought anything like that could ever happen.’
‘I was just 4, attending Kindy. We walked down the road to the Primary school which had double classrooms. They opened up and there were more children than I’d ever seen! Way down the front was a black and white tv, and we watched the grainy footage. It was exciting!’
‘The atmosphere was one of wonder and excitement, when we were outside we were looking up to the sky to see if we could see the rocket.’
‘To look at the moon and think there were people on it. The whole thing had an air of excitement and anticipation that nothing else has had since.’
All these memories echoed my own, because I, too, am one of the lucky ones who witnessed this event as a child. It was that never-forgotten thrill, and the emotional impact of it, that inspired me to write Moonboy.
As an imaginative, impressionable child, I kept worrying about the things that might go wrong for the astronauts, and tried to picture what it would be like to experience all they were going through. In those days, horses and carts still clip-clopped down our suburban Melbourne street early in the morning, bringing our milk in glass bottles. The postman still walked along it twice a day, blowing a whistle as he delivered a letter. We had no computer, no microwave oven and no mobile phones. The concept of three men travelling hundreds of thousands of miles to the moon, walking on it, and getting back to earth, was terrifying and unbelievable.
When astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin were scheduled to take off from the moon again, I was filled with intense fear and suspense. At four in the morning, I lay in a darkened bedroom beside my sleeping sisters, a crackly transistor radio clutched to my ear, listening to the astronauts speak to Houston as they prepared to take off. Would the booster rockets work? Would they manage to meet up and dock with the command ship? Or would they be stranded in space forever?
Forty years later, when I visited Los Angeles in 2009 for a literary conference, I took a long side trip to NASA in Houston so I could sit in the actual flight director’s chair in the control room of the Apollo 11 mission and, even more excitingly, touch a real moon rock! (FYI it was black and smooth like any ordinary polished rock – but it still gave me shivers!)
The idea of turning my fascination into a book came to me while I was working on 52 Mondays (A&U 2019) and wallowing in memories of my 1960s childhood. The problem was, how to approach it …How could I make young readers feel the same gripping emotions for a real historic event that took place so long ago – and for which the ending is known?
It wasn’t till I discovered the fun and potential of the time-slip genre that I found my solution. In Moonboy, Letty would slip back and forth between 1969 and now, changing history, and putting the Apollo 11 mission at risk.
Just for fun, I decided to have Letty meet her grandfather in the past. He would live behind a milk bar – the one where my husband lived as a child. My husband and his two brothers enthusiastically reminisced about their milk bar life, helping me recreate the setting, right down to the details of the stored crates of soft drink bottles, and the huge array of lollies for sale.
Then I had one of those lightbulb moments that are such a thrill for an author. Grampa would be suffering from dementia, not recognising his granddaughter anymore, but when Letty travels to the past she discovers his childhood interest in the moon landing and this gives her a way back into his mind, and heart. Intensive research into dementia gave me lots of information to help me create this scenario, and I am thrilled that this aspect of the book provides a helpful insight into how to communicate with dementia sufferers in real life.
I hope those of you who witnessed the heady days of the Apollo missions will borrow this book from your grandchildren and relive those amazing moments! And I hope your grandchildren will join in your wonder and excitement, and look forward to experiencing something of the same with the new moon missions expected to take place in the next couple of years.
Moonboy
by Anna Ciddor
An exciting timeslip novel from the bestselling author of The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, featuring a present-day girl hurtling back to the time of the 1969 moon landing.
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