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For anyone interested in or learning about specific periods of history, Josh Lacey’s The Time Travel Twins cleverly introduces events from dual perspectives!  Easily accessible by students in Key Stage 2, and illustrated by Garry Parsons, the series features Viking, Roman, Stone Age, Mayan and Victorian adventures with Tudors due later this year.  Josh has very kindly answered our questions about the series and even more kindly is giving away free author visits to schools this year to help celebrate The National Year of Reading…

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Scarlett and Thomas have drastically different attitudes towards history at the beginning of The Viking Attack, when you were ten who were you more like and why do you think that was?

Scarlett is thoughtful and conscientious. Thomas is reckless and daring. I wasn’t really like either of them. I was very bookish. I spent all my time lost in my own imagination. Like Scarlett, I did love learning about history, because I enjoyed imagining myself in the past. Thomas and Scarlett are much luckier than me: they don’t just dream about history, they actually go back there, and experience it for themselves.

 Which period of history was the most fascinating for you while you were at school and what about it made it so?

When I was at school, I was especially interested in war and weapons. Guns, knives, swords, spears, tanks, bombs, bazookas, fighter planes – those were the things that really excited me about history, and the two periods that fascinated me were firstly the Napoleonic Wars, and secondly the Second World War. (As I’ve got older, I’ve got less interested in weapons, and more interested in the people at either end of them.) I don’t know exactly what excited me so much about all those weapons and those wars. Explosions, danger, death, yes, of course, but also the knowledge that most wars are fought by young men, who were often in their teens, only a few years older than me, and if I had been born in a different time or place, I would have been expected to fight soon too.

 Access to a time machine to see these times for themselves makes all the difference, which period of history would you have travelled to when you were a kid and would that still be your choice now?

Ah, that’s an excellent question. If I had a Time Machine when I was a child, I would have liked to return to the Battle of Waterloo, and watch the fierce, brutal fighting between the French, led by Napoleon, and the armies of the Duke of Wellington and Marshall Blucher.   If I had a time machine now, I would really like to go to the future, and see what happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years. Will humans still be here? Will we have destroyed ourselves or even the entire planet? Or will we have found a way to live here peacefully and successfully?  But if I was travelling back in time, rather than forwards, I would like to return to London in the year 1600, and wander through the streets to London Bridge. On the south side of the Thames, I would make my way to a round building, where a performance would be just about to start. Quickly I would pay a penny to the doorman and push through the crowd to get closer to the stage. It would be one of the first performances of Hamlet, and Shakespeare himself would be one of the first actors to walk on the stage, playing the ghost.

 What sort of research is necessary before you start a new book in this series, how long does it take and where do you look?

I do a lot of research for these books, and it takes a long time. First the research is very general, because I need to decide exactly when the book will be set. For instance, I’m currently writing the sixth book in the series, which I knew would be about the Tudors. However, the Tudor period lasted for more than a hundred years – from 1485 to 1603 – and there were a bewildering number of kings and queens, and exciting events. What will I write about? Eventually I pinned it down to a particular date, a particular place, and a particular event. Then I have to research more specifically about the people at that event, and what they would have worn, and eaten, and all the other details of their lives. I try to visit the places where the story is set: the Tower of London for this Tudor book, for instance. The Roman Invasion is set on the site of the Roman temple in Colchester, which is now a wonderful museum. For The Stone Age Clash, I went to Stonehenge, and the brilliant museums in London, Salisbury, and Devizes, which are full of fascinating and inspiring archaeological discoveries.

Can you tell us something you learned while researching one of these titles that you find particularly fascinating or surprising?

When I was reading about the Stone Age, I was absolutely fascinated to learn about the Neanderthals. How recently they lived, for instance. How closely they are related to us. How we all carry some of their genes within us. Having read about them, I realised I had to add a Neanderthal to the book, and so I divided the story into two parts: the first half is set not much more than forty thousand years ago, when the last Neanderthals wandered around Europe. The second half is set four and a half thousand years ago, when the first stones were brought to Stonehenge, dragged a hundred and fifty miles from Pembrokeshire to Wiltshire.

 Which of the 5 titles was the trickiest to write and why?

I think the trickiest was probably The Victorian Revolution, because of the sheer amount of historical information about the Victorian era. I could have written about so many different things. The choice was overwhelming. I simply didn’t know where or when to set the book, or which characters to focus on, or what story to tell. The more that I read about the Victorians, the more confused I felt. I had to pick an area, or a character, or an event, but I couldn’t choose. It was all so fascinating!

However, ironically, when I had made my choice, the same problem became its own solution, and made the book much easier to write. I decided to write about the Great Exhibition in 1851, and specifically the first day on 1st May, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert opened the exhibition in the Crystal Palace. I was still confronted by a vast amount of information, but I narrowed it down further by focusing the story on two particular characters: Princess Vicky, the queen’s eldest daughter; and Jenny Marx, the daughter of Karl Marx, who had emigrated to London not long before, and was living in Soho. I was easily able to find all sorts of fascinating details about the lives of both girls, and the book suddenly sprang into life.

What do you like most about visiting schools to talk about The Time Travel Twins series?  What do you do during your events?

I like talking about my love of history, and about the core idea behind this series, which is that there are always (at least) two sides to any story. By dividing the twins, and putting each of them on a different side, I wanted to point out that history might be written by the winners, but any historical events are experienced by all sides, all participants, even the ones whose voices are never usually heard. You can’t have “us and them” or “goodies and baddies” if you’re seeing the same events through the eyes of two kids on opposite sides of the story.

During my school events, I always read from at least one of the books. I explain how I got my inspiration, discuss my research, and talk about the process of writing the stories. I also talk more generally about creativity and writing. If I have enough time, I will run some writing workshops, which use the books as a spur for creative writing: each pupil will write a story about travelling back in time, imagining who they might meet and what they would see in the past.

Anything else you would like teachers, librarians or students to know about the series?

I hope teachers will find these books very useful as a complement to their history lessons. I’ve tried to bring historical events alive by imagining them through the eyes of contemporary kids who are sent back in time. I hope readers will be inspired to imagine themselves in different time periods, and I hope teachers will use these books as a spur for creativity. I’ve loved imagining the twins in different historical periods, and I hope children will be inspired to feel curious about history, to learn more about the past, and perhaps to write their own historical adventures too.