My Latest Book – Rock the World
By Keith Campion (Teacher and Writer)
I adored creative writing as a child – this was the 1980s, when fronted adverbials and modal verbs were the stuff of mystery to your average ten-year-old. We were encouraged to pile on the adjectives – though I doubt we knew they were ‘adjectives’. I remember writing about The Iron Man and can still picture gazing at the striking front cover while Mr Hetherington read aloud the unforgettable opening. Two decades later, I was teaching the very same lesson to my own class. At primary school, we were urged to write for sheer enjoyment – scribbling for pleasure, not tick-lists. As a teacher myself years later, I’ve always tried to nurture that same spark in my pupils, even within the confines of a far more prescriptive curriculum.
My own writing ‘career’ began when my school was preparing a service to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War. Each teacher was to contribute an aspect of the Great War with their class. I felt that familiar sinking that teachers feel when nothing suitable appears – so, in desperation, I thought, I’ll just have to write something myself. Out came a series of letters between a soldier father and his son back home, letters full of innocence and protection, yet underscored by the audience’s knowledge of the father’s grim reality. My class performed it beautifully, and I found I enjoyed the writing process itself. Emboldened, I developed the idea and polished it up and, somewhat sheepishly, published it as The Last Post. To my slightly startled surprise, teachers began using it in classrooms. Then it was adapted into a touring schools production, and later into a full theatre tour with Hobgoblin Theatre Company.
I honestly thought that would be it. But then lockdown arrived. With my two young boys in their double buggy, I spent endless hours trundling around our Cheshire village – the very same one where I grew up. Each corner held a memory. Often, I’d end up at the churchyard, where the old gravestones seemed to whisper a ghost of history. I began to imagine the lives of those villagers, once so vital, now long forgotten. That, combined with my own memories of moving from primary to secondary school as a rather shy child, became The Flower Boy – a tale celebrating local history, seen through the eyes of a socially anxious Year 6 pupil. I loved writing it so much that a sequel, Flower Power!, quickly followed. By then, the writing bug had well and truly sunk its teeth in. My fourth book, The Chemist, carried me back to post-war 1950s Britain: a darker, stormier tale, though rooted in truth.
I don’t think of myself as an “author”. I’ve been a full-time teacher for eighteen years and I love my job. I’m also a single parent to two lively boys, which means writing happens in grabbed moments – perhaps an hour late at night, if I’m lucky. Keeping a story coherent in such small snippets of time is not straightforward; I often find myself squinting at notes hastily tapped into my phone, trying to decipher what on earth I’d meant. Writing has been a tonic for me – cathartic, restorative, and, at times, as euphoric as exercise, when the creativity is flowing freely and the endorphins are rushing.
The idea for my latest book, Rock the World, lingered in my head for years. I’ve long admired Freddie Mercury and Elton John, and so had a heightened awareness of AIDS – the tragedy, the stigma, and the prejudice that raged during the 1980s. Freddie, of course, was lost to the disease, and Elton, after losing so many friends, established his charity in response. Initially, I wanted to write another children’s book, to let children know what happened during the 1980s, but the tough themes soon steered it firmly towards adult fiction. Oddly, I stalled for ages and wrote two other books in the meantime, unable to get going on it. Then last Easter, I finally sat myself down, determined to get words on the page – and the story at last poured out.
At its heart, Rock the World is a human story about people: an unlikely friendship between a fading rock star, a boy, and his mum. It mixes two loves of mine, music and the 1980s. It’s also a reminder of what AIDS patients endured. They weren’t only battling illness – they were fighting a society that was often cruelly hostile, from tabloid headlines to the very top of the establishment. Some of the things said by politicians, police chiefs and prominent figures at the time remain genuinely shocking.
As a teacher, like others, I often lament the way today’s curriculum pushes children into a requirement to produce technically perfect work at such a young age. The race towards Year 6 targets risks stifling creativity and turning writing into a tick-box exercise, rushing children through the foundations. I was pushing forty before I wrote my first book; I simply didn’t have the skills or the experience before then. Learning, after all, is lifelong. I am a hobbyist writer, and I’d encourage anyone with a story inside them to have a go. It might just change your life too, and even if it doesn’t, the creative flow feels pretty good.
Rock the World is available now as a paperback and ebook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rock-World-Keith-Campion/dp/1836284101
If you would like to find out more about Keith, you can find him on X: @keith_campion
