This story begins in a fever. It was the spring of 2021 and I’d contracted my first bout of Covid. Confined to bed, I turned to the pile of books that had been staring at me guiltily for weeks, if not months. The one I pulled out was a soon-to-be released noir-ish thriller called The Passenger. It was set in the Germany of the 1930s, following a man on the run from the Nazi authorities, hoping to make his escape by hopping on and off trains crisscrossing the country. As the Gestapo net around him tightens, he plunges into paranoia and breakdown. Perhaps the coronavirus intensified the experience, but I was gripped. I tweeted that it was part Franz Kafka, part John Buchan and completely riveting.
But there was a twist. This was not a new book, but one written nearly a century earlier. The author was Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, just 23 years old when his novel was published in 1938 and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. In 1935, he had made his way across Europe to reach Britain, where he was promptly classified as an “enemy alien” and interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. He was held with more than a thousand other émigrés, among them a remarkable number of artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals on what Simon Parkin has called the island of extraordinary captives.
Eventually the British authorities decided that some of these enemy aliens should be shipped to Australia. After a hellish journey, Boschwitz was held in another detention camp, this time in New South Wales. Finally, in 1942, he was reclassified – now deemed to be a “friendly alien”– and allowed to return to Britain. He climbed on board a ship, the MV Abosso, and set sail for what he hoped would be the start of a new life. He was 27.
But the Abosso was spotted by a German U-boat and torpedoed. The ship sank, killing 362 of those on board, young, luckless Boschwitz among them. Lost with him was his revised manuscript of The Passenger which, he felt sure, would have made an even better book.
But there was another text he had left behind, a story for children that he had dreamed up while held on the Isle of Man. Less than 3,000 words long, it was called King Winter’s Birthday: A Fairy Tale. The original, handwritten manuscript, complete with drawings added by Ulrich’s mother, had lain undisturbed in a New York archive for eight long decades.
I learned all this from Adam Freudenheim of Pushkin Press, the publisher who had so successfully resurrected The Passenger, turning it into a belated international bestseller. I had become something of a champion of that novel and now he had an unusual proposal to make. Would I take a look at Boschwitz’s forgotten fairytale and see if it could be brought to a contemporary audience? Might I, a political columnist and sometime writer of thrillers, relish the challenge of writing for children? The answers were yes and yes.
I read Freudenheim’s translation from the German and my first instinct was that, while I couldn’t exactly adapt the story, I could certainly take inspiration from it. Indeed, the conceit at the core of Boschwitz’s tale – Winter summoning the other seasons, his siblings, to celebrate his birthday – had prompted an idea the instant I read it.
Two decisions, apparently contradictory, came to me just as quickly. First, I realised that this story would need to be aimed at children younger than those Boschwitz had seemed to have in mind. Older children might have accepted the idiom of a fairytale – kings and palaces and the like – in the 1940s, but I suspected their counterparts today would be far less patient.
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At the same time, I had an animating thought for the story that might, at first blush, appear an unlikely theme for the youngest readers. Yes, the structure of my King Winter’s Birthday is straightforward and the words are simple, but the plot turns on a seemingly demanding concept: the need to put right a world that has lost its natural balance.
Some might think that too much for a child to take on, but I remembered from my own experience as a parent and, many decades ago, in informal education, that young children are often able to grasp the largest ideas. Indeed, when it comes to philosophical questions that older minds shy away from – why are we here? What happens when we are gone? How do I know this table is real? – there is a refreshing openness, perhaps born of lack of embarrassment, among the very young.
There is, too, more of me in this short book than I anticipated. No spoilers, but it is a story about siblings and the ache that comes to those who can no longer be with a much-loved brother or sister, who can only remember them instead. I am in that position myself and I confess I did not expect to find expression for that feeling in a debut title for children. Still, that is what happened.
The result is a book that is more beautiful than I ever guessed it could be, thanks to the magnificent illustrations of Emily Sutton. Between us I hope we have done justice to the imaginings of that young man, a boy really, who never stopped running – who was cut down in the spring of his life and who never knew its summer, autumn or winter.
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King Winter’s Birthday by Jonathan Freedland and Emily Sutton is published by Pushkin (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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