The Fire Eaters

Story

1962, the Cuban Missile crisis threatens and Bobby Burns starts grammar school. His father is ill and McNulty, the mysterious fire eater he first met under the bridges in Newcastle, has found his way to town. That autumn everything is strange and different and the Cuban Missile crisis hangs over it all.

Why we chose it

David Almond is a powerful storyteller. The Fire Eaters, like many of his stories, seamlessly mixes the real and the imaginary and brings to vivid life a place and a moment in time.

Where it came from

David Almond grew up in a small town on the River Tyne and the places and events of his childhood are woven into many of his stories. He writes about the north east and about the ghosts of a long gone time. In The Fire Easters the Sphink family are sea coalers who bring coal from the sea. Kit’s Wilderness is set in abandoned pits where the ghosts of child miners are glimpsed and Heaven Eyes in derelict warehouses. In The Story of Ella Grey the teenagers gather at the Ouseburn near Seven Stories. Almond put his own unhappy grammar school year into The Fire Eaters. McNulty came from an escaplogist who used to fascinate him as a boy. He wrote The Fire Eaters at the time of the Iraq crisis which he found took him back to living through the Cuban missile crisis.

Associated stories

David Almond has written a number of books for children and young adults including Skellig , The Savage, Clay, My Dad’s a Birdman, Harry Miller’s Run, My Name is Mina , The Story of Ella Grey, Jackdaw Summer. He has also published Half a Creature From the Sea and Counting Stars, two anthologies of stories about his childhood, growing up in Felling on Tyne, mixing he says ‘memory and dream, the real and the imagined.’ They are a beautiful evocation of a past time.