In September we played a shoot ‘em up spelling game with difficult words and it reminded me of David Almond’s use of misspelling in 
‘The Savage’. Here’s a little bit – I loved the book – lots of pictures too! It raises the question about whether spelling matters. Almond manages to ensure that it is helpful in building a relationship between the reader and writer. Normally the assumption is that spelling mistakes get in the way of the reader making sense of the text. As the LINC report puts it “It is salutary to be aware of how strongly we can as readers (and teachers) be put off a piece of writing by misspellings. This suggests a readiness to judge at a surface level only. We must remember that our job as teachers is to foster and develop the whole of a pupil’s competence as a writer, not just ability as a speller…”
‘…You won’t believe this but it’s true. I wrote a story called ‘The Savage’ about a savage kid that lived under the ruined chapel in Burgess Woods, and the kid came to life in the real world.
I wrote it soon after my dad died. There was a counsellor at school called Mrs Molloy, that kep taking me out of lessons and telling me to write my thoughts and feelings down. She said she wanted me to explore my grief and ’start to move forward’. I did try for a while, but it just seemed stupid, and it made me feel worse, so one day I ripped up all that stuff about myself, got an old notebook and started scribbling ‘The Savage’. Here’s the first bit of it, and I know the spelling isn’t brilliant but I was younger then.
There was a wild kid living in Burgess Woods, I wrote . He had no family and he had no pals and he didn’t know where he come from and he culdn’t talk and he lived on beries and roots and rabbits and stuff like old pies that he pinched from the bins at the back of Greenacres Rest Home. He lived in a cave under the rooined chapel. His wepons were old kitchen nives and forks and an ax that he nicked from Franky Finigin’s alotment.
If anybody ever seen him he chased them and cort them and killed them and ate them and chucked their bones down an aynshent pit shaft.
He was savage.
He was truely wild.
Once I started writing the story, it was like I couldn’t stop, which was strange for me. I’d never been one for stories. I couldn’t stand all that stuff about wizards and fairies and ‘once upon a time’ and ‘they all lived happily ever after’. That’s not what life’s like. Me, I wanted blood and guts and adventures, so that’s what I wrote. I set it all in our little town of Saltwell. I didn’t show ‘The Savage’ to Mrs Molloy. I didn’t show it to anybody. It was my kind of story, just for myself…’
David Almond, “The Savage”, (2008), Walker Books, London, pp7-12
