On Saturday 13 September, Roundfire novelist (On the Far Side, There’s a Boy) Paula Coston (her real name is Paula Iley) presented to a packed lecture theatre audience in Oxford on her long-hidden Tolkien link. The occasion was the 38th annual international Tolkien conference (‘Oxonmoot’), held for the 10,000-strong Tolkien Society at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. This was the first time that Paula had spoken in public about her relationship with the Father of Fantasy, although a brief account was published in the August issue of Writing magazine. As she explained in Q & A at the end of her talk, ‘I think I’ve left it so long to speak partly because it wasn’t until my late thirties that I was able fully to process the feedback that J.R.R. gave me on my writings, and it’s only been since I’ve had success in fiction that I feel I can celebrate the potency of our connection; also, I chose this occasion – sponsored by this illustrious Society - as the most fitting tribute!’

Coston described to a fascinated audience how her maternal grandparents occupied first the Tolkiens’ house-to-be, then the house nextdoor, in Headington, Oxford. As a result, she visited the Tolkiens sometimes with her family for tea. Even aged 3-6, she was starstruck; but it was only once her own family had moved away from Oxford, from 1965 onwards, that she realised she had a link to a literary star who was now rising into the stratosphere. She began writing to him, enclosing her puerile pennings – and, to her astonishment and gratitude (looking back from mature adulthood!), he wrote back. He critiqued her infantile poems in minute detail, at the same time sharing with Coston his trials and tribulations with being pirated; his own grapplings with language, especially as a child; and his musings on the difficulty of obeying – and yet aspiring to transgress – the literary ‘rules’.

Paula’s listeners were treated to slides of each letter in turn, from which she read. Despite her gaining a place at Oxford to read English and a thrilling reunion in 1973 in JRR’s College rooms, tragically he died later that very year. Paula then explored the various spooky mirrorings and symmetries between Tolkien’s work and her own, superficially very different, novel, just out, and the story of its inception. For one thing, On the Far Side, There’s a Boy is also about the link through letters of an adult and a child – and explores a fantastical reality through a quest!

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