Philip Pullman: His dark materials

He is regarded by his fans as the greatest storyteller of his age, but there is one tale that Philip Pullman has always preferred not to learn, let alone tell. It is the truth about the death of his father, a man he was taught to regard as a pilot, a patriot and a hero.

The young boy was seven years old when Flight Lieutenant Alfred Pullman of the RAF died in his aircraft in Kenya, in February 1954. Soon afterwards, he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. "My brother, my mother and I went to Buckingham Palace for the investiture," Pullman told me. "I have never fully understood why he got the medal. As far as I can make out, it was an accident. His plane crashed. But I don't know..."

I do. After we met, I went away and discovered the true story, which was not pleasant. It would prove hard for him to hear. But at the time, chatting at a children's workshop on the South Bank in London, I simply wondered why an author of novels so rich in detail and stuffed with research would be so vague about something so personal.

It is not a side issue: adventurers, heroes and absent fathers appear in almost everything he writes. Sally's dad drowns in Pullman's first hit, The Ruby in the Smoke. The explorer Lord Asriel strides through the multimillion-selling trilogy His Dark Materials. The airman Lee Scoresby is the hero of the most recent book, Once Upon a Time in the North.

The themes emerge again in the strip he has just devised for a new comic, The DFC. The first weekly publication of its kind in 25 years, this is an attempt to recapture and remake the spirit of the great comics of the Fifties for a new generation. The first edition will reach subscribers this week, and its main attraction will be Pullman's "Adventures of John Blake". Drawn by the illustrator John Aggs in a style inspired by Japanese manga, it is about a boy who travels the oceans of the world on a schooner shrouded in a mysterious sea fog. He appears to be an orphan. "It is disconcerting," Pullman said, half-seriously, "to realise that one is writing the same story again and again."

The author did not look grand or wealthy that day by the Thames. In his crumpled linen jacket and red shirt, he looked like the mildly eccentric English teacher he once was, with bubble patterns on his socks and red laces in his suede desert boots. Pullman had been charming to my 10-year-old son, listening carefully and taking seriously the questions of a boy who was thrilled to meet him.

But when the subject of his own father arose he frowned, and it was suddenly like being in the headmaster's study. "He was a father I never really knew," he said. "He was never at home. He was always off flying. My father, to me, was a figure of glamour and mystery and absence; his presence was more a matter of the smell of beer and cigarettes than anything else."

Wasn't it strange that the medal was called the DFC, and so is the new comic? "Just coincidence," he insisted. The comic is being published by his editor and friend David Fickling, who says the title is deliberately ambiguous and not named after himself. This is exactly the sort of odd happenstance that would intrigue Lyra, the young heroine of His Dark Materials, the only franchise to come close to rivalling Harry Potter in selling power (Pullman far outranks J K Rowling in literary acclaim, however, having become the first children's author to win the overall Whitbread Prize). What would Lyra do? She would go home puzzled but eventually discover, as I did, an entry in The London Gazette of 1954 that revealed what really happened to Flt Lt Pullman.

"He was training pilots, I think," his son said. Not so, according to the Gazette, which carried the official RAF news of the day. It said that the medal was given for "gallant and distinguished service" during the Mau Mau uprising. "The main task of the Harvards [the squadron of planes led by his father] has been bombing and machine-gunning Mau Mau and their hideouts in densely wooded and difficult country." This included "diving steeply into the gorges of [various] rivers, often in conditions of low cloud and driving rain".

Testing conditions, yes, but not much opposition from the enemy. Very few of the Mau Mau had guns that could land a blow on an aircraft. Most were hiding in those forests. This was surely something approaching a war crime. Philip Pullman knew nothing of this, he insisted after being sent the citation. But he replied by email: "Quite clearly, the Mau Mau he was bombing and machine-gunning from the air did not have the weapons to respond in kind." There was more. "Given what we now know about British behaviour during the insurgency, my father probably doesn't come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought."

This was a serious challenge to his childhood memory. "It's clear that he was not shot down in action, which was what I believed when I was told about his death – and for a long time afterwards. What can a seven-year-old boy know? How can he see the truth about complicated adult far-off things? To that boy he was a hero, steeped in glamour, killed in action defending his country."

Why had the author never tried to find out more for himself? "I think that with part of my mind I haven't really wanted too full a knowledge," he said, "and perhaps I have deliberately avoided looking this sort of thing up; but the time for that has passed."

Pullman was born in Norwich, but his early years were spent following his father to various postings around the world. It was on a ship to South Africa in 1951 that he first learned to read, a moment that opened up all the possibilities to come and that he recalled in detail. He was alone, aged five, with a book he couldn't read. He knew the story off by heart, though: his mother had told him "how the camel got his hump" many times before bed. So the small boy muttered the words to himself, trying to match them to the shapes. Slowly, on that ship, it happened: the magic began. "Those squiggly black things on the page became transparent and I could see through them, to see what they meant." Even after 57 years, the memory made Pullman grin. "Gradually, I could read. I remember that sensation to this day."

His mother married again just a year after his father died. It was another RAF man. The scene was set for the entrance of a wicked stepfather, but it didn't turn out that way. "He was very good to my brother and me. They went on to have children of their own. It was a mixed-up family, but a very happy one."

After a spell in Australia, which left an enduring mark on his accent, Pullman was educated in London and Harlech, Wales. He still sends copies of his books to his old English teacher Enid Jones. After taking a third-class degree at Oxford, he worked as a teacher and married Judith Speller in 1970. He and Jude are still together. They have two sons, who are now grown up.

Although Pullman published his first book in 1972, it was 14 years more before the success of The Ruby in the Smoke allowed him to become a full-time author. "I have always written what I wanted to write," he said. "I have never considered the audience for one second. Ever. It's none of their business what I write! Before publication, I am a despot." That sounded like the sort of thing only a massively successful writer would say. "Not so! I was saying that, feeling that, working like that, 30 years ago, when I wasn't successful."

It was not until 1996 that Northern Lights started his ascent to superstardom. Recently filmed as The Golden Compass, it was the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, which has now been performed in its entirety at the National Theatre.

The story of the young Will and Lyra, who move between worlds, meet armoured bears and participate in the collapse of an authoritarian belief system, His Dark Materials provoked fury among some people of faith. The Catholic Herald said it was "fit only for the bonfire". But others loved it: the Archbishop of Canterbury said it should be used in religious education lessons. "The incendiary thing is religion plus politics," said Pullman. "If religion is only concerned with helping children not be afraid of the dark and consoling those who have lost a relative, or whatever, then it is, on the whole, beneficial. Though not," he paused for effect, "scientifically true. But when it has the power to tell us how we should dress, what we should eat, how we should think and read and behave, then it is very dangerous. That is what I am criticising."

Lately, he has also used his fame to criticise "the educational dead end into which the Government is herding the majority of children in this country". As we spoke, 11-year-olds were sitting their SATs tests. "Everything they do is regulated, tabulated and measured," he said, anger sharpening his pronunciation. "The results are recorded in digital form so the skills can be ranked. Anything that can't be fitted into this is deemed unimportant. What a terrible cast of mind." Parents, teachers and educationalists had all spoken out, he said. "But the Government presses on, saying, 'No, you're all wrong.' Huh! It fills me with rage, really."

Aspiring Pullmans would collapse into bed after the classroom rather than start a novel, he feared. "I would be surprised if the next generation of children's writers came from the ranks of the teachers, because they just haven't got time to do it."

Videogames, iPods and DVDs had left us all "living in a neon-lit Dark Ages," he said. "We've lost oral communication. We're all isolated, atomised."

What is to be done? "Tell stories. To children. To each other." He remembered sitting around a fire on a school trip, "listening to a voice coming out of the dark. It is so entrancing. It goes right back to the dawn of history. A story will enchant and beguile and bewitch."

And challenge, if it is the true story of a father you thought was a hero, but who turns out to be far more complicated and flawed than that. Exactly the sort of story, in other words, that Philip Pullman has been writing all his life.

The works

Philip Pullman makes his graphic strip debut on Friday with 'John Blake' in new comic The DFC (www.thedfc.co.uk).

Most famous for the trilogy 'His Dark Materials', he has published novels and stories since 1972. The list so far:

THE HAUNTED STORM (1972)

GALATEA (1976)

COUNT KARLSTEIN (1982)

THE RUBY IN THE SMOKE (1985)

THE SHADOW IN THE NORTH (1986)

HOW TO BE COOL (1987)

SPRING-HEELED JACK (1989)

The Broken Bridge (1990)

THE TIGER IN THE WELL (1991)

The WHITE MERCEDES (1992)

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF ALADDIN AND THE ENCHANTED LAMP (1993)

THE TIN PRINCESS (1994)

THUNDERBOLT'S WAXWORK (1994)

CLOCKWORK (1995)

THE FIREWORK-MAKER'S

DAUGHTER (1995)

THE GAS-FITTER'S BALL (1995)

NORTHERN LIGHTS (1995) *

THE SUBTLE KNIFE (1997) *

MOSSYCOAT (1998)

THE BUTTERFLY TATTOO (1998)

I WAS A RAT! (1999)

THE AMBER SPYGLASS (2000) *

PUSS IN BOOTS (2000)

LYRA'S OXFORD (2003)

The SCARECROW AND HIS SERVANT (2004)

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE NORTH (2008)

* Part of his dark materials