I’ve missed a couple fo days beause we’ve been away so I
have some making up to do. I’m not going to lie and say that I did this on the
right day. I admit I’m a couple of days late but at this stage I have the rest
of the month to make up. I probably won’t till next weekend, because I’m not
sure what time I’ll be home every day. I took my laptop to work to do stuff at
lunchtime on Friday but it didn’t happen. Oddly I felt insecure about doing it.
I intended to spend an hour doing my own thing but it didn’t seem to work.
Maybe I’ll try again this week. I just need to find somewhere that I can sit on
my own without anyone to interrupt me, but I have no idea where that could be.
I thought about the car, but it seems rude somehow.
Anyhow, I have some writing to do to keep up to date – or more
accurately to catch up with where I should be.
I guess I’ll have to start somewhere. I was going to talk about my
childhood and how I got into this word smith thing in the first place.
I was very young when my parents first decided to teach me
to read. I must have been about three because it was a long time before I
started school. My Dad thought that reading was important. He read every day.
His job was sedentary and most of the time he didn’t actually do much. He had
to be at his post in case something happened, but for huge parts of his eight
hour shifts it didn’.t. So he read. Sometimes it was a novel. Sometimes he read
things he’d read before. Captain Blood was a favourite and he probably read it
twenty or thirty times that I knew of, not to mention others before I was born.
It was one of his favourite films too, with Errol Flynn in the title role.
He was fond of historic navel stuff too, but he also read
classics. He felt he’d missed out at school. He was forced to leave at 14 and
went to work on te land. His family weren’t too bothered about learning an were
more bothered about earning a living and making sure everyone was fed. Probably
to do with their backgrounds. No-one in my history has been rich. I guess I don’t
fully understand the need to earn all the time. I’ve always had a reasonable
amount of money in the bank. We had to watch what we were spending from time to
time but we were never really poor. We always ate well, if not excessively. (Even
though we’ve all quite big!) We went places, we did things, and we were
surrounded by books.
There was a monthly magazine called Argosy that we had
delivered regularly. It had short stories by well known and lesser known authors.
It was paperback so nobody was too worried about damaging it, and piles of them
were kept on the side of the bath where mother could read them while she soaked
for hours on end, avoiding the films that Dad used to watch. Captain Blood wasn’t
one of her favourites. Of course, just because books were all around me didn’t
mean that I could read them instinctively. I was taught to read, ot with
children’s books, but with what was around me. For example, my parents were
avid crossworders. Some of my earliest memories are of Dad reading the clues: “Is
it made straight for the hive? Seven letters, ends in e.” It’s beeline, of course, and I can remember
early on asking why the answers were what my parents wrote in to the grid.
I can remember
sitting with my dad while he read out each clue, running his finger below the
words as I watched. Eventually he started asking me to read the words to him.
It was a faltering start but I made progress. So I learned some very strange words very
early on. I mean, have you read crossword clues? They make no sense in a conventional way. So I
had to be able to work out the actual words. There are no hints within a
crossword clue about what the next word will be.
For very long words Dad taught me how to break down each one
into smaller components so I could say them out loud. I probably had no idea
what the words meant. Such as convalescence, for example. I could break it down
into con val es cence and say it to me Dad and he’d tell me I had it right. And
then he’d explain to me what the word meant. But mother would work out the
answer to the clue and then we’d go through why it was so.
That’s how I had such a huge vocabulary by the time I
started school. I can remember the first day, being asked to read a list of
words to my teacher. Far from Janet and John, I had lots of very long words at
my fingertips. Did I know what any of them meant? No. But I could read them and
pronounce them, so it was decided that I had a reading age of about 10. And by
the time I left primary school at the ripe old age of 10 they said it was 16
(which was as far as the measurements go. That just meant ‘grown up’.
I’ve gone off track a bit here. I’m supposed to be talking
about my childhood writing, it’s just that reading came first. I had two
primary schools, and I don’t remember much about the first one. I can picture
it and I know where I had to walk to get there, but there’s not much about my
life there that’s stuck i my mind. The second one, though, that’s different. I
had some corking teachers who decided to support my skills, rather than just
record them.
We were taught all kinds of complicated things under simple
headings. Under the guise of ‘how things began’ my vocabulary grew even further
as words like Ordovician and trilobite were added to it. As part of ‘seashore
life’ I learned Laminaria saccharina and Patella vulgata. (That’s a sort of
seaweed, and the common limpet, if you want to know.) It soon became obvious to my teachers that I
had skills in English, both reading and writing. A wonderful, inspiring teacher
called Mr Childs encouraged us to take part in writing contests and I can
remember one that was run by the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury. I wrote a
story about a chocolate bar that didn’t want to be eaten, so it ran away. It
had a very bad time of things as a result and ended up cold, wet and miserable
after being swept through a storm drain. In the process its wrapper fell off
and it was depressed and lonely when a dog came along and ate it, so it
realised its true destiny.
Of course I’ve learned since then that the dog would have
been very ill as a result, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid. It seemed
like a good tale, and the Cadbury judges must have agreed because I won a first
prize certificate and a huge tin of chocolate things. I was told I was
imaginative. These days they call it creative, but I’m not sure what to call
it. I suspect I just like iving in a world where everything eventually works
out for the best. I’ve always thought my
version of the world is better than the real one. In fact I still have an active fantasy life. I
sometimes see people walking past me and create whole back stories for them to
suit what they’re wearing, how they walk, what they are carrying. I imagine
where they are going and what they plan to do. I create whole stories in my
head about their lives and what they do. The worse I feel the more creative I
am about their stories. It’s amazingly cheering.
Then there was Mister Wilson. He was the headmaster and he was a great
believer in expanding children’s horizons. He had a theory that, if you’d
learned to walk, talk, interact with people and generally live by the time you’ve
five why should you slow down the rate of learning? So he felt that kids should
hear the classics, and try to understand what they were about and try to
understand where the story was going. If you hear the start of a story you
should be able to predict where the tale is going. Or alternatively you can
create a whole new direction for it and make something totally different
happen. So he would read us the first half of something then make us write our
own ending for it, in the right style, even if it was poetry.
I remember one day he read us the first half of the poem Lochinvar.
“Oh young Lochinvar is come out of the west, through all the wide nation his
steed was the best” or something like that. The tale is a proper story of
romance and heroism in which Lochinvar eventually rescues his love from an
imminent marriage to the wrong man. Sure enough, I wrote the correct ending
because, like I said, I always want the world to have a happy ending! So Lochinvar gets to ride away on his fine
steed with his lady love.
So my creative writing was encouraged early. My teachers
wanted us to be imaginative and to write as often as possible. And I was happy
to take part in it. By the age of 10 (which is when I moved on to secondary
school ) I was recognised as being ahead of my school pals in writing,
spelling, reading, using words. I was already a writer and already wanting to
do it for a living when I grew up. At
the age of 10 that was how life seemed to be going. I knew that words were my
friends and I already felt that they would do what I wanted if I asked them.
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