Reading,Writing But No Rithmetic

We’re supposed to go to school to learn the 3Rs, but only two of them ever really appealed to me. Reading and writing. Words. I loved words. I did not love numbers and they didn’t like me.

I now have a granddaughter who struggles with Maths and my heart goes out to her, because, like me she was an early, fluent reader and she loves it when I read to her, or more often these days, she reads to me.

I was born and brought up in a small town in rural Suffolk. We lived in a semi-detached house that my grandfather had built during the Second World War. This meant that when my dad came home after six years with the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy, he and my mum could move into this brand new house, with my grandparents next door. That was the life that I knew when I was born at the end of1947.

The Library at the Bottom of My Road

For me, the best thing about our house in Church Walk was a small library which was at the back of the Bunbury Rooms - a sort of community hall. Church Walk was a cul de sac, so there were few cars, which meant that my mum allowed me to walk on my own a couple of hundred yards down the lane to the library to get my weekly choice of books, even on winter nights and in the dark. I can remember the smell of that little library until this day. A bit musty, a bit dusty. Spongy wooden floorboards with a very small selection of children' s books, but there was always something I could take out with my library card and run home with, delighted by the prospect of a new adventure I could discover as soon as I was snuggled down in bed.

As a child, I read every night before sleep, a habit that I keep to this day. I often wonder how many books I have read in my seven decades of life. Several thousand for sure, and some feel like old friends because I have returned to them more than once, sometimes separated by many years.

Books and Authors that I Love.

Where to start to tell you the books and authors that I love? I guess I have to start with the one that shook me to my core when I was about sixteen years old. It was the first book that made me understand something essential about reading a brilliant book. There will be escapism. There will be the evocation of another world, or maybe another time and there will be a protagonist to care about, and, possibly, a villain to loathe. The book may also represent an intellectual challenge and be thought-provoking. In my earth-shattering book, there were all those elements as well as a political awakening, combined with a sad and doomed love story. Poor old Winston Smith. Poor Julia.

Because yes, George Orwell’s 1984 taught me all those lessons about the power of a great work of fiction. Since then there have been many, many more such moments. British writers, Irish writers, American writers and French ones (I speak and read French). And, once I find a compelling author, I want to read everything they have done and wait with baited breath for the next creative work their fertile brains have created. I remember discovering Ian MacEwan and Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing (a very deserved winner of the Nobel prize for literature). Fay Weldon and, later, Kate Atkinson and Don Delilo and Anne Tyler, Colm Toibin and Sebatian Barry, William Boyd, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson and John Boyne. The list goes on and on. The pleasure goes on and on.

My Earliest Writing

And what about writing? Early in my life - in my twenties - I started to record my lived experience in diaries and journals. A week at a health spa, won in a competition run by Cosmopolitan in 1973, became a journal which is hilarious to re-read now. I was twenty-five, married three years and spent the whole week dodging an over-sexed dodgy dentist! Predatory men have always been a menace…. Much later, when my special granddaughter India was born in January 2012, I recorded every day of her first ten months of life in hospital - most of it in intensive care. It now makes for heart-breaking reading, although, happily, against all the odds, India survived and is now a delightful fourteen year old who lights up all our lives.

Starting A Weekly Blog.

India’s difficult first year led to my starting an online makeup and skincare brand, another event I recorded in a journal, and that led me to writing a weekly blog. I’ve now written over six hundred blogs and have an amazing and very dedicated following of regular readers, mostly our customers, although some just come for the blog. No-one tells me what to write and I have no plan from one week to the next. I just wait for inspiration to strike on a Monday morning. And it always does! Because there is always something that I want to explore, research or opine about. If you are interested in finding out more, just click here: https://www.lookfabulousforever.com/blog

Daring to Write A Novel

And now a novel! Again, no great plan, nor great overarching scheme for world literary domination (as if). Just a fantastic story buzzing around in my head for a couple of years. Characters I fell in love with and cared about and scenes I could imagine these characters living through. And so, one morning last year I sat down and started to write ‘Like A Bird Without A Song.’ It poured out of me and gradually took shape. Then I submitted it to professional scrutiny and this wonderful woman encouraged me to continue, whilst showing me all the ways that my story needed to be better. So I cut it in half, wrote a second part and then wrote a third draft, and then revised it  over and over and again, until it became the novel that it is today. 

What have I learned to take forward into Book Two (already planned and partly written)? So much! How to ‘show’ rather than tell. How to create characters that have depth and about whom we might care. Dialogue that rings true and how to increase that vital sense of wanting to keep turning the page to find out what happens to these people. My best moment in terms of reader response probably came from a very good childhood friend (she also remembers the Bunbury Rooms Library), who WhatsApped me as she finished the book to say that she was bereft that it has ended because she so loved being in the world of the characters that I had created. I nearly cried with relief. I had written something that another person had read with pleasure and enjoyment. A book that they hadn’t wanted to end.

I have come late to this craft, but there is a part of me which believes that I could not have written this book at an earlier age. Maybe I tell myself that as consolation for the fact that I may have loved the life of an author if that had been my chosen path fifty years ago. However, I don’t believe in those kinds of regrets. I have loved my working life, apart from the first four years I spent as a (very lacklustre) primary school teacher. It has taught me so much, earned me a very healthy living and emboldened me to be both risk-taking and entrepreneurial. What’s not to like?

Now I have the opportunity to share a work of pure fiction and imagination with the rest of the world. Well, if not the world, at the very least those people who decide to read my story. I offer it to you all with my love. Because it is a love story and one that I have loved every second of writing. My fervent wish is that you will love it too.

Click here to order your copy of my new book 'A Bird Without A Song' on Amazon.

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