I wasn’t a happy child but I wasn’t an unhappy child either. Once I could read I was free. I could go to libraries every day, often accompanied by my mother, and I saw reading as a way out from my immediate surroundings.
Soon I learned to cycle. Alone, I could explore the streets and fields of the countrified semi suburbs in which I grew up. It was a county called Kent which had been bombed to hell not long before I was born.
In those days parents were less police-like. They gave you a penny at the beginning of the day and didn’t expect to see you until the evening. I cycled all day, stopped where I wanted and talked to anyone who had a story for me. I am still like that.
The third element in my liberation was my discovery of my father’s book on how to type. My father himself had been a journalist and was writing fiction. His vigorous typing in his sexy shirt sleeves seemed very impressive.
One day he bought a little portable typewriter in a blue case of which he was incredibly proud. He swung it round and round, because it was light, and suddenly announced he was going to Vietnam to be a war correspondent like Hemingway or Norman Mailer.
I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I started to blindfold myself with my school tie and soon found I could write the right words in the right order without even looking.
It was exhilarating. I had been reading Crime and Punishment at the time, always a cheery go-to book for a young man, and I began to copy out pages from this great novel.
At school I had been a disaster, but now at last alone I found something that I could do. I never had the desire to write underwater stories, adventure stories or amazing stories involving giants, dwarfs, elves or mermaids.
I didn’t know much about those things, but I did know the people around me. And I guess that made me into something of a realist. One day, I called myself a writer.
And I found that it suited me like a good shirt, haircut or well cut trousers. It covered me like a cloak and I was keen for others to apply the word to me even though I hadn’t yet written anything.
After all, at school many words had already been applied to me, words like brownie, or Paki, or shit-face, so I found my own word, I stuck to it, and never let it go. It is still my word.
Excuse me for a moment, I must have an enema now.
The last time a medical digit entered my back side was a few years ago and as the nurse flipped me over she asked me; “How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?” I replied, “If I had indeed written Midnight’s Children, don’t you think I would have gone private?”
Enema is over now. Back to reality.
I have read many many good books on so-called creative writing, and there are more and more bad books coming out, sanctioned by the desperate times in which we live. People are so hard-up for work they believe they can make money from writing.
In my experience as a young man the one book that really helped me was by the American novelist Ray Bradbury. It is called Zen in the Art of Writing which attempts to free you from all the hopeless rules and conventions you may have learned at school.
He taught me how not to be careful, he taught me how not to care, he taught me how not to give a shit for what other people thought. Not, of course, that one should not listen to other people, which I do.
That’s how it all began. And although I am lying paralised on a hospital gurney with my arse in the air and a long rubber tube sticking out my jacksee, it is where I am still going.
That’s all the good news for tonight folks. Have a drink up for me.
It's great that you found that word (writer) for yourself so early in life. I've come to believe that certain words define and renew us, if we love them enough and don't let them go! Perhaps they even fight against certain other words and ideas that are thrown towards us.
Midnights Children enema story. You made me laugh out loud! Sending lots of love x
These are brilliant. Inspirational. Human.
Much love to you.
It's great that you found that word (writer) for yourself so early in life. I've come to believe that certain words define and renew us, if we love them enough and don't let them go! Perhaps they even fight against certain other words and ideas that are thrown towards us.
Brilliant response. 🥇