Living with Isla and the Part stories

Isla Goodchild has been with me since early-2011 when I joined the Beeston WEA writing class, then led by Mike Wareham. He was a good tutor. I joined the class because I was looking for ideas as to how I might write a memoir. The local historian in me was already well aware of reminiscence writing, life story telling and autobiographies, having read hundreds over the twenty odd years Susan, my wife, and I published Local History Magazine. What I hadn't expected Mike to do was divert me, by introducing me to short story writing and its challenges.

Quite early on, Isla Goodchild came into my life. I knew from the off who she was — a amalgam of people and events, men and women, personal, family, work, politics. You name it, she was it. I could see her, hear her, feel her and she has been part of me ever since. Early on Mike asked the class to write in a gender not our own and there was Isla, in my head, waving, 'I'm here, I'm here'.

I love her. I have been writing and parking stories about her ever since. I have probably said before that I am more interested in how words tumble onto the page and how we remember the past, how we prioritise what we write, how easily we are distracted and diverted. Story telling is not a straight line, so why should we expect a life story to be a chronology of dates and events. It is not how we remember things.

Our heads harbour the lives we think we have lead, the ones we wanted to lead or could have had, and when we speak of them those we love and others are there waiting to correct us.

When I first met Isla in 2011 she came, it seemed at the time, out of nowhere, prompted by Mike Wareham. I quickly realised she has always been part me and her life is mine and those of others I have connected to, some fleetingly, whilst others will be with me I until the day I die.

Life is a collection of parts and this fact is enough to explain why I have began to post my Part stories. 

Remember as we write?

What comes first, the thought or the word?

It could of course be an image or something we hear. I sometimes hear a story in my head which prompts me to write and as I write the story changes. I have, on occasions, watched my hand write, then read the words. I have had 'out of body' moments for as long as I can remember. Watching myself. And since my mother died in 2006 I have thought myself to be her a few times, not that we were ever close, given that I rarely lived with her.

Published fiction is 'sanitised' fiction insomuch as what the author writes is picked over by the publisher's editor and comes out in a form which may be different in terms of plot and wording. What the author writes and what the reader gets are two different things. Neither should we forget how many times the author re-works his or her text before it is handed to the editor. All writers do it, self-edit.

Should we be afraid of what we write? Perhaps. I am glad that I have come to fiction writing through my interest in local history and life-story telling. I see the me in what I write, the good and bad, what I want the truth to be and what it is. 

Some years ago, a friend's mother was worried that she was showing signs of dementia. After a long chat we came to the conclusion that her mum was a seventy-something with too much unoccupied time and that she needed an interest. The solution turned out to be bread-making, so my friend bought her mum a bread machine. Within a week she had become the family baker and so she remained for next ten years or so. There was always something to talk about, orders to make, recipes to discuss. I was able to help because I introduced my step-father to soup making and bread-making when he was 71 and recovering from a heart attack. Not that he appeared to be in any danger of suffering from dementia  as his mornings were taken up by the Red Cross shop he managed in Eastbourne, then his afternoons were spent in the kitchen, shopping or help my sister in Hastings look after her garden. My mother watched and read. Both made it into their mid-eighties without any hint of dementia.

My friend's mum finally succumbed to dementia and my friend said to me "I can tell you the moment I knew the worst and what made it worse was that Mum knew too". It was when she forgot something and no longer knew that she forgot things. It seems as good a description of dementia as any others I have heard or read.

You may wonder what all this has to do with writing? I believe that how we write is an exercise in how we remember. Nothing comes from nowhere. I begin to write and unlock memories of sorts, but if or when I forget how to write that is when I will be locked in my head, unable to communicate.

We articulate our thoughts with words, except when we cry or scream or act in some physical way. Even then we will return to words.

Perhaps all published fiction should be accompanied by an online copy of the author's original text. We may find we prefer the un-sanitised version, but then what would editors and publishers do to re-order the world?

Memories of trollies and Joy - memoir or poem?

I wrote this memoir cum poem prose style for a WEA Beeston writing class I attended from 2011 until the end of 2013 in response to an exercise we were set by our tutor. It is based on memories. I did think of it until recently as a poem, now I'm not so sure. I admit to liking it, for having been inspired to write it, and for the memories it brings back.

Re-reading it after a long time, I am struck by what I now remember of the seventeen year old I then was. Joy knew me better than I knew myself and I never said. 'Awe' best describes how I felt.

I liked girls, but I held back, always waiting for permission. My distant cousin Caroline gave me permission, but family warned us off and, aged 16 and 15, we obeyed. She died of breast cancer aged just 38. We were close to the end and she used to come and stay with me and Susan after her marriage ended.

An early girlfriend told me I was 'undemonstrative' and I remember going home and looking the word up in my beloved Words dictionary.

I let another girl go for fear of being overwhelmed by my feelings for her. She didn't understand and life moved on. She went to university in Reading. Her name was Anne and she was a vicar's daughter. I wonder more with the passing of years what became of her, her life.

I was thirty-one before I got the permission I wanted, to be me, and I fell in love in a moment and made it the subject of my first poem, written a couple of days after Christmas 2010, inspired by my grand-daughters. Again, it is a memoir of sorts.

I have just helped a friend publish a collection of poems, which I will blog about on my beestonweek blog next week. They are full of memories and passion and in them I recognise something of myself.

Right now though, I leave it for you to decide, is this memoir or poem?

Memories of trollies and Joy

Another day done

And over the road

I stand at the bus stop

With four in front

It's damp and I'm cold.

I wrap a scarf around my face,

To keep the sulphur out,

Every 3 to 4 minutes they come

Along the Harrow Road from

Paddington Green and Kensal Rise.

Then thru the February fog

Still a distance away

Pinheads of light, an indistinct shape 

Enveloped in winter's dark folds

A trolleybus comes.

Embryo like, it clings to its wires

Smog yellow, dirty red

Then a surprise, it's three in a line

As they come to the Jubilee Clock

A 664 for Cricklewood, then mine…

A 662 that's Sudbury bound

5:45 and it's heaving

'Room on top. Two upstairs'

'Don't hang about'

'And you, son, inside'.

Two regulars look and nod

I see Joy in the front wedged tight

She turns and gives a little wave

Maybe a chat when we get off

I can't wait for our Wembley stop.

She's engaged

I wish it was me

We always talk

We met on the trolley

Older than me, I love her to bits.

Wet windows inside, Pearl lights

Warm bodies, Narrow seats

Grey faces, Woollen coats

Baskets and bags, where voices

And silence share the same space.

Painfully slow we glide

On and off they get at every stop

Harlesden's rush hour crowds

Craven Park 'rumbles' ahead

And then Mr. Jones.

Every time the same

'How's Pop?…'

'Tell him he owes me a pint',

Then he takes a bench to himself

And I slide in with Joy.

Small talk, shared passions

Barham Park Library

Books and museums 

Past Stonebridge and Tokyngton Hill 

The trolleybus goes, unnoticed by us.

Above the rooftops to our right 

Wembley Stadium, all lit up tonight

We shudder to a halt

Roads and pavements overflow

A welded line of buses, cars and us.

Then an exodus above our heads 

And the Trolleybus sways

To the rock of the stairs

Joy. Heaven. Puts her hand on mine

'Time for tea I think… My treat'.

'Shall we get off and walk?'

Down the trolley and off the back

'You'll break your necks one day'

We hear the clippie shout

As holding hands we jump.

In a world of our own

Shrouded by vapours which cling

We could be any High Road couple

Past the Majestic and old Town Hall

We see Lyons still open for tea.

No one we know

Joy tells me her fiancé's away

Gone home to Sunderland

'Are you expected?…

If not, come home with me'.

'I'll phone' I say. 'Nanna won't mind'

Nothing happened

It never did

But those times were special

Joy, the trolleybuses and February.

A FOOTNOTE.

Twelve months later

The trolleybuses had gone

My Nanna was dead

And Joy was married

I was there for them all.

The day Joy married

Was the only time we kissed

She squeezed my hand and said

'Next time it will be you. I promise'

We never spoke again.

There was one last glimpse of Joy

Years later on the Bakerloo Line

Our carriages stopped, side by side

I saw the wave, then her smile

And she was gone. This time forever.

Robert Howard

26 March 2011.

V3.

Written as an exercise whilst going to

a WEA Beeston Branch writing class.

A bouquet of words

‘My earliest experience in art occurred at the Benjamin Rush public school,’ (Louis) Faurer remembers. ‘Miss Duncan, who seemed to float on a rose petal scent, having requested that numbers be written on paper with lead pencil, was shocked when my sheet yielded a drawing of a locomotive.’ He also submitted drawings to Walt Disney aged 13, who invited him out to California. ‘It seemed unreachable and so I didn’t go,’ he said

Louis Faurer (1916–2001) - New York photographer’. Click on The Guardian, 13 October 2016 to see photographic essay of his work.

The text above is the caption to image no.3 and what jumped out were the words 'Miss Duncan, who seemed to float on rose petal scent'. I lost the 'a' without noticing at first, yet it conjured up a powerful image in my head, not at all related to the photograph itself:

Photograph © Louis Faurer estate, courtesy of Deborah Bell and Howard Greenberg Gallery. An exhibition of Faurer's work is at Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, until 18 December 2016.

The description of Miss Duncan reminded me of my first ever 'poem' written just after Christmas 2010, which I called 'Unknown Certainty'. The first four lines were:

Grey blue eyes and rowan hair

Smell of cloves and apple pie

To all the world another woman

To me a perfect vision

The poem is my account of my first evening with Susan. I ramble on with another four verses before ending:

There is no going back

The past's undone

The future beckons

Unknown certainty awaits.

Susan is not alone in this respect and Miss Duncan reminds me of this. All the stories we tell or we write come from somewhere and, I suspect, smell is more important than we realise. 

'A bouquet of words' sounds like an original thought, but it isn't. Typing the words into the web, I came up with this link to a blog post by a writer called Sean Platt:

http://writetodone.com/how-to-build-a-perfect-bouquet-of-words/

Well worth reading if you have any doubts about yourself as a writer. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

'Each of us has what it takes to be a better writer.  It is already inside us, waiting for its salutation. For some, this means discarding the rules that the gatekeepers have handed down, and listening to the quiet whisper of our instinct.  Only we know how we view the world, and it is us who best understand how to make our thoughts sing...

When we speak through our heart, our fingers dance across the keyboard or glide across the page, then we can make every post as pretty as a bouquet, each word placed as perfect as a posy.'

Waiting in the wings like other stories for Pat

I have posted another story today, Love is all it takes. My usual girl man theme, except this time is boy girl woman. You can click the link here of go to the entry in the right-hand column.

I have some others still to post and even more to type, edit, then publish here. When that will be I am not sure.

It does have adult content.

This one inspired by a painting:

Pat is a friend in Gainsborough who we do not see enough of, but she says kind things about my writing and I have been promising to post a story for ages, so here one finally is.

The truth be I am slowing down and sleeping more as my heart condition takes a firmer hold of how I feel. I have had all the tests and scans and see my cardiologist this coming week, when I hope I will get a good indication of when I will have open heart surgery. As a friend said recently, 'It's not knowing when, so you put your life on hold' and that about sums up how I feel. I want to get on with life again, but for now I will settle for doing a couple of final promised jobs for people, then my decks are clear!

Memory is what you make it

The local historian in me has long known that the past is created by what we choose to remember, be it about ourselves, other people or the order of things. An invitation on one of my favourite short story websites, shortfictionbreak.com, prompted me to write a story about memory, which I have added to my list in the right-hand column and called 'Murdo's memory'.

We do have the habit, as a society, of forgiving and not admitting the sins of the great and the good whilst never forgetting and readily exposing the sins of the poor and the frail. I am sure you do not need me to list examples of my observation; you can, I'm sure, quickly compile your own list.

As a child from about the age of four until I was fourteen I always shared by bedroom with a lodger, one of whom, a man who called himself 'Karl', sometimes 'Leo', got me to share his bed to keep us warm and for about three years sexually played with me and got me to do the same with him. It was 'our secret' and I kept it until I told my wife. Today we would call it 'sexual abuse' and there are many poor souls with similar experiences to me who are still traumatised by the experience.  I can make no such claim and responded by being determined that any children of mine would have their own bedrooms and so it was.

I also had a female cousin my own age who liked to share a bed with me on family holidays and we became openly close after leaving school, to the point where we were warned off one another and dutifully did what we were told. At best we were second cousins, maybe third. My maternal great-grandfather was the brother of my cousin's maternal grandfather. Neither of us worked out the link and when she died of breast cancer aged thirty-eight, she was convinced had we stayed together her first husband would not have been there to punch her breasts repeatedly when he got angry with her. I am in no doubt that she was right and I took some comfort from the fact that she and my wife were good friends.

I tell you these things because how I have chosen to remember my life has freed me from the pain and trauma I witness in others. I can do nothing about the past. Bitterness will never make me once a rich child from a stable loving home. I had the childhood I had and in the order of things it was not bad. My memories of it are mostly happy.

My grandparents, who brought me up, were of their time and a little distant, but I did feel protected and cared for. More hugs and kisses would have been nice and the lack of such affection probably explains why Caroline and me took mutual advantage of the opportunities we had. Leo/Karl depending on his mood was always kind and generous, but he exploited me none the less and what he did was wrong, very wrong, but I know enough about life to know that what happened to me was not uncommon in the 1950s.

My experiences and memories are the stuff of fiction and not a week passes without some author writing a successful novel based on childhood or matrimonial abuse. So it is with how we remember dead members of our armed forces. We make heroes out of them all and, in truth, I do not know what else we can do. The truth is something we bury with them and I can live with that. As for the living, we can call them to account and we should, but only if we do it regardless of class, gender, faith, race or wealth. I find it difficult to punish just the poor, the black, other minorities and those least able to defend themselves.

I have long been of the view that story telling is a more reflective and understanding way of dealing with injustice than prison and scaffolds.

What I took with me into the world of work

On Monday 31 August 1959 I started work. I had left Alperton Secondary Modern School in Wembley, where I grew up, with a reasonable grounding in writing, arithmetic and reading. Enough to write a letter to a potential employer. I have no recollection of ever filling in an application form.

I left school aged fifteen not knowing what a GCE or a university was. I must have sat the 11-plus, but I cannot remember.

I was born in Torquay in 1944. My mother was not married and when I was a few weeks old, she handed me over to my grandparents, Nanna and Pop, who lived on Swinderby Road close to the centre of Wembley.

I know next to nothing about my father. I never asked my mother because I did not think she would tell me the truth. One day I will write about her and me. I was sixteen or seventeen when during a heated argument with Pop, he yelled 'It's the bloody Irish in you speaking'. I had to wait until a couple of months ago to have my Irishness confirmed after a DNA test showed I was 55% Irish, 28% Scandinavian, 6% British, 3% Iberian, 3% West European, 3% Russian Finnish, 1% Italian Greek and 1% Caucasian, but I digress, these are stories for another day.   

With the exception of a few brief months at the end of 1956 or 7, when I lived with my mother and step-father in Swindon, Swinderby Road was my home until 1966, when my first wife, Tricia, and I bought a house in South Harrow.

I have had it in my head since Christmas 2010 to write about my time in Wembley, after being prompted by family into reminiscing about my Wembley days. I am still not sure as to how I am going to do this. I recently sorted what few photographs I have, and Susan, who I have been with since 1975, and married in 1977, freed up some shelving in our office and suggested we could use it for books. This gave me the idea of gathering together what books I have from my Wembley days and found more than I expected, so I decided just to include what books I have from before I started work — hence the picture at the top of this blog.

With the exception of my John Betjeman Collected Poems they are all originals. My Betjeman fell apart years ago, so Susan bought me a new copy. Looking through them they all tell a story and have all played a part in making me who I am today.

I arranged them in no particular order before taking the photograph. I also took another photograph:

The two bus books are in the top photograph as well and the London bus maps are just a few of a collection which continues until I left Harrow in 1969, when Tricia and I moved to Birmingham.

There are fourteen books in the pile, of which four are local history related, three are bus books, three political in some way, two religious, one poetry and, top of the pile, a dictionary.

I bought the two London bus books and Betjeman, and asked my Nanna to buy me the dictionary. Our Democracy came from school. I gave Wembley Through the Ages and English Place Pames to my mother as presents and they came back to me when she died in 2006. Middlesex was always in Swinderby Road and left with me in 1966. The other books in the pile were given to me, three as presents and two not long before I left school. They were News From Nowhere by William Morris and What are we to do? by John Strachy. Somewhere, yet to be found, is a old hard back copy of God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell. 

Taken together, this much remains of the world I had around me when I started work in 1959. All on the bookshelf in my bedroom at Swinderby Road. There were others, but they have gone. My Animal Stories by Rudyard Kipling and other story books were passed down to my children, as were a large collection of comic annuals, including Rupert the Bear. I also had selected volumes of the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, which I also passed to my children.

Looking through the books today I have been overwhelmed with memories, struck most of all by how much of the me I have become can be traced back to the schoolboy.

I like to say school passed me by. I remember finding reading and writing a struggle and that I was still trying to memorise the alphabet into my secondary school days. Once I did start writing I enjoyed the achievement and I still marvel at my ability to string words together as I write.

Top of the pile is Words,my dictionary dating from 1956. Nanna bought it for me on a shopping visit to Harlesden. It cost 2/6d (12.5p) from a hardware shop, which had the dictionary on show outside. I picked one up and looked through it, then I asked my Nanna to buy it for me, which she did. It has been a prized possession ever since. I took it to school with me and my then English teacher laughed at me and Words, pointing out as he did that it had been printed in Czechoslovakia. Other kids heard and joined in the laughter, but I knew it was better than any at school because it had a section of English grammar, an extensive biographical dictionary, a separate guide to 'well-known authors' and a world gazetteer. A few years later the school bought Words and I went up to Mr. Charlton, the teacher who had laughed at me, and  pointed out it still said 'Printed in Czechoslovakia' inside the cover.

Fortunately, Mr Irvine became my English teacher and he got us to write about issues, then to discuss what we had written and why. At the time we were using a school textbook called Our Democracy, written specially for secondary modern schools. By then I was well on the way to being a socialist, thanks to my Uncle Dave and Auntie Nannie in Harlow, who I stayed with during school holidays (now I realise to give my Nanna a break). He was Secretary of the then Plumbers' Trade Union Harlow Branch and active in the Labour Party. People were always visiting the house and it was where I first heard people talking about politics. My perspective on things was also local, Pop was Wembley born and bred, my great-grandparents having arrived from Willesden in the 1890s when my great-grandfather started his own plumbing business and opened a hardware shop on Wembley High Road. Pop's friends were also local businessmen and shopkeepers. I heard lots of stories about Wembley whilst growing up, so when Wembley Through the Ages by Reverend Elsey was published in 1953, a copy found its way into 36 Swinderby Road.

Fares Please was a present from my mother in 1953 for my ninth birthday. By then I was well into London buses, having been riding on them alone from the age of four. I also had a collection of maps. My mother used to say I could read a bus map before I could read a book. Inside the cover my mother wrote my name as 'Robert K P Gillies'. My Nanna put a line through 'Gillies' and wrote 'Howard'. Given I was named 'Kevin' by my mother (which appears on my birth certificate) and 'Bobby' by my Nanna, it was argument Nanna won. My mother married my step-father, who I knew as 'Uncle Jimmy' until I started work, then he became 'Jimmy', in 1952, but I was not told about the wedding and it was a family I was on the edge of. Jimmy was a good man, who was brave to take my mother on, but I was never going to be a Gillies. This book reminds me of the tension there was between Nanna and my mother.

The next book in the pile, The Story of the Bible, is my Church of God Sunday School attendance prize for 1957 made out to 'Bobby Gillies'. I had found my way to the Church of God when I was about seven through a girl I knew, who was a couple of years older than me. We both went to the Church of England Sunday School at St John's Church and when she left, I left too. Writing this, I recall her Nanna, a lovely lady called Mrs Peart, telling me years later I was the little brother she always wanted — which probably explained why our brief teenage summer romance, when she was eighteen and I was sixteen, was always doomed. Ann went off to university. Had it not been for Church and Sunday School our relationship would probably have ended when she went to Wembley County School at eleven.

I met Tricia through Wembley South Young Socialists not long after Ann went off and I  continued to attend the Church of God for another year. Then I went back to St John's Church opposite the then Wembley Police Station not far from Swinderby Road, where my connection was enough to enable Tricia, who was a non-churchgoer, to have a white wedding two years later. I got The Story of the Bible because, as my Sunday School teacher, Les Hardy, explained 'You are always asking questions, so this may answer some'. It was about this time that a boy called Geoff in my church class asked the question 'Is God vain?' and set me thinking about my own take on life. It is a tangible reminder of somewhere I enjoyed going and why I found it hard to leave. Had I stayed, I suspect my life would have very secure and happy in a different kind of way. My nickname at Church was 'Dodo'. I really was different to them in many ways. I was already living my life in a collection of compartments (and still do). School, school holidays staying with relatives, cubs/Woodcraft Folk, Young Farmers (yes, me!), all made way when I started work for Wembley South Young Socialists and my trade union. Rarely was there any crossover.

John Betjeman found his way into my life through the Home Service on BBC radio. We did not have a television until I was about seventeen, by which time Nanna was dead (she died in early-1960) and we only got electricity in the house in 1958. His poems mentioned Middlesex, Wembley, Harrow, Brent and Perivale, even one called 'A Wembley Lad'. I used my paper round money to buy a paperback copy of his John Betjeman Collected Poems. It is enough to say that he has a poem for everything.

News From Nowhere by William Morris and What are we to do? by John Strachy both played a formative part in shaping my take on socialism. William Morris offered a vision and John Strachy a reminder that socialism is as much about individual enterprise as collective effort; he argued that most small businesses are born of a desire to be free from exploitation in the belief that they can do just as well, given the opportunity, but when they are successful, large greedy companies move in and use their wealth to force small business under. It is a message Labour has yet to understand, but Strachy's analysis was correct in the 1930s and it remains so eighty years on.

The Pilgrim Shrines of England is another book which made its way back to me via my mother and I love. I have not been religious for over fifty years, but I remain spiritual and like plain, simple, quiet places where I can connect with eternity and a sense of what it means, for understanding it makes one one aware that it is different to nothingness. My summer with Anne included a week at the then small Othona Community at St Peter's Chapel, Bradwell-on-Sea, and through this book I also discovered Sempringham in the Lincolnshire Wolds. There are still places to visit and as I get further into my seventies so I more understand why. It is a thread which has run through my life and I am grateful for it.

The Book of Harrow was a Christmas gift in 1958 from Mac, an Irishman who assisted Les Hardy in running the Church of God Sunday School class for teenage boys like myself. We could be awkward and unruly at times, more interested in the teenage girls than Jesus. He obviously picked up on my interest in local history back then and gave this local history of Harrow. I treasure it for the gift it was.

Local history was nothing something we ever did at school, despite the opportunities it presented then (and still does) across every aspect of learning, including maths. Again I could go on, but I was reading books from Barham Park Library about local history from an early age.

Nanna and Pop were never into education, other than it teaching you basic skills. Both had beautiful copper plate writing, were able to read and keep accounts. If you left school able to do these things, what more was there to know?

My education really began when I left school, thanks to trade unions and the Labour Party. I got my chance to become a paid writer, albeit as a cub reporter, when I was sixteen or seventeen, but chose not to take it and I got my chance to go to Ruskin College in Oxford, but let that pass because I was married, buying a house and my wife was pregnant.

Somehow, these books stayed with me, they survived getting married at twenty-one, when the past was nearly forgotten as the future consumed me; moved in a cardboard box when I left Tricia to live with Susan in 1975, since when they have come through numerous 'culls' of books. This far into my life I am sure of one thing: they will all be there at the end for someone to deal with, and out there, on the ether somewhere, will be this rambling account of why they mattered to me.

Flash story and American link

There is an American fiction blog I like called shortfictionbreak.com. A few days ago a contributor posted a flash story 100 words along and invited readers to post their own flash stories, so I had a go and here is what I posted:

His grandmother warned him, but he took no notice. Had he not seen his grandfather do it a hundred times. How hard could it be to chop the head off a chicken?

The old hen clucked in his arms, unaware of what was about to happen. 'There, there, soon be over I promise'. He placed her on the bench and picked up the cleaver. No going back. The boy surprised himself with his speed. He pulled the hen's head forward and swung the cleaver down. The sickening crunch numbed him. There was blood everywhere, but no chicken.

Maybe I should try and write more flash stories. It was quick and fun.

Two colleagues join me

Today I have posted two short stories by other writers I know. Rosie Pursglove and I go way back a long way and she took to fiction writing and blogging long before me. It was with her encouragement that I first began blogging in 2007, when I started Parkviews, then in 2011 I joined the WEA Beeston's Writing Class. Rosie's very successful blog is called Corners of my Mind and dates from 2005.

Her contribution, Encore, has been written especially for Senior Fiction, so thank you Rosie.

I met Kevin Rodrigues at the WEA class in Beeston and he has just published his first novel, a detective story, as an e-book.

A stranger is brutally murdered in Tufton Magna Library and the examining pathologist says the man had survived a bomb blast, but DCI Johnny Benedetti needs to establish the man's identity before he can tackle the question of who murdered him.

Kevin is a retired GP, so he know all about body bits.

It is still early days and I have yet to tell more than a few close writing colleagues about Senior Fiction, so if you have found me, then enjoy the two latest short stories.

In sidebar to the right I have added a wonderful quote from Tessa Hadley and given it the heading, 'The magic of writing'.

Down the arm flows…

A close friend, who has been a successful blogger for the past eleven years (Corners of My Mind), is also a fiction writer and she is the person who got me into blogging back in 2007, then encouraged me when I joined the writing class in Beeston. She seems inexhaustible to me, although she would tell you otherwise.

In a recent short story she shared with me, she describes the act of writing to near perfection. The one thing I know about writing is that many writers will never get the acclaim they deserve. Writing is like acting and so many other things in life. Connections matter more than ability. With the former comes patronage of sorts. Of course there are exceptions to my generalisation, but I know enough from personal experience to stand by my claim.

My favourite book, A Month in the Country by J L Carr began life as a self-published book in 1980, before eventually getting the attention and acclaim it rightly deserved. Telling others about the book, as I have been doing since 1980, and the subsequent feedback, still gives me pleasure beyond words. 

I know it takes courage to share your work with others. A friend from my schooldays in Wembley, who is writing a life memoir for herself, modestly believes her life is no interest to anyone. It is not a view I share and have told her so on a good few occasions. One day I will write about our relationship and how a reminiscence blog posted by me brought us together again after a gap of fifty years.

In the ideal world I would have an editor, but for the past few years I have enjoyed the support and friendship of a 'writing buddy'. She tells me how she sees it and I love her for that. I will be taking her a printed booklet version of my latest short story, The New Volunteer, on Monday. In meantime I share it with you and would welcome your feedback too. Would you like the story to continue? Would you like to know more about Wendy?

I hope you enjoy.

My first seven short stories

It has taken me a day to set up Senior Fiction and this morning I have posted seven stories. From now on I will add stories to the top of the Story Page list in the right-hand column.

I have a good few to add over the coming weeks and I will post them in no particular order — a bit like how I chose the first seven stories I have posted today.

I am conscience of not having an editor, but I do have friends who read some of my stories and comment on grammar and plot.

My 'writing' days began as Secretary of Wembley South Young Socialists in 1960, when I was sixteen. At first it was letters to The Wembley News, then it was meeting reports and I must have been doing something right because the then Editor invited me to his office and we had a long chat, after which he offered me a job as a cub reporter, but only if I gave up my involvement with the Labour Party, explaining that the paper itself was 'non-political'.

I had left secondary modern school in 1959 with no qualifications. As difficult as it is for some to believe, I left school like many others at the time not knowing what a GCE or a university was. My first job was a trainee animal technician at the Chester Beatty Research Institute attached to the Royal Brompton Hospital in South Kensington.

I chose to stay in the Young Socialists and not to take advantage of the opportunity I was so generously offered. I take the view that had I accepted the job offer I would not have met Susan in 1975, but then again I may have gone to Birmingham in 1969 as a young journalist and not a young distribution manager.

I became a different kind of writer, and I did end up writing news part-time for a living, and this fact, I am sure, impacts on how I approach and write fiction. I write with urgency once I start on a story and I have no idea where my writing is going to go, I have no plot in my head when I pick up on an idea for a story. I just go with the flow and that is what excites me about fiction. It is always a journey of discovery and I love that.

I suspect that a good few will read what I write and say that this lack of plot and direction shows. Well, I can live with that, thanks to the politician in me. I do not expect everyone to share my views or to like me and one thing you quickly learn in local politics is that you only need to win over a small percentage of the electorate to get elected, and so it is with being a successful writer — a very small audience is, in the order of things, all you need.

Once we were defined by the work we did, for this told us much about our class, now it is which university you went to. Thanks to the WEA I know a good few like myself who left school at fifteen with no qualifications and who managed to progress. We had our opportunities. USDAW, my union in the mid-1960s offered me the opportunity to go to Ruskin College in Oxford, but by then I was married with a baby daughter, so I turned down the offer. A close friend from my Wembley Young Socialists days, who I still see, did go to Ruskin and onto to Hull University. Our lives intertwined in surprising ways and there is a story here waiting to be told.

It is only in recent weeks whilst thinking about creating this blog that I have thought about what I write. I write a lot about meetings and life defining moments. I understand why because back in 1975 my life changed in a day. Meeting Susan is a story I have yet to write, suffice to say we took off like a rocket and until that day I had no inkling of the astronaut who lived in my head alongside the father, the husband, the charity worker, the councillor, the poltical writer and the chair of museums I knew Robert to be.

I reached my late-sixties passions undimmed and my idea of writing a memoir got side-lined as I discovered the joys and pleasure of writing fiction. I know I am not alone. Older folk are not often the subject of fiction, perhaps because the young do not understand us and all too many of us are so fixated on the past that we ignore the present and the future. It is these thoughts which are at the heart of Senior Fiction.

Let the journey begin!

Amazed to have the name

I have been writing short stories since the beginning of 2011 when I joined a WEA (Workers' Educational Association) writing class in Beeston, on the south-west edge of Nottingham, but I have been a published writer since the early-1970s, almost exclusively about local government and local history. From 1984 until 2006 I was the news editor for Local History Magazine and also The Nottinghamshire Historian (1992–2013). For the past few years I have been writing a monthly column in the Nottingham Post and, occasionally, for Buses magazine.

A family gathering over Christmas 2010 persuaded me to think about writing a memoir of sorts, but despite having read countless memoirs and collections of reminiscences for the two periodicals I have mentioned above, I was not sure how I wanted to write my memoir. I knew it was going to be 'a story' — for that is what all memoirs/autobiographies are — at best they are collections of jumbled 'facts' and morphed memories. A good friend had attended a writing class in Stoke and I decided to follow her example, which is how I came to join the WEA writing class in Beeston, which I attended until the end of 2014.

I left because we had moved from our house in Lenton, Nottingham, to Beeston at the end of November 2014 and we had a lot of sorting to do, having downsized. To date, my memoir is no more than a few postings to a blog I had started in 2013 called My Wembley 1944–1966, but I had got into the habit of writing short stories.

Christmas 2015 found me pondering the future and what I wanted to do. It had been an eventual year. During the summer I had been diagnosed with two serious health conditions: Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis and Aortic Stenosis, yet I have never felt better and had it not been for a x-ray on the day after the 2015 General Election, I would not know of either condition.

In 2014, on reaching seventy, I had decided to give up on committee work and to do what I wanted instead. From the age of sixteen in 1960 until October 2015, I was always doing a political or voluntary job of some kind.

My health has made me a more solitary person, attending fewer meetings, avoiding crowds and, worst of all, minimising my use of buses and trams to reduce the risk of catching a cold or a cough. As a result, my writing has had more attention. I am not a hermit and go into Beeston most days with my shopping trolley and prepare meals, whilst Susan, my wife, does the washing, ironing and, apart from the stairs, the cleaning. I still enjoy visits to my favourite Beeston cafés, eateries, bookshops and galleries.

From 2007 until 2014 I did a Lenton based blog, Parkviews, and since December 2014, a blog called Beestonweek. Both are now pensioned off, still online. Blogs which require weekly attention are time consuming in a way which I do not expect Senior Fiction to be. Together, they give you an idea of who I am.

So I decided over Christmas it was time to come out as a fiction writer, to share my work with a wider audience and to hope that, by word of mouth, I can attract a few readers. I am a member of the Nottingham Writers' Studio and will be telling them about Senior Fiction (seniorfiction.blogspot.co.uk), a web address I did not expect to be available. I am somewhat amazed to have this name for my blog. I hope it will help folk find my blog by chance as well as via word of mouth and online recommendation.

My plan is to publish each story on its own page, which will be listed in the right-hand column, where you can see who I am. Blog postings will be, well, I'm not sure, so please bear with me.

Robert Howard.