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!