Over this weekend, I’ve written the first draft of a new Fred story – “Fred and the Easter Bunny”. The idea has been simmering for a while (all my best ideas are slow-cooked) but Easter Saturday morning seemed the ideal time to get on with it – because of the date, of course, plus the break from work. The only way to write for a seven-year-old is to go back to being one – and the day job doesn’t leave much time for that, especially at the moment. Getting wrapped up in a new story is a great way to forget, just for a while, that I’m a grown-up (allegedly) carrying the responsibility of a fledgling company.
First reading and later writing has always been an escape for me. In the notes at the back of “Fred Goes to School”, I thank Mum for “My love of books, bears and children”. All three have been very much a part of me for as long as I can remember. As for books, she started reading to me even before I can remember – often either to prepare me for or distract me from something unpleasant. She read to me in hospital; she read to me when we realized I had to go away to school, to instill in me the idea that boarding school was something really exciting – and later she read to me to take my mind off the fact that, all too soon, I was going to have to go back to school! And sometimes, she just read to me because we were tucked up in front of the fire, while the winter was doing its worst outside. From fairytales, we moved on to boarding school books, then Enid Blighton adventures. She would knit complicated patterns and read for hours, while I sat on the floor creating my own versions of the scenes she was describing, out of lego or plastersine – or whatever I had to hand.
There’s a tendency to believe that if someone’s eyesight isn’t good enough for them to appreciate pictures directly, visual images can’t matter too much to them. It isn’t true – at least, it never has been for me. I have a very visual brain – it draws cartoons, landscapes, people – you name it! It even turns non-visual information into visual images. When I’m working with sound, I think about “changing the audio landscape”, introducing “colour”, avoiding “monochrome” – even “creating a mosaic”! I see the flow of a programme as the changing scenery which rolls past a train window – and I completely confuse other sound people! When I’m writing, I think about adjectives like colours – blending them together to get the exact shade of description I’m looking for – and when I want to show more than one view point of a scene or an incident, I visualize it in terms ofcamera angles. I suppose it’s inevitable really – I come from a line of talented amateur artists – but the fact that I have “shadow vision” means this way of thinking wasn’t picked up and developed when I was a kid – I had to discover and develop it myself when I grew up.
That’s one reason I want to do a project with the kids at my old school. I want to get them thinking about pictures. More than that, I want to get them excited about pictures! Whether or not they can see them clearly – or at all – is irrelevant. What matters is that they live in a primarily visual world and the more they can understand – and better still, embrace it, the easier – and more importantly, the richer their lives will be. My mental imagery might confuse people at first, but it usually ends up opening up some interesting and exciting avenues. On the most basic level, once people know I see radio programmes as changing landscapes from train windows and books as films, they stop being afraid of words like “look” and “see” – at which point, everyone can relax and be themselves!
Over the last month or so, after three decades, Mum has started reading to me again. She’s read extracts of books aloud in the intervening years, but “Call the Midwife” by Jennifer Worth was the first full book in all that time. The author’s real talent, I think, is juxtaposing humour and pathos, serious moral issues and pure naughtiness, to create a very clear, 3D, full-colour picture (sorry! There I go again!) of her life as a young midwife, a not very religious girl (to begin with anyway), working in an East-end convent in the 50s. At first, Mum just read out the best bits –but before we knew it, she was reading the whole book. Then came “Shadows of the Workhouse”, also by Jennifer Worth – and last night we finished “The Girl in the Red Coat” by Roma Ligocka –the author’s experience of a childhood spent trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazis in Poland in WW.II and its effects on her adult life.
I know what you’re thinking – not exactly light reading! Well, no – but I can read light for myself any time I like. I could have read these for myself too, but it wouldn’t have been the same. They were three quite different books (even though the two by Jennifer Worth follow each other), but they were all better shared than read alone.
Reading, whatever the subject-matter, is still an escape – and being read to means escaping with company. I might end up being absorbed into another reality –at times a lot more grim than anything I’ve ever had to deal with – but it’s still an escape from concerns about business, money, the future etc. And there’s another element: Mum and I have always been close, but there are all the usual undercurrents that flow beneath the healthiest relationship between a mother and her adult daughter – the mutual tensions between the need for separateness and interdependence – and they’re accentuated for us because for the last several years we’ve shared a house; Mum’s house; the house I grew up in; the house she ran for years – and which now she finds it progressively harder to manage without my help. It makes for an “interesting” dynamic – a delicate power-balance – sometimes; but when we’re reading, all that is forgotten. We’re completely in harmony – just like when I was little (the way I remember it anyway). We don’t quite recreate the scenes from my childhood – but the atmosphere (for me at least), isn’t so different. these days Mum can’t knit because of her arthritis – so she reads while I wield the needles. I made a fluffy jacket for the upcoming company launch while she read the second Jennifer Worth and I made great headway with a red shrug (appropriately enough) during “The Girl in the Red Coat”. I’ve a strong feeling that whenever I wear the clothes I’ll remember the books – and if I’ come across the books, or the authors, I’ll think of the clothes. We often don’t know when we’re making memories until, a few miles down the road, we pause and look back; but when I’m knitting and Mum is reading, I’m very aware of making memories – memories which I suspect will be very important in the future …
Tags: children; charity; school; education; writing; reading; "Jennifer Worth"; "Roma Ligocka"
