Early Words

and a ghost story

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to go to several events as part of the Cambridge Winter Literary Festival. As always, there was a diverse and interesting gathering of great writers and thinkers, and it was difficult to choose which events to attend. I saw the ever wonderful and brilliant author, poet and wordsmith Michael Rosen who entertained us with a whole string of anecdotes almost without pausing for breath. He was there to reflect on his life in writing but barely got to age eighteen before his time was up, with great memories of growing up in North London and fond stories of his parents. If I had one complaint it was that Alex Clark with whom he was in conversation spent a full ten minutes telling us anecdotes about herself at the beginning which wasn’t what I felt I had signed up for. However Michael Rosen overran by about 15 minutes so ultimately I didn’t feel short changed.

I also saw Patrick Grant of The Great British Sewing Bee who was both extremely erudite and amusing in presenting his case for less consumption but better quality in all the items we purchase, not only clothes. He seemed to be particularly impassioned about shoddy cookware. which was rather amusing. That same afternoon I saw Tim Spector who was there to promote his new cookbook, Food for Life. He was also very erudite as might be expected but sadly lacking in the humour of Patrick Grant. Frankly, I was somewhat disappointed and found him a little bit boring. To be fair it could be that as I am already a convert to his way of eating i.e. more plant diversity, less meat, reducing ultra-processed foods etc. that I wasn’t really hearing anything new. I wasn’t tempted to buy the book however.

My favourite interview of the weekend was with the author David Nicholls who was entertaining, self-depreciating and generally came across as an all round really nice chap. I am already a fan of his books which to manage to be both laugh out loud funny and terribly sad at the same time. I treated myself to a copy of his latest novel ‘You Are Here’ and finished reading it last night. It’s a great story with brilliantly drawn characters, so good that they feel like real people. It centres on Marnie, a copy editor who is stuck working from home in her small London flat following her divorce and Michael an increasingly reclusive Geography teacher who is still reeling from his wife leaving. Michael finds solace in long lonely walks and vows to walk the 190 mile Coast to Coast from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay on the East coast in just ten days. His friend Cleo decides to gather a small group of friends together, which includes Marnie, to accompany him for the first couple of days, but her ideas for a bit of matchmaking don’t go to plan with a couple of no shows and others leaving early. Eventually we are left with Marnie and Michael as they walk across the British countryside from the Lakes, over the Pennines, across the Dales and the Moors towards the East Coast. There is a lot of weather (it is Britain after all) and wonderful scenery as we follow the couple through indifference, attraction, friendship and misunderstandings which in less capable hands would feel predictable and formulaic, but David Nicholls has a touch that makes it feel fresh. It’s the sort of book that makes me want to start it all over again as soon as I have finished because I miss the characters and their banter. I also quite fancy walking the Coast to Coast myself but possibly not in weather like today’s high winds and rain.

Walking through the English Lakes

He was chatting with the writer

Hattie Crisell

who is the host of the podcast ‘In Writing’ which has now become my current favourite soundtrack when out dog walking. (You can hear her episode with David Nicholls here) In the podcast she chats to a variety of writers from all walks of life from novelists to screen writers and journalists to joke writers. They talk about where and how they write, their inspiration and also about their earliest memories of writing which has got me thinking about my own early writing experiences.

I am vaguely aware that I enjoyed putting together little books of my own as a child, but I have no strong memories of writing before secondary school and my Mum was never one to keep my drawings or writing either, so nothing has survived. However my earliest memory of writing in a secondary English class wasn’t that great so it is quite possible it obliterated all earlier memories. One of the first essays I recall handing in started with the words “Many moons ago…” I’m not sure what the subject matter or title was supposed to be - we were often just presented with a title as our starting point. But I believe we had been looking at traditional folk stories and I remember thinking I would write my own ‘Native American’ folk tale that probably involved tepees and sitting around campfires. Back then in the 1960s my only experience of anything remotely American was based on TV ‘Cowboys and Indians’ so wholly culturally inappropriate I imagine, but to my 11 year old self starting with the words “Many moons ago” seemed to hit the right tone of verbal storytelling. So I was crushed when it came back marked with red pen scoring out those first three words with the observation ‘not a proper measure of time.’ After that I assumed I just wasn’t very good at writing. Interestingly I have heard the phrase ‘Many moons ago’ repeatedly over the past few weeks, including just this week on a radio programme.

But then whilst hunting out the Christmas decorations in the loft I took a look through a box marked ‘keepsakes’ filled with various odd and ends mostly from my teenage years and discovered a magazine, entirely hand drawn and written by me in my last year of Primary School when I would have been ten years old. I then remembered that this was a project given to a handful of us in class to create a magazine for other children in the school to read.

Mine was called ‘Duckey’ (don’t ask me why, I was ten!) and my friend Jeanette had written one called ‘Swinging Girl’ which I know because my publication featured an advertisement boldly stating:

“Get ‘Swinging Girl’ by Jeanette Keith. I can guarantee a good, good read and exciting stories. Read about the great swinging girl herself, do the puzzles, laugh at the jokes and a thousand other things”

Mmm… I can see why I didn’t go into writing advertising copy. But joking aside I’m quite impressed with the content of the magazine itself, despite some of the awful spelling. There are several cartoon strips, puzzles and a joke page with jokes submitted by readers, most noticeably my teacher Mrs Bridgman, my Dad and my younger brother.

Q. What is green, has whiskers and goes up and down?

A. A gooseberry in a lift

Sent in by Mrs Bridgman

And that was one of the better ones. There were pictures to colour in, competitions to enter, a feature on The Monkees, obviously my favourite pop group at the time, and with the supreme confidence of youth there was a ‘Ducky song’ complete with three verses and the accompanying musical notation (I can’t actually read music), a knitting pattern for a striped dolls jumper, recipes which I can only assume I copied from my Mum’s Family Circle, as well as absolutely awful instruction on how to draw. The whole thing is hilarious.

There is also my earliest surviving piece of fiction on the ‘short story’ page complete with illustrations and so I will finish this week with a story by me from fifty seven years ago. It could do with some judicious editing as it’s a bit heavy on the adjectives and adverbs to say the least, but I present you with the unexpurgated version. It’s short… stick with it!

HAUNTED HOUSE by Gina Ferrari, aged 10

I stood and watched, waiting for the long dark fearsome hours to pass. The window frame gave a loud groaning creak which echoed through the house.

” Oh, What was that?”

I think it was only a frightened little bat fluttering past or was it a big white scary ghost who gives little children big frights.

The old brown owl stood on a small branch outside the window, but his big black shadow stood above the dirty oak chest in the corner of my bedroom.

“Twit twit twoo, twit twit twoo, who, who”

The owl let out a deafening screech.

Then shivering with fright I slowly crept back into bed but then there was a creak. The floorboards or was it a skeleton? I lay among the warmth of my bedclothes but then I heard a tap patting noise. I looked around the room cautiously and I noticed a very tiny twig and the wind was blowing it up against the window. Then the wind rose into a terrifying gale, and it whistled madly through the window frames, louder, louder, louder and then bang! I whipped my pillow up and covered my ears with it.

Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick! Every tick of the clock grew louder and echoed throughout the whole house until I wanted to smash it to the ground.

“Ahhh!” Oh, only a long black hairy spider hanging down from his black gloomy web of fine silky threads.

Gradually, light took over the sky and I gave a sigh of relief. I went downstairs for breakfast thinking I would never try to stay awake all night again because at night the whole house seems haunted.

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