Starting Over

The cursor blinked lazily on the white screen in front of me. Come on, I told myself, put something down. Anything.

It had been a long time since I’d written, 1990 to be exact. Pregnant with my first child, I’d been doing creative writing as a hobby in my spare time. Now my sons were grown men, time was my own, and the white page beckoned.

On nearing my retirement my mother had encouraged me to start writing again. I’d always read and enjoyed writing essays for school, at least up to junior level. High school didn’t seem to appreciate my creative urge so much. None of the teachers, other than the maths teacher, appreciated my talents at all. School reports abounded with comments like ‘daydreamer’, or ‘could do better’.

I had aspirations to work with animals but was told “You won’t make any money as a kennel maid, and you’re not good enough to be a vet.” Shows how imaginative they were. “Go be an accountant, work in a bank, work with computers,” they said. Somehow, more by accident than design, working with computers is what I eventually did, writing code. But although ‘if … then … else … end if’ and ‘while … loop … end loop’ did what it was supposed to do and payed the bills, it didn’t make for very interesting reading. It was challenging, it was not a thing of beauty. But I was quite good at it, so with no ambition to do anything else, I stayed where I was, keeping cats and fish to soothe the animal urge as my husband and I brought up our boys.

Quite by chance I found a creative writing group for over 50s. That’ll do, I said to myself. No ambitious young things thinking I was over the hill. I signed up for the autumn term that followed my retirement in summer. Between retirement and starting the course, I found work I’d done on my previous course some 28 years previously and sat down for a read and catch up. What a disappointment. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were some good ideas in there – all right, some okayish ideas – but they were very high schoolish in the way they’d been written. Not a promising start if I wanted to progress.

I remember there was one piece in particular that my teacher at that time liked in particular, so I got that one out and reread it. As I remember, it had been a triumph in class when the tutor had chosen to read it out and everyone applauded. And now it seemed – lame? Perhaps, considering what else I’d written at the time, and if others had written in a similar manner, it was just the best of a pretty bad bunch. Ah well, I’d signed up for this new course now, paid my money. I only had to stay one term if it was as bad as that.

The first day was fine, though I felt a bit of an outsider, most of the other members being repeat attenders, but they seemed nice enough. No matter, they must all have been newbies at one time or another. Our tutor was a small Scottish woman, Jenni, fiery red hair and a wit to match. First icebreaker exercise was to write a sentence to tell the class your name and say how you’d arrived at the class, using the first letter of your name as the first letter of the mode of transport. I’m not very quick on the uptake with ideas, they usually need some time to stew with me, so the best I could come up with on the spot was ‘Hello, my name is Bernadette and today I arrived by Bus.’ Only later did I realise that it would have been much more fun if I’d said ‘Hello, my name is Bernadette, and today I arrived by Boomerang. Big Mistake. Bye.’ At least I understood the instruction. One lady, bless her, said ‘Hello my name is Theresa and I arrived in my son’s car’.

We read a piece for discussion, and some of the others read some of their pieces from previous terms, and I saw what I was up against. Quite good, some very good, but thankfully not Pulitzer Prize-winner good, so, though I thought it would be a while before I plucked up courage to read, I thought I’d be okay.

We were given homework. Take an inanimate object, Jenni said, something that’s precious to you, and write a story from the objects point of view. Which is why I was sat at my desk, new document open, cursor blinking. My object? I decided it couldn’t be anything new, no matter how much I might love it. It couldn’t be one of the kids, one of the cats. It had to be inanimate. And it had to be old, seen something of the world.

I rummaged through a drawer with some old stuff in it and found my grandmothers address book. Now, what action had that seen? It was precious to me; I was interested in genealogy and in there were the names and addresses of great aunts, second cousins, names I recognised from my research. Back when Granny was a young woman, way before they had computers, emails and text messaging, letter writing was important, crucial. Granny’s address book would have been key as she tried to keep in touch with friends and family.

What did I know of Granny as a person? Not much. She’d had seven pregnancies producing nine babies, five of those stillborn. She judged that she’d done her stint of childcare – she wasn’t going to do any more. She never, to my recollection, took on any babysitting duties for her grandchildren. To me she was a person who sat in the corner of the room when we went round to see grandparents, not saying much. Pops always made a fuss of me, my unmarried uncle always answered any questions I wanted always speaking with a smattering of bad language which nobody minded unless I repeated it. But Granny even if she didn’t ignore me, didn’t engage with me either. She died when I was seven, so I like to think she’d have found me more interesting as an adult and I might have got to know her better too.

I knew more about Granny’s life. She’d been born in Devon in 1892, and most of her family came from round the south west of England; Devon, Dorset, Somerset. I knew that her father had died when she was five, her mother when she was 15 and that she’d been brought up by two aunts in Bournemouth. So how did she end up in Nottingham married to Pops?

And this, I thought, might be the tale Granny’s little book could tell.

Granny came up to Nottingham for a job with Pops’ brother, Joseph. And it must be through him that she met Pops. My grandparents got married January 1917, and my aunt was born in June of the same year. Doesn’t take a genius to work that one out does it?  Except…

My aunt told mum that she and Pops had been arguing one day (she was trying to organise him against his will, as usual) when he turned round and said “Well, you’re not mine, you’re your Uncle Joe’s”. Whether this was true or not, we will never know. Pops refused to say anything more about it, and Granny had long since died and wasn’t saying anything. Mum tried to pacify my aunt; Pops had been the one to bring her up after all, so of course he was her dad.

And great Uncle Joseph? He was at that time married to a woman who apparently, so the tale went, “would not give in to the lusts of men”. If in desperation he had felt the urge to stray with the young woman he employed, well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?

And this little address book would have been witness to all this, consulted for letters home when she first travelled up to the new city, to a place where she had no friends, listening to the tears of regret as she realised the consequences of her moment of weakness. So now I have my object, I have my title, and I begin…

The Address Book

By Bernadette Miller

There, that wasn’t so difficult, was it? Now just got to get the rest of it down.