My Bio, A Story Never Told.

Reader warning: You will have to read this story to understand the secret.

This is a story about my introduction to storytelling, and it started when I was just sixteen.

I was at my regular local disco, where a live band was playing, and a guest celebrity DJ was spinning tracks. Partway through the night, the DJ suddenly stopped the music and picked out twenty of us from the dance floor and called us onto the stage, pairing us up without any explanation or introductions. We had no idea what was going on, not until he announced a surprise dance contest. For the next hour, we performed on stage while the disco carried on around us. I was dancing with a girl I’d never met, throwing ourselves into the Jitterbug, the Jive, a mix of disco hits, and even a routine to Slade. One by one, the DJ began sending couples off the stage, narrowing down the competition.

Long story short—we won. That unexpected night led to a string of gigs as backing dancers for a few bands, but that’s a tale for another time. Angela and I quickly became friends, and not long after, lovers. We’d been struck by that bug everyone catches eventually—the kind that doesn’t let go. Love. It clung to us like a terrier with a bone. From that night on, we were inseparable. I kept dancing, while Angela returned to fashion, working as a pregnant model—always in demand. Exactly two years to the day after we met on that stage, Angela gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Seven pounds, seven ounces. We named him Paul.

When Angela decided to take Paul, now three months old by then, to meet his grandparents, I of course, had no objections. In fact, I was glad. She'd fallen out with her parents when she told them she was pregnant, and I was the main reason. They didn’t think I was good enough for their daughter.

I didn’t go with her to Swindon. It didn’t feel right. It would’ve only stirred up tension, and that wasn’t what she needed. This was her chance to make her peace with them. So, she went alone, taking the train.

Putting her on the train that morning was the last time I ever saw Angela or my son.

As she was crossing the pedestrian crossing, she was run over by a hit-and-run driver as she went to catch the return train from Swindon. The driver was never caught. Paul survived. Being only 19 years old, and male, the courts were persuaded to grant sole custody to Angela’s parents. I was not granted visiting rights.

I lost the plot. I could not stay in our house.

A friend of my fathers, an old gypsy, Bommer, heard what had happened and sought me out. He gave me somewhere to hide from the world. He asked no questions and gave me no advice. He asked nothing in return. For the rest of the summer the Autumn and Winter, I lived in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan in an old quarry, away from everyone, even Bommer, who had donated the use of the caravan and somewhere to stay. He left me to my grief. Not because he was insensitive, but that was what I asked of him. The only contact I had with them was from his sister Mahola, who brought me meals to start with, then after two weeks, she would bring the food I needed to cook my own meals with, every week and leave it outside in an old chest. They asked nothing of me.

Then, in early December, I joined them at their campfire. They all welcomed me with open arms, literally, like a long-lost son. I have to admit; it brought tears to my eyes. I was far from being over Angela’s death, but it had been almost five months now, and I felt obligated to find a way to pay Bommer back for his help and understanding. But all he would say was, “one day I or a member of my family will need your help, let’s leave it at that, and say no more.” Over the next month I think I went some way to thanking him.

The land his family had bought a few years earlier at auction came with a quarry and a dilapidated, but massive shed. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of old French wine barrels. Bommer had been breaking them up for firewood, but I found a new and more profitable use for them. Chicken sheds. Some were taller than either of us, and Bommer was a giant of a man, stacked like a brick shithouse. We went on to make beds and even bunk beds out of the larger ones, but mainly they were turned into barrel coops, chicken coops. They sold like freshly baked bread. And I got the handle, Coop, that later morphed into Barrel Coops.

Then in In February we set out with five horse-drawn caravans, and four horse-drawn carts along with a further 5 horses, and headed to the Appleby fair, always taking the back roads where traffic was lighter. The three hundred plus miles took us till the end of May before we arrived at Appleby. Though there were many stops on the way. Little did they know, it would be the last time they would ever travel to Appleby fair by horse and cart. It was the end of an era.

They would time their stops to coincide with arriving at a large village every Saturday, and they would hire the local hall and put up notices for a show they would put on. Singing, storytelling, music, even a puppet show and a juggler. Using it to fund their trip north, it always went down well.

My storytelling started around the campfire one night. Unlike my companions, who told stories every night after eating, I was not old enough to have interesting stories to tell. It was Lavinia, one of Bommer’s many granddaughters, that suggested I make up a story. Suddenly everyone was suggesting a prompt for a story for me to use. We had just spent two days working on a farm, and it was rumoured that the farmer had more than one lover in the village, but Teddy came up with his own variation of it. He suggested, ‘A farmer with two wives’. Surprising even myself, I found it easy to craft a story based on his prompt. They did this several nights on the trot, giving me just five minutes to come up with something. The following weekend, I was on the stage. I had been given three prompts by the audience, and I had until Mahala had sung her two songs to come up with a story. I have to admit, the first few times I fluffed it a bit, even getting booed off the stage once, but the more it went on, the better I became. Plus, Bommer would not let me give in to my stage fright, but more to the point, I started to enjoy it.

I still told stories on the stage on odd occasion through my twenties and thirties for charity events, a few stints at a hospice, and at parties, but never on any regular basis. My main audience now was my children, who would come up with some of the weirdest suggestions you could imagine. One of the best, being the alien that was always hungry, because he was the purple people eater. A prompt derived from an old song my wife loved and was forever singing to them.

With five sons, now all in their twenties or thirties, a surprise arrived just before my fiftieth birthday. A Daughter. She always loved my stories and would invite her friends over, then would insist I told them all a story. I always mock protested, but I loved it, and always gave in.

When my daughter was just thirteen, she had saved up all year and bought me a year’s subscription for MS office, predominately for MS Word, telling me it had a spell checker and narrator built in, so there was no excuse not to start writing some of my stories down anymore. In four years, I have written one trilogy, one tetralogy, one pentalogy and several standalone books, under several pen names.

The thing is, I am severely Dyslexic. I can’t read. My spelling and grammar, it turns out, are not too bad though. But for more than sixty years, I had never tried.

I do use software to help me. MS Word and its narrator, along with a plug-in called ProWritingAid. That’s all it took.

The true hero of this, however, is my daughter, who felt my frustration and sought a solution. Then she did it again just yesterday, when she convinced me to write this for the Reedsy prompt. “Write about a character trying to hide a secret from everyone.”

Dyslexia had been my secret for more than sixty years. Now I set it free.