Let me take you back in time to Theydon Bois County Primary School, nestled in Epping Forest, West Essex. It’s 1972. I’m six years old, sitting in Mrs Camus’s class. I’ve just made a fantastic discovery. Using our standard issue chunky crayons, I’m able to create a pleasing shade of pink on my drawing by using first red, then white.
Mrs Camus asked us all to write something down in our writing books (we didn’t call it literacy then). I drew a picture of a lady wearing a pink dress using my new two crayon technique, then carefully wrote these words in wobbly writing. “My aunt came round. We went out.”
That day, sitting on my little wooden chair in Class Three, I became a writer.
My aunt had not come round. I had actually never met her due to an exciting family feud. We had not gone out. We rarely went out. It was all made up. It was the first time I realised that you could write something which was not true and get a gold star for it. Mrs Camus was very pleased.
Back then, our young minds were formed by reading about the lives of Janet and John. When you could prove that you were a confident reader, you graduated to the gender specific world of Peter and Jane. Life was simple. Mum stayed at home and cooked and cleaned, aided by Jane, while Dad went out to work then came home and flew a kite with Peter. They may have had a dog. I could barely count to ten and was useless at sport, but when it came to reading and writing, I was a prodigy. I whizzed through each misogynistic tale at top speed, finding that I could read twice as fast as everyone else and still retain every word in my memory.
In the long hot summer of 1977, I was in my last year at Theydon. We sweltered through the days with the smell of chalk dust and powder paint in the air. One day, we were asked to write a poem. I was delighted and immediately set to composing some verses.
I produced a poem about the forest. A few days later, a strange man appeared in our classroom accompanied by the Headmistress. Most unusually, our teacher seemed nervous and there was lots of frowning and head shaking at the quartet of spirited boys on the table by the glockenspiels.
I suppose the man was the 1970s equivalent of an Ofsted inspector. There was certainly a lot of bowing and scraping going on. Suddenly, he loomed up behind me and asked to read my poem. I didn’t really have a choice, so I muttered something and sat there with my cheeks burning while he read it. He made approving noises and the Headmistress murmured, “That’s a remarkable poem for a child of her age.” I seemed to have passed some kind of test. It felt pretty good.
Life went on. I passed the Eleven Plus which meant that I ended up at the local girls’ grammar. I hated it and pushed the idea of being a writer to the back of my head. I had enough to do getting through the days without wasting energy on a dream which was never going to come true.
My twenties and thirties were the usual whirl of work, making friends and finding out who I might be. I was pretty hazy on the latter, but deep down, somewhere in that busy life, a little voice would occasionally remind me that I was a writer. I ignored it, naturally. People would sometimes talk about following their dreams, but I had no idea what that meant. To me, giving a voice to that six-year old girl with her green notebook and crayons was tantamount to offering a fragile Christmas ornament to an angry rhino. Why would you?
Two years ago, four things happened in one week. None of them were huge, in the grand scheme of things, but they conspired to send me into a spiral of enormous sadness. I felt helpless. Life was grey. I went to see a counsellor.
“Ruth, you’re a writer.”
On my second appointment, we talked about writing. I told him the story I’ve just told you. He said, “Ruth, you’re a writer.” I snorted in disbelief.
And yet. Driving home, a sentence dropped into my brain and wouldn’t go away. I sat down and wrote 10,000 words in a day. Then another 40,000. In five days, I wrote 70,000. I didn’t even have to think. A whole world came tumbling out, peopled with characters I seemed to know. Then I started writing poems. Again, I didn’t think. They simply fell out of my heart.
And that is how I became a writer. Through pain, low self-esteem, hope, sadness and doubt. One of my favourite quotes is this: “Writing is easy. You just sit down and open a vein.”
I don’t use crayons any more. It’s been a while since I did a drawing of a lady. However, I am, most certainly and without doubt, a writer. Thank you, Mrs Camus.