When did I know I wanted to become a writer? Or should I say where?
I think actually its been a long process.
When I was 22 I was having a difficult time, I was at college studying to be a teacher. I’d had one really good teaching practice and then I had one really tough one where everything was an uphill struggle. The teacher supporting me was really hard on everything I was doing and I was in a class of very challenging children.
I was struggling.
At the same time, I’d fallen in love, I was with the lovely man who I would marry — Steve.
It was like I was in a world of two extremes. Extreme tension and also real happiness.
I was on a path to becoming a teacher. I always knew I wanted to be a mum, even when I was growing up, I hoped I’d have a big family one day. I feel very blessed to have four children now.
I discovered I loved working with children whilst working at a children’s camp and I just thought — well maybe I’d like to be a teacher. What I didn’t actually realise at the time was standing in front of a classroom and delivering lessons and everything that goes with it would stretch me completely and exhaust me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. It’s been a 20 year journey. I look back and think wow, I’m so glad I never quit in that teaching practice. I could have… I’m so glad that I met so many amazing children and had a small part in shaping so many lives.
So back to when I knew I wanted to be a story writer… an author. So I was in a place of two extremes and I was exhausted. As a Christian I prayed for a breakthrough that God would help me and sustain me through the difficult times. At this time my parents moved from quite an ordinary childhood home in Surrey to a rambling house in Devon with big garden around it. It was really quirky and lots of the walls were painted in dark green. It had lots of wood carvings everywhere within the staircase and along the eaves. The house had secret rooms and ladders where you went through hatches to get in. It was a really unusual house.
When I first went there, I remember thinking the house was a bit dark and cold … but wow… it was so big and the views from the windows were amazing. The location was stunning, it was really near the beach and the garden was a glorious expanse of green.
It was March and the daffodils set the banks around the house ablaze with yellow. The colours and Devon air after a term of stuffy classrooms and long hours of lesson preparation gave my mind and body a chance to stop and be completely refuelled. My room looked out across a sweeping landscape of fields and trees with the estuary and sea in the distance.
My parents bought the house with adopted chickens, ducks, geese, doves and goats, which mum proceeded to name imaginatively giving each character a story.
The house was actually built by the author Henry Williamson, who wrote Tarka the Otter. He had acquired the field at the top of a hill and had been given special permission to build there. I don’t think he ever actually ever lived in the house my parents lived in, although some of his family did. He did spend time in the dwellings on the edge of my parents house though. After Henry Williamson died and his family moved away they decided to keep part of the field. This was owned by the Henry Williamson society. On this land there was a small older house which didn’t have any electricity or water or toilet. Then at the furthest corner there was a writer’s hut where Henry Williamson used to sit and write some of his stories. It is still there now.
As I relaxed and spent time in Devon at this home with its secret loft hatches and rambling garden with runner ducks and a writing hut in the adjacent field, it started to ignite ideas and refresh my mind in a way I hadn’t expected. Rather than going home to just destress, unwind my mind felt like it was being woken up to new possibilities. The noisy buzz of college and subsequent stress of teaching became a faint hum in that glorious place and my creative brain had a chance to open up again. As I walked along Devon lanes and long sandy beaches or sat in the bluebell woods and daffodil banks I discovered a lost voice that had always been there. My storytelling voice.
Over the next few years I worked hard teaching, being a mum and as a potter (another creative idea ignited through an old kiln left behind for a few weeks at the Devon house). Life was busy, happy, hard at times. Going back to my parents’ home was always an oasis of loveliness amid times of new babies, birthdays and holidays. I started to write some stories down and over the years tweaked them and rewrote them. I always went back to the inspiration I’d first felt as a stressed 22 year old when visiting that quirky house for the first time. This along with praying to God for direction helped me write imaginatively and freely.
Then my parents moved.
Of course we knew they would one day… How could a house that I hadn’t grown up in have such an impact on me? Over the 22 years that my parents lived there things hadn’t been easy for us financially. At times making ends meet had been difficult. When we moved into a 3 bedroom terraced house we had hoped it would be a stepping stone to somewhere bigger where we could stretch out and have adventures in. In fact it has become our 17 year long family home. It has looked after us well, but those moments of peace in my Mum and Dad’s rambling garden and spacious house came to an end. We had to find our space and adventures elsewhere. A short time working and living in Kenya certainly gave us space and adventure — but that is a story for another time. For now though our terraced house is our home and our adventures and space are in the nearby hills around us and in our memories and imaginations.
The door to the quirky house is closed to me now and instead a new family enjoys its secrets and its charm. The wonderful thing is the stories I created in my mind have continued to flow, in fact they are clearer now and more desperate to escape onto a page. All sparked from those first visits to the house with its secrets and treasures of the nearby writing hut. I have recently published two stories and written many more… I hope the essence of that lovely home is in my books. I hope that the readers find the same oasis of freedom that I felt when I was there, as they turn the pages of each book I write.
