You ask me why do I write? I do not really know and have often wondered myself when facing an empty screen without a thought in my head. lt was even worse before I had a laptop and when it was necessary to write, by hand, rewrite, and continue rewriting until I reached grammatical perfection? Writing does not come easy to me. lt is a struggle. I lay awake during the night, thinking, thinking and thinking of what I can write. Sometimes everything fits into place and I say it over and over again so that I shall not forget it when I want to get it down on paper, only to find that it has completely gone from my memory the following morning. So, perhaps it is a masochistic tendency that drives me on. A form of self punishment - but for what?
In hindsight, I suppose I have always enjoyed putting pen to paper. I remember vividly as a child writing to my two uncles, who were abroad on active service in the second world war. Childish words, deliberately spelled wrongly, to make them laugh. I even imagined that my work was so funny they would pass it around their mates who, in turns would gain pleasure, even solace, from my literary genius in the danger and turmoil of their lives. Doing my bit for the war effort, I told myself. . . .. or could it have been vanity?
Apart from picture books, the Dandy annual at Christmas and a yearly Sunday School price for good attendance, books did not feature in my life until I was eleven years old and started bringing my text books home from Grammar School Sadly the childrens’ classics eluded me. My parent, like many others of that era, were only very basically educated so “our library” was practically non-existent. Indeed, I could nearly count the number of books in the house on the fingers of one hand; People of All Nations” a one thousand page black and white tome of weird, wonderful and wicked pictures of different cultures and tribes - where I knew exactly which page to turn to, a bible, a dictionary, a soft backed book on the Royal Flying Corps, in which my father had served in the 1914/18 war, prior to the formation of the Royal Air Force, and my very favourite, an instructional book on card games. This substituted as a music book which I would place opened on the sideboard, where I played everything from nursery rhymes to great concertos on the ‘piano’ we did not have, and which I so passionately desired.
Whilst there were few books and, sadly, little encouragement to read, we, as children were never short of a story. My mother, with her wonderful imagination, would tell us delightful, funny or even sad, tales which she made up as she went along. Could it be the imaginative mind which I inherited from her that I turn to for inspiration in my pursuit of authorship?
Whatever, something drives me on, and does there really have to be a reason - other than that I enjoy seeing my thoughts and words in print? Yes, it is obviously vanity!
Molly Johnson
