Yearly Archives: 2021

The year is ending. Hopefully its disappointments have been coped with and learnt from. We all berate ourselves sometimes, for not trying hard enough, for giving up too soon. Steep learning curves are good for us.

I wish my writer friends perseverance, courage, and lots of self-belief. Let’s aim high, and cheer each other on.

Frog: (Rather unwillingly);

I find myself on Happy New Year duty. Well, as we frogs say, ‘Ribbet, ribbet, ribbet.’

What do you mean, miserable? Actually, from here the view’s quite good.

Overcoming the monster—immediately I think of Jack and the Beanstalk, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding. Monsters definitely wave a flag in many novels for children and young adults too, tales where reader bite their nails to the quick and/or takes a torch under the bedclothes to keep the nasties out.

For some reason, the thought of monsters took me back to my primary school in the nineteen fifties. The children sat in order of cleverness, determined by the number of sums ticked and spellings remembered in the weekly tests. Every day we had to face Miss Woolcock. There’s almost a tremor in my voice as I say that. Oh, the cold fear she could inject into a class of nine-year-olds. Let me tell you about the day I made a blot on my book, and then, trembling, tried to rub it away. Grey-faced, I nearly lost control of my bladder in the abusive torrent, after which Miss Woolcock snapped at me to get to the bottom of the class. I am sure I almost died.

Now, years later, I can see what a tortured woman she must have been. Maybe she’d lost her fiancé in the war, or her parents; maybe she’d been trapped under rubble for hours on end. Maybe she was of a nervous disposition and spent years frightened of pain and death and loneliness. Being a teacher she had to deal with children, maybe knowing that she herself would never be a mother.

Perhaps we all have potential monsters waiting to get us when something goes wrong in our lives. Monsters like anger, jealousy, fear, pride, intolerance, meanness… shall I go on? Do you agree that It’s always easier to see the monster in other people than it is to identify and face our own? What if we love overcoming the monster stories so much because we want to overcome our own monsters?

I hope Miss Woolcock grew to understand herself as the years went by, and didn’t go to her grave still filled with bitterness and rage.

I think I might have a story coming on!

Frog: (gulps) Hiding? Well, a frog does have a vivid imagination, you know.

This is the sort of fairy tale I grew up with in the forties and fifties. I didn’t have many books, and those I owned had very few pictures. This wasn’t such a bad thing as you might imagine, because when I heard a story, the whole thing took place in my mind. Cinderella was poor and ragged. Her sisters were horrid to her, her father a distant figure, her step-mother demanding and unkind.

Modern films and illustrations often make Cinderella so glamorous, and there’s never a raggy and grubby old dress in sight. Even the old-fashioned picture on the left doesn’t do justice to the poor girl’s situation. Perhaps because of my upbringing, I still prefer the ordinary-looking girl I imagined all those years ago. To someone like me, a little girl whose mother had to chop wood to get the fire going in the range on a winter’s morning, who had to fetch water from a tap in the road near our cottage, I can easily empathise with the hardship of the story-girl’s life.

And how amazing and romantic her story seemed. I pictured her singing to the mice that scurried about as she scrubbed and polished. I imagined her as never shrieking at her horrible sisters, but bearing her situation with fortitude. I wanted to be just like her. I was not, of course.

Could anyone real be kind and caring when treated as harshly as our heroine?

Children still love fairy tales, yes, but what I learnt as I looked back at Cinderella and other ‘Rags to Riches’ stories, is that there is something in them that encourages us to be our own person, to strive against injustice and unkindness.

Some of my favourite modern children’s books are ones where the heroes have to fight something or someone much bigger than themselves. They battle against the odds and they win through in the end.

I reckon children will never tire of stories like Lorraine Gregory’s ‘The Maker of Monsters, where we meet Brat, poor, overworked, and alone. Like Cinders he meets his challenges with courage and fortitude.

A hero who finds riches in friendship and kindness. Perhaps the best kind of riches we ever need.

Frog fancies his chances as the Frog Prince.

Once there was a boy…

…whose earliest memories were of bombs exploding, people injured and killed, and fear. A deep, deep fear. Waheed Arian was born in war-torn Afghanistan. He says,’ I spent much of my childhood amongst death and fighting.’ The family escaped to Pakistan, and as refugees lived in camps, often cramped and without basic sanitation. Waheed contracted TB and suffered from malnutrition, which almost killed him. When he was fifteen his parents gave all they had to get him to the UK. He arrived with 100 dollars in his pocket, and very little English.

He became a boy with a quest.

He worked at various jobs to support his family in Pakistan, learned English and studied for his A-levels, because he wanted to be a doctor, making a difference to people’s lives, just as the doctors did in the refugee camps. Waheed says, modestly, ‘I did well enough to be accepted into Cambridge, and I gained additional qualifications from Harvard and Imperial College.’ He qualified as a doctor, and now works for the NHS. His quest hasn’t stopped there, though. This is not the end of the story. He’s developed a pioneering global charity that connects doctors in war zones and low-resource countries with their counterparts in the US, UK, Europe and Australia. During the Covid pandemic, Dr Arian was concerned that Covid has impacted people’s mental health, and he has now launched an online mental wellbeing service. (Read more at https://arianwellbeing.com/about/)

Once there was a girl…

…not a real girl, I know, but once you start reading about Vita in The Good Thieves, she becomes oh so real in your mind. Vita is the heroine you become as you read the book. She’s a stranger in New York, where her grandfather has been cheated out of the castle and land that have been in his family for years. Vita is on a quest to get the property back for her grandfather. She’s plucky and refuses to let fear get the better of her. She makes some unusual friends along the way, and never gives up. The author, Katherine Rundell, is wildly inventive and imaginative.

You want a definition of ‘a quest’? The book is a wonderful example.

Frog: (who has always got something to say)

I shall go where ever my quest shall lead me.

Writers are very sensitive people, so I have some valuable advice coming up next.

Here are three things you should NEVER say to a writer, EVER.

1. Gosh, are you still churning out stories?

2. Are you going to be the next J.K. Rowling?

3. A writer? I’ve never heard of you.

In the face of such daunting remarks, here are three things you MUST do.

1. Keep smiling.
2. Keep writing.
3. Keep believing in yourself.

Frog: (Wistfully) I could write a book about  Froggy Potter and call myself J.K.Toadling.

Please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

A CHILDREN’S BOOK WITH A UNIVERSAL MESSAGE

Imagine an island hundreds of miles off Norway. Windswept, remote and lonely. Always cold, even in summer. There’s a small weather station and a tiny dwelling.

This is where April and her father live for six months.

Some children would hate it. No-one to play with. A dad who loses himself in his work because he’s still grieving after the death of his wife, several years ago. April remembers the time with her mother as ‘a lovely summer holiday she’d once been on.’ In one way, the book is about April’s relationship with her father, but the main plot shows her as a loner, resourceful and brave, and just the right person to help the last polar bear, stranded on the island.

This is a lovely story, in many ways pure fantasy, but with a message that inspires each of us to do whatever we can to reduce climate change and the loss of habitats. It’s illustrated beautifully by Levi Pinfold (though as a boring adult, I wished she had a nice warm hat — Hannah’s description of the wind and weather were chillingly accurate).

This book would make a brilliant gift for anyone aged 8 upwards.

Click the link to find out more about The Last Bear and its talented debut author Hannah Gold 

Frog: The last frog would be an excellent subject for a book. You could put my picture on the front if you like.

When my father was very ill, I gave him an empty journal, hoping he would record some of the things that had happened to him during his life.

After he died, I found the journal. It wasn’t empty, but all it held was a tick-list of when to take his medicines.

My dad had been a soldier in WW2, working in the signals, sending and receiving messages in morse code.

The only tale he ever told my brother and me was about when he was in the Far East, in the jungle. One night he’d walked away from the camp to relieve himself behind a tree. The jungle was so dense he said he didn’t know which way to go, to get back out again. And then he saw two eyes shining in the moonlight. A wild animal was watching him.

The family would have loved to read more of his stories and thoughts.

WRITING A MEMOIR FOR YOUR FAMILY?

A brilliant idea! Make it fun. Make ’em laugh! Tell them stories. Get the grandchildren to do some illustrations.

Don’t insult  Auntie Winifred, but make sure you’re not coming across as some sort of saint either!

The important thing is, just do it!

WRITING A MEMOIR FOR OTHERS?

Yes, I do mean publishing it.

Here’s some great advice from Writer Marion Roach Smith. ‘Memoir is not about you, or me, it’s about something universal. That is, if you want anyone else to read it..’

Author Maggie O’Farrell published her brilliant memoir in 2018. ‘I am, I am, I am’ is a riveting account of her life told in seventeen near-death experiences, and it reads like the best kind of novel. You get lost in the story, and that’s because there’s something in there that makes readers think about their own life experiences.

WRITING A MEMOIR FOR  YOURSELF?

This too can be a satisfying and useful experiment. One of my friends says he’s recording his story for himself, to think about how he grew as a person, how events and opportunities shaped him.

This kind of memoir has to be a celebration, not a means of dwelling on all the daft and/or mean things you ever did, nor all those lost opportunities.

Life’s too short for negative thinking.

Remember, a good story starts with a single word. Go for it!

Frog: (eagerly):

Out of the pond. A memoir from pond to garden in a series of leaps.

The house we lived in at Breachwood Green had once been a pub called The Sugar Loaf. In those days it was a small, detached cottage, just like the houses my children used to draw, with a path leading up to a door in the middle and with a window each side. I can’t remember one of the front rooms at all, because no one ever went in there. My memory of the other room is very hazy. I know there was a cupboard and inside lived a greyish brown lump of plasticine. It had a peculiarly revolting smell, and I was afraid of it. My dad tried to encourage me to approach the cupboard, open the door, and horror of horrors, lift the wretched lump out. I probably did it, because not doing as you were told was not an option. Not for children in those days.

My dad used to make things with this ghastly misshapen ball. He showed me how to form a little pot, the circular base first and then the long worm that had to be rolled carefully and then fixed around the edge to build the side, growing higher and probably wonkier.

I went to pottery classes later in my life. I’ve kept got some of the pots I made, and not all of them are wonky. I’m still not keen on the smell of plasticine.

Fimo’s fun, and so is clay. But not plasticine. Definitely not!

Breachwood Green was a quiet village in the years following the second world war.  We hardly ever saw a car. There was a bus to take us to Hitchin or Luton, the nearest towns. There was a post office, next to a pub, The Red Lion, and beside that the forge where my grandfather, William Tripp, used to have his blacksmith’s workshop.  I never knew my grandfather. He died before I was born.

When I was old enough, I went to the Baptist Chapel on Sunday mornings. It wasn’t far from where we lived, and I walked there on my own. You could let five-year-olds do that in those days. I don’t remember the singing or the lessons, but I can remember very something I did one day. I brought home a hymn book. I don’t know why I did it. My mother was furious with me. I think she saw a life of criminality and theft ahead if it wasn’t stamped out there and then. She insisted that I went to the Sunday school teacher’s house, said sorry and gave the books back. She sent me off on my own, clutching the wretched book, a sense of terror rising with every step.

The Sunday school teacher lived at the end a very long drive, and she had a very snappy little Jack Russell dog, who guarded their property with something bordering on mania. I’d already had a bad experience with a dog, so I was filled with dread when I arrived at the gateway to find Snapper-jaws on duty. Tears slid down my cheeks. I wanted to run and run and run and never go back. However, I didn’t dare go home with the Sunday school book still in my hand. It was a no-win situation.

I’ll tell you what I did, and it was very naughty of me. I threw the book into a ditch underneath a sprawling hedge. There, that was the end of that!

I don’t know what I said to my mother when I got home. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the truth. Sometimes when you’re grown up you have to forgive yourself for something you’re sorry about, something you may have done years ago. I’m sorry I threw the book under a bush. I’m sorry I told my mother a lie. Without Snapper-jaws on sentry duty, I might not have remembered this story so clearly.

I’m sure all my mother wanted was to teach me a lesson – that if you’ve done something bad, it’s right to be sorry. You should own up and apologise, and then you’ll have every chance of being forgiven. I know now that God is the greatest forgiver of all, which is a very good thing.

Anyway, whatever happens, you can always learn something from it.

Frog: (Nervously) Give me a statue any day.