@sandradavies
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Read, enjoyed and commented, but comment didn’t appear. I thought it very well captured the claustrophobia of village life. I haven’t got into the habit of submitting any of my stories; just self-published a collection so as not to lose them.
How long have you got? btw, I re-read your story for ‘Bump in the night’ yesterday, and was much impressed , all over again. Good stuff.
Know what you mean about ‘just nice’. Sarah Winman’s ‘Still life’ had that effect – a thoroughly ‘feel good’ effect, in part for location. Which is no bad thing, since I do re-read for comfort. And also find that writing that takes my breath away one day, might not have the same effect on another. No wonder this writing lark is so hard!
A quick glance at p.82, and I suspect it was the brutal blowjob (but more subtly described). I am aware of a degree of wariness with each book of hers I buy but she always does it for me in the end. I am also very aware (in a science-minded family) I lack analytical skills, so can’t always justify my reasons to like or dislike (and hence am crap at analysing my own writing)
Same here, with stories, although ‘Butcher’s perfume’ in ‘The Beautiful Indifference’ blew me away.
Ditto Benjamin Myers?* I’ve just finished his ‘Male Tears’ which is short stories and much less impactful (to me) than his novels.
*not at the Festival!
I confess I’ve never read Mrs Dalloway, but have ‘Burntcoat on my tbr pile. Fell heavily for Sarah Hall having picked up ‘How to paint a dead man’ in a charity shop, some years ago.
Quick count says I’ve bookmarked 19, but I don’t know if all are online, which they need to be because I’ll not be there in person :-(.
Thoughts for today
Writing this on the fifth day of June – my daughter’s 51st birthday and the third day of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations of a reign of 70 years – my memories span a similar length of time. In June 1953, once again off school and suffering with the recurring pain of a persistent ear infection, my mother attempted to divert me with a blank scrap book; magazines packed with pre-Coronation pictures, scissors and (presumably) some sort of glue. I remember my impatience with the time and care required to snip carefully around the intricacies of coach wheels and bejewelled tiaras as vividly as I do my solitary wait in June 1971; in a high-ceilinged, cream-painted hospital room, my state of mind more curious than nervous. aware that, this baby choosing to arrive 4 ½ weeks early I’d missed out on ante-natal classes (and that my ignorance matched my stupidity in choosing ‘Anna Karenina’ as a suitably lengthy book to fill the time.)
A sense of being contained within a glass bubble kept me calm and the final slither of well-lubricated limbs told me it was done (although I questioned their assurance it was a daughter, weighing a bit above 4 ½ pounds) since instinct told me to expect a son.)
Looking back I recognise that this balance of ignorance as to what was to come, followed by dealing as best I can (good intentions often distorted by further ignorance, but always ameliorated by the support of my husband) is what has got me through life so far.
I’m less blithely optimistic, unable to remain ignorant of the fact I’ve exceeded my three score years and ten; that the horizon will stay distant for much longer, but can’t complain I’ve not had my share of sunrises. Though I’ve never yet read ‘Anna Karenina’)
Well done @ Knicky – I agree with Sea, there should be more, because the writing was, as ever, fabulous. (Thank you too for your kind words) And I too had to check @Alex’s on Google that my my guess was right. 1961, eh?
Well done Sea. Yours put me in mind of the This might hurt book/TV series, very important pressure. And thanks Knicks for giving me the opportunity to play with plot possibilities.
Attempt to alleviate some plot pressure!
Monday they returned from Suffolk, Luke taking over the driving just before they reached the A14, having said to Fran, ‘You do the wriggly village bits. Easier on my arm if I drive the motorways.’
‘No worries.’ A lie. Except for easing the small concern Luke didn’t over-do it with his still-healing arm. Her not driving meant she had head space to re-sort the many and diverse worries she did have. Re-order them, attempt to allocate priorities.
At least the visit to her mother had dealt with some of the longer-outstanding ones. Ended the seven year non-speaking hiatus, begun when she’d stormed out, screaming about false-accusations (directed towards her was first love, now ex-boyfriend) after her step-sister’s suicide, to join the police.
And she’d finally been able to confirm her father hadn’t abandoned her mother simply because he’d not wanted a daughter. Not at all: he had been determined to – and until recently, successful at – escaping a five-year jail sentence, for fraud.
Much more recently – until just last week, when a DNA match – his found in the bed of a moderately successful local author subsequently found dying on a nearby beach – indicated they were blood-related, thus dictating a conflict of interest it had been Fran’s job – as DS Lloyd – to ascertain whether he’d additionally been responsible for that woman’s death.
She was still allowed to seek, to contribute intelligence. And it was … unfortunate that the most useful was being unearthed by Baz Rose. Her husband’s oldest friend, and the one man she needed to avoid. For her sanity’s sake For Luke’s sake. For the sake of Baz’s marriage. Of her own. (Less than three months old.) And for the sake of the eleven-week foetus ensconced within her belly. Father … uncertain.
But the first thing she had to do after returning home was visit her Gran’s house, having been told her on-the-run father had been hiding out there. Left evidence he was looking for ‘documents’. She’d go first thing tomorrow. Not tell Luke; he’d worry.
Next morning, unlocking the door, had she not been worrying about worrying Luke she’d’ve paid more attention. Noticed the absence of post on the doormat. Smelled the alien shower gel.
Because by the time it was too late there was only one more thing to worry about.
The pocket-size gun he pointed towards her.
For a mad, mind-blowing moment, Fran believed his firing it would solve everything. Welcomed the thought.
[413 words]
Thank you Ath, for comp and comments, and very well done Knicks. Seagreen (who gave me lovely images), and Kate., whose teddy could well be a friend of mine,
I lied.
Summer of sixty-one – when Percy Faith’s ‘Theme for a Summer Place’ persistently played along the telegraph wires, exhaling hauntingly into the ether – was one of much excitement and promise for the girls of the small Hertfordshire village where I lived, thanks to a recent influx into the village of no fewer than eight new males, mostly of an age to be of interest.
Sean, Christy Mick and Joe, (Liam a bit young), Irish and each of them fascinatingly different in appearance and personality, moved into the estate opposite my parents’ bungalow. South through the village, cousins John and Steve (John’s mother owned and managed the Wool Shop) To the north, newly-occupying another bungalow, another Steve and, a younger brother, Jack.
In the following months those who had the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge, made progress, aided and empowered by such songs as Helen Shapiro’s ‘Don’t treat me like a child’; Billy Fury’s ‘Halfway to Paradise’ and Elvis’s ‘Surrender.’
Me, I got German measles. And my parents were very strict.
So it was April 1963, a youth club trip to The Fifty Nine Club in Hackney Wick, run by the “Ton up Vicar before the Steve living to the north and I “got together” (i.e. snogged on the coach throughout the journey home.)
A date for the following night was made: the cinema in Bishop Stortford.
“Telling” my parents opened a floodgate of questions:
“How old?”
“Eighteen”
“How get there?”
“Bus” (Taken as read, catching the last one back meant leaving thirty minutes before the film ended)
“Has he a job?”
“Yes.” (And gives his mother £3 10s of his wages every week.)
“What qualifications?”
“A levels.” Getting fed up. “He was accepted for Medical School, but changed his mind!” Then, sensing victory, “We’re only going to the cinema – it’s not as if I’m intending marrying him!”
That April date was fifty-nine years ago. I knew before the end that night, waiting to catch the bus home, I’d found the man I could be me with. And three and a half years later, we did marry. And have lived happy ever after.
And I thank my lucky stars that his parents, thinking of the cost of medical school, sold their house in Ponders End and moved out of London, so as to free up cash to fund it, unaware he’d change his mind.
[394 words]
Congratulations Ath, an intriguing tale and well-deserved top place. And thank you Raine for providing me with a very useful opportunity to work out a scene in my current wip as well as inspire others to provide entertaining tales.
A question of perception
After, naked, panting; towelling stinging sweat from our eyelids, we stepped outside through the open French windows into the still-warm August night. A quick sideways glance: he as relieved as I to no longer be the focus of intense female attention. Relieved it had ended – honourably? Yes. That could honestly be said. I’d refused to claim a recent-mended humerus as handicap, even knowing he’d been training. I far more needed an honest win. To gain victory over my all-but-blood brother. In order to forgive him. To let go the ever-present – and illogical and unnecessary conviction that only by doing so could I accept the possibility of his blood flowing in the veins of one or both of the babies Fran would very soon be giving birth to. To accept, black-haired or not, it was mine.
This wrestling match – I’d known, to be sure of lasting four two minute rounds (that the only compromise) I’d needed to force the first fall soon as possible. The naked bit had been Annabel’s idea: she did paintings of the male torso. Wanted models. Not a problem: as infants, we’d rolled naked together, blankets on a summer lawn; bathed together as winter-muddy schoolboys, comparing scabs. Teenage, we’d checked ourselves against Baz’s elder brothers – size; the advent of hair – and later, when it looked likely to matter, each other.
In part (and shamefully) it still mattered. Because, not that I ever asked Fran, it further prompted us – me – here today.Unnecessarily. Because now, standing side by side after what had, been perhaps the most unexpectedly exhilarating fifteen, twenty minutes of our shared lives – bodies striving, as they’d done when we were boys; now more muscular and, in Baz’s case, hairier, each to subjugate the other, I’d come both to understand Fran’s claimed sexless appreciation of the pleasure of such fleshly contact and to realise it a privilege to have the upbringing of a child of Baz’s loins.
Knowing it important, I turned to say this to him, but he was gazing skywards. Pointing to where the heavens glittered, beneath a shower of silver dust.
‘Look.’Ed came out, informed us it the promised Perseid meteor shower, followed by a glowing, triumphant Annabel and our wives. Fran relieved: she’d feared me further damaged. Madigan uncertain what she’d witnessed.
Baz’s problem.Hands joined, we stayed watching; our problems further shrinking to insignificance.
[396 words]
Congratulations Raine – so uncomfortably vivid! – and to all of you who managed to fight down an adversary, real or fictitious. And thank you Knicks for competition and comments.
Not exactly ‘Overcoming Adversary’
Truth is, I can’t think of anything big enough in my life to count as ‘adversity’. (If it was big, I either ignored, walked painlessly around, or didn’t even notice it.
So I’m giving you, ‘My writing journey‘, which is as close as I can get.If we’re talking about ‘proper’ conscious writing; wanting to set down on paper a story that had been building, sentence by sentence, night after night in my head, as a means of preparing myself for sleep, my journey began when I was around thirteen.
The hero was an amalgam of characters based on television cowboys (Rowdy Yates et al) and went by the name of Jet. Skinny, black haired, scowling, unpredictable and undoubtedly (albeit undefinedly) ‘bad’.
I, of course, was the heroine (transformed into something a good deal more attractive than actuality).
I was kidnapped. Taken, at what must have been a great descriptive length, to a hut in the woods where … knowledge fell far short of yearning.Stupidly, (stupidly, stupidly) so buoyed by the beauty and power of my words, I read the story aloud to my parents, aware within half a minute of their discomfort, distaste and and embarrassment.
The following weekend they sent me to stay with a favourite aunt. I returned to an emptied desk and the news that my cat Pip was dead.
I didn’t attempt to write fiction again for best part of fifty years.2008 I gained an MA in Cultural History and a prize for my dissertation, assured over and over that I could ‘really write’. 2009 (having researched it for 20+ years) I wrote a family history my children might enjoy reading. My daughter declared it ‘boring’ and in January 2010 recommended I join Six Sentences, an online writing group. A challenge to “write something sexy” led me to scrabble together six discarded sentences from something part-wishful, part biographical. That grew to sixteen episodes. Six weeks later, the three-month baby in that tale reached sixteen, and demanded I tell her story. Result: three novellas plus two full size novels, the first of which done in NaNoWriMo 2010. (Biggest surprise there was what a doddle 50K words!) 2011 I added the extra challenge of writing a crime novel (not having read more than a handful myself). This was ‘Step So Grave’. An ‘unwieldy disaster’ according to my daughter.
But the characters grabbed me and would not let go. I’m now on the first draft of book 6
They are not, not entirely, crime novels. One reader said ‘Love Triangles with murder’ which is perfect. And they are all books I enjoy reading. I’ve self-published four. But (and this perhaps my unadmitted adversary) I’ve not yet gone down the route of seeking agents, publication.Knicks, you very closely echo my thoughts about participation in the comps (and in the Den as a whole, to be honest, despite Ath’s striving to make it a more use-friendly site) but I think the answer IS just to press on with setting one – if we join the non-participants, they have us beat.
And yes, I do know how Life leaches away time, am well aware each member of my usually supportive SE Group has other demands but I still think it it too soon to give up. So have at it Knicks – I for one am looking forward to whatever challenge you come up with.December destined to be a quiet month, I suppose, and very few of you seemed to have suffered from the prurient curiosity about the activities of Jack and Jill’s activities I did, Nevertheless the two entries submitted were a pleasure.
Ath’s trawl through several nursery rhymes returned me to childhood, browsing through books illustrated by the likes of Mabel Lucy Atwell. (‘Bouquet’ providing a pinch of grown-up spice.)
And (unless I’m reading it wrong) ‘prurience’ the perfect word for pondering on what I think poor Jill suffered (this such a multi-faceted tale), which earns Knicks top place this month, and thank you both for taking up the challenge.Thanks, Ath, though I’m not sure I’d welcome being 21 again, in many ways (all those nights with screaming babies!!)
Come on folks! Jack and Jill went up a hill … As a child you must’ve wondered what happened to send them tunbling down! It’s my birthday on Friday (a horribly big one) so please present me with a story for the December comp.
Thank you Ath, and thank you Knicks for a version I wish I’d thought of , so many excellent phrases. Now to try to craft an irresistible competition!!
Failed on the basics.
I’d been riding pillion on a BSA since my teens. Clandestinely to start, because my parents forbade me, but by 2004 I was well past that, and three years past my first BSA rally, which had taken us to Australia. Being one of 200 bikes wending our way across rolling golden hills an unforgettable experience. Even so, that June morning, emerging from the ferry terminal to read, “Berlin 623 km” was somewhat daunting. To start we were a group of six or seven, not following the same route (we’d hotels booked) but all obliged to spend a lot of time on the autobahn.
After bit I began to wonder about what riding a bike involved. What was he doing every time he jigged his left foot up and down? With all those km to wonder I guess that was where the desire to do it myself was born.
BUT
But the one time I’d sat astride one of his bikes and followed his careful instructions, I’d been so surprised when the thing moved (and lacking any instruction to steer) that I went straight into the wall of his house. Slowly enough not to damage either me or the bike (It was early enough in our relationship for him to ask about me first).Years passed. We acquired children and cars. He gave up bikes until he retired, quite quickly amassing half a dozen or more. I thought again about riding a bike.
Booked a course. Was complimented on the suitability of boots, jacket, helmet. Sat astride a bike. Talked though all I needed to do, in what sequence. Did as instructed.
BUT as with my (now husband) I wasn’t told to steer, and to compound the problem, the instructor stood at the front of the bike.
It was inevitable I’d knock him over.
Luckily, without damage.
He was encouraging. ‘Try riding a pushbike for a bit. Get your balance. Come back next week.”
I did, but I’d lost my nerve by then.
And I knew, deep down, my husband didn’t deserve to be put though the worry of me on one of his precious BSAs.
So I stuck to riding pillion, surprised by how many said how brave I was to do so.
[373 words excluding title]Another pieced-together piece, and only 245 words, but best I can manage.
Bourbon dreaming 28 December 2012
A bottle of Makers Mark from my husband for Christmas and a wine-free tea (Köstritzer Schwarzbier instead) so I took a glass of bourbon to bed with me, along with John Rebus.
And I dreamt, more vividly and memorably than usual, with more logic than usual too but little of it, nevertheless.
A dawn-dark car park wherein we had to wait permission for a place and then a pale blue pillowcase of clothes.
A French class I had to prove my credentials for – and then find the classroom.
An attractive man in a blue and white check shirt, re-drawing in red ink a poor photocopy map of the university layout: three capital ‘A’s, top points converging.
A conversation in a celebrity-crowded corridor with Camilla Parker-Bowles concerning the health and whereabouts of Andrew Lloyd Webber.By morning, the alcohol should have dissipated, but enough remained for one last dream, just before I wake (so the sense, the emotion, the wishful thinking and regret of it stays all day)
In this dream, a man I’ve long and lightly fancied, for his gunslinger walk and easy smile, sits behind me, naked (as am I, but for a hospital gown). We gaze in silence across a hazy Tuscan valley, olive trees dusty against a pale blue sky. Lombardy pines imply the twisted lies of adulterers, as his erection emulates a fancy-carved church candle.
Even before I wake I curse my eager clumsiness, grateful for his understanding grin.Late to this, but well done indeed @Knicky, for a poetic tale. Also to @Athelstone – I too had a lane like that in the place where I was born, which decades later had its magic buried beneath tarmac.
Thanks @Seagreen for the challenge and the feedback – I did enjoy the opportunity to just play.
