Doors (and a dog) - by Annie Try

 

By Annie Try

My next novel must include someone who has a problem with doors. Why? Because I know exactly what that's like - from repeated experience.

Here’s a tale, a true one, from our recent trip to Keswick:

We were at the Keswick Convention, the accommodation having been booked nearly three years ago for 2020, with the booking carried over to this year. Somehow we had booked a pet-friendly apartment, which was a blessing because our Old English Sheepdog has deteriorated a lot in the past year and was too frail to leave with a carer, so we took her. Unfortunately, when we arrived we realised there was no door to a garden or yard.

This proved a problem when she needed to go out at 5.30 am. My husband, Ken, put his clothes on ready to take her but she needed encouragement to leave the apartment to go out into the communal hall, ready to have a walk in the park just up the road. OES are a stubborn breed. While we both helped her out, the self-locking door to our apartment slammed behind us. We avoided blaming each other somehow! But there we were, stranded in the hall. I was in my pyjamas.

Ken took the dog for a brief walk, leaving me with his fleece so that I wouldn’t feel too exposed if anyone else from the house came into the hall. Basically we waited until the letting office opened at 8.30. Meanwhile, I borrowed Ken’s size 8’s for my size 4.5 feet and set off to find a loo. A just-opening sandwich shop told this strange woman-who-must-have-looked-homeless where there was one. It would cost 40p. I explained why I was there with no money and asked how far I would need to walk for a free one - the till was opened and money passed over to me. Praise God.

There are other door tales - one where I went through the wrong door of a newly-built car park under a shopping mall and ended up lost behind all the shops eventually being escorted back out by security men. Then there’s something that happened at the Christian Resources Together conference  - but that’s a story I’m saving for the ACW Golden Jubilee Writers Day in October.

The analogy of doors is one I tend to use when thinking of God directing me. Doors closed when I tried to access a post-graduate teaching course, but opened when I became the seventh person accepted onto clinical psychology training, when the course usually only took six trainees. I was sure that when I was doing my MA in Creative Writing God opened the door for me, and even nudged me through it, to write about something I was passionate about. So I abandoned the novel I had started and wrote ‘Losing Face’, a story for young people, especially girls, with facial differences.

I have used a door in my novel ‘Trying to Fly’ to portray the difficulties of the heroine who is trying to tackle agoraphobia. But otherwise they don’t feature much in my writing or reading. We take doors for granted, but why? Don’t they tell us a lot about about a character, or the people who live in a particular house?

For example, sometimes you can read the tale of someone who has trouble with doors and realise they are completely scatty! 

Annie Try is the pen-name of Angela Hobday, who writes the Dr Mike Lewis stories. Mike is a fictional clinical psychologist who has his own issues but seeks to restore the mental health of his clients. These are tales of courage, mystery and  triumph. Her first novel, Losing Face, is now out of print but can still be ordered directly from her, hobdayangela@yahoo.co.uk.