Boxes of treasures

Horse-riding heroine ...

My mother died in February, and my siblings and I have been clearing out her flat.  I found her ‘box of treasures’ – our stories, poems, pictures, pieces of art, hand-drawn birthday cards and Mother’s Day cards. 

By far the biggest collection of stories is mine.  There are well over ten transparent folders containing my poetry collections and novels, all written between the ages of five and eleven.  My modus operandi was to create the title and cover page, map out the chapters, do all the illustrations, and then plan a plot to fit the pictures.  Most of my stories were unfinished.  However, a few of them were complete, like ‘The Paradise Seahorse’. 

There is one completed magnum opus, an eccentric fanfic populated with my favourite cartoon characters of the time (the early 1970s).  There is also my beloved Selbornia Island saga, originally designed as a series of six or seven books.  The fictional island in question (named after my street) was situated at the mouth of the Bristol Channel as it opens out onto the Atlantic, and the geography was inspired by the Devon coastline, where my family spent a couple of summer holidays.  My three main protagonists were two girls and a boy, keen horse-riders all, who spent much of their time entering show-jumping competitions, or camping out on the island Swallows and Amazons style, or rescuing horses from some unscrupulous capitalist who would of course get his comeuppance (“I would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for you pesky kids!”)  Alas, not much remains of this series.  I wish it did, because it was my favourite creation and I was very fond of it, despite only ever finishing the first volume.  What remains are some hopeful illustrations and chapter headings for the other books, but not much actual text.  Of course, it is amusing for me to read now, especially as one of the principal female characters is very much a ‘Mary Sue’.* She even has my name. 

I imagine that many of us in the ACW wrote stories as children.  I didn’t write mine for an audience: they were my own private childhood fantasies, and I would have been deeply embarrassed to have had them read aloud.  My mother kept them – she was perhaps the only person who ever read them.  But they were the springs of my creativity. 

Just write ...



I’m a writer. I wrote stories and poems as a child, I write stories and poems now.  I’ve had a few (very) modest successes with my writing – and I also wish I’d been far more productive and disciplined.  I guess many of us feel like that, including the more successful writers in the ACW, the ones who’ve actually got their work into print.

But there’s no point in wallowing in regret.  Just get on with it.  God likes it when we write.  All that creativity we expressed as children will not go to waste, if we cultivate the gift God gave us.

 

*For those of you not familiar with the term, a ‘Mary Sue’ is an authorial insert, the author inserting herself as a character in the story.  The term originates with a parody of Star Trek fanfic, in which a teenage fanfic author – the Mary Sue – inserts her own character aboard the starship Enterprise and dazzles the ship’s crew with her brilliance and beauty and embarks on a romance with Kirk or Spock or some passing alien.  The Mary Sue is usually flawless and perfect: pure wish-fulfilment on the author’s part.

 

Philippa Linton is a Lay Reader in a local Anglican church.  She works full time in the Education and Learning Department of the United Reformed Church.  Her favourite childhood authors include L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Rosemary Sutcliff.  As an adult reader, she enjoys many genres including high fantasy and soft sci-fi, as well as some contemporary fiction.  The best book she read recently was Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?   She is currently reading Rachel Held Evans' Searching for Sunday.