Small Acorns to Mighty Oaks? by Debbie Bennett

Below is the opening to my very first (unpublished and unpublishable) novel. It was lovingly hand-written in a fancy binder in about 1978 when I was fourteen. No computers back then and nobody even had typewriters at home. I got a manual typewriter when I was seventeen or so, as I recall. It was (is) a crime novel, inspired by a dream I had, and was written in the evenings when I wasn't particularly happy at school and didn't have much of a social life. I don't think I ever showed it to anybody except perhaps a girl at school who did type some of it up for me - although that may have been novel number two when I was seventeen. Neither novels have ever been edited and I've never attempted to submit them or self-publish. They're nowhere near good enough and being only fourteen would not have cut it!

So I’ve typed this up exactly as it appears in my binder, which I still have in the filing cabinet. Every missed comma and dodgy sentence structure! I don't think I've even read this in the last thirty years or so, much less examined it in any depth ...

“Who is he?” Kate nudged Emma violently. “Hey, he’s coming over!” She straightened up, and smiled prettily. The boy, or rather man, since he was obviously older than any of the others present, stopped halfway across the disco floor and gazed around the room, as if looking for someone; he looked at his watch, and walked over to Emma. 

“Wanna dance?” 

Emma smiled in reply, glanced at her friend, and followed him out onto the floor. Puzzled, she studied her partner throughout the dance, finding it difficult to see him properly in the light of the strobes around the disco unit. He was about twenty, possibly older, and extraordinarily good looking, she could see why Kate fancied him. But what on earth was he doing here? Emma herself was fifteen and most of the other dancers were about the same age, at any rate, no older than seventeen or eighteen. Besides this, he seemed to be completely alone, she hadn’t seen him talking to anyone throughout the evening. 

The music ended, and the dancing stopped for a minute. Emma looked at him, and he nodded briefly before walking away, and out of the room. Emma shrugged and wandered back to her friend. 

“Wow! He’s okay!” Kate was ecstatic. 

“Mmm, alright” Emma replied absently 

“What’s up with you, thinking of Dave?” Dave was Emma’s steady boyfriend, living in Nottingham, fifteen miles away. 

“No-o. It’s him.” 

“What about him?” 

“He’s odd. Doesn’t fit in somehow. He’s too old, must be at least twenty, and he’s alone!” 

And when I read this back now, nearly fifty years later, I'm curiously proud of it. It's near impossible to edit a handwritten draft, and while I could have corrected punctuation (and that alright sets my teeth on edge ...), it wasn't something I wanted to do back then. But you know - there's no head-hopping, it's formatted reasonably well and it's not that badly-written.

Get further in and my characters are cardboard and my plot has significant holes. But I did make some notes about things that weren't working. It was just never important enough to make the effort. I'd moved on, as had my writing.

So Kate and Emma are at some kind of disco and there's a much older man, Alan,  who is Not What He Seems. He turns out to be a plant, sent by the bad guys to keep Emma occupied while her house is being burgled. They are looking for some legal documents, but are disturbed when Emma is spooked by Alan's advances and leaves the disco early. Thus starts a chain of events that sets up the rest of the novel.

And what surprises me now are the similarities to my first published novel Hamelin's Child. 2011 and over thirty years later and this opens in a London nightclub with Michael being less than impressed by a creepy older man, Eddie, who spikes his drink and assaults him. 

Here are the opening lines of Hamelin's Child for comparison:

Michael Redford died on his seventeenth birthday – the night Eddie picked him up off the street, shot him full of heroin and assaulted him. 

Michael had been drinking steadily all night, matching Jenny’s Breezers with export-strength lager, and when he saw Jen wrapped around his mate’s brother across the dance floor, he didn’t feel at all inclined to slow down. Totally oblivious to observers, they were all hands and lips – a human octopus of limbs on the red chesterfield sofa with Jenny’s long dark hair covering both their faces. She’d dropped an E in the toilets; he could tell by the shine in her eyes and the way she moved when they’d been dancing earlier – she always came onto him when she was high, then pulled away when he got interested. Michael kicked the pillar next to him in disgust. He hated nightclubs anyway. 

‘She came with you, didn’t she?’ 

Michael turned to see a man standing next to him. Blond hair, cream chinos, polo shirt and too much jewellery. He seemed older than the rest of the punters. 

The man waved his hand in Jenny’s direction. ‘The girl,’ he added, by way of explanation. ‘I was watching the two of you earlier.’ 

Michael nodded. ‘Don’t think she’ll be leaving with me.’ 

‘Girlfriend?’ 

‘Ex.’ 

‘Evidently.’ The man smiled sympathetically. ‘Women are bitches, aren’t they? He’s a dealer, by the way – saw him outside the bogs before. What’re you drinking?’ He pointed at Michael’s empty glass. 

Michael shook his head. ‘No, thanks.’ Now fuck off, creep. Something about the stranger made him uneasy. 

‘Suit yourself.’ The man shrugged and went off to the bar, returning a few moments later with a pint and what looked like a whisky chaser. He held the pint out. ‘Got you one, anyway. You look like you could use it.’ He had an impressive assortment of gold rings on his hand, which suggested serious money, even if the guy was a poser.

Alan and then Eddie - minor bad guys, catalysts who lead into the real crims, although my fourteen year-old writing was nowhere near as dark as later on, possibly fuelled by many years working in law enforcement and drugs investigation in London!

Both novels have a police officer investigating. In the first book we have Alec - I knew precisely nothing about police procedures and it probably shows! Hamelin's Child has Derek, my relatively cliché-free DI (OK he's divorced, but he doesn't have anger issues nor drink too much) who ties several threads together throughout both the Hamelin trilogy and its spin-off Rats trilogy. At least by then, I'd worked extensively with the police and was well-versed in arrest and charge procedures; I'd also taken two cases through crown court as case officer, so I could write court scenes too. But even then, I've never written 'police procedurals', partly because it doesn't interest me and partly because procedure can often change from force to force, never mind as new legislation comes in. When I wrote a police radio dialogue, I ran it through an officer in the relevant force for authenticity and radio call signs.

So who knew how much those early words would influence what came later? Much matured and changed both in plot, depth and maturity in writing. I think I've developed as a writer, although my early scribblings aren't as bad as I thought! The first book was left to languish in a drawer, but Hamelin was agented for a time and won a place on the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger longlist, so I must have learned something?

www.debbiebennett.co.uk