Writing, luck, and memories of a wonderful dad - by Rosalie Warren
When I told my dad, years ago, that I’d submitted a novel to a publisher, he gave me a wry smile and said, ‘Well, I hope you have better luck than I ever did.’ I did have some luck – certainly better than my dad did with his writing. He was always rather secretive about it when I was young. I can understand that much better now, though at the time I’d have loved to see what he’d written. The only things he ever showed me were some jokes sent to Reader’s Digest – if I remember rightly, for their feature ‘Humour in Uniform’. I never quite got the jokes, probably because I’d never been in the armed forces myself. Sadly, I don’t think they ever accepted any of Dad’s stories, though to his credit he went on trying for many years. I’m sure he wrote other things too. His favourite author of fiction was P. G. Wodehouse. I have all PGW’s books now, arrayed on my bookshelf, including a number of relatively hard-to-find early works that I managed to track down for Dad in his later life....