Authors Electric

AE blogs are a treat and, quite often, thought-provoking, as Bill Kirton’s last one about where ideas come from. It’s a topic I’ve used before about my picture books, but this is about now and chain reactions. I woke up the other morning thinking about my Great-aunt Scilla – christened Priscilla but known as Setfire by her sister, my lovely Nan, because she couldn’t pronounce Priscilla and Setfire was the nearest she could get. It turned out to be prophetic; Scilla’s habitual stance towards other people was condemnatory, or so it seemed to me. I later learned from Nan, who had birthed and brought up eight children and also housed Grandad’s parents and his six brothers until they married and moved on, that Scilla had had an illegitimate child and given him up for adoption. She might have had no choice in the matter – this was West Cornwall in the early 1900s – but hers was a soured and solitary life thereafter.   I don’t know why Scilla popped into my head as I woke that morning...

Before my next brother was born and we were allotted a prefab, we lived with my mother’s family in an old stone-built house with three stories and a basement. It’s still there, now called Wealden College, a centre for psychotherapies. At the time we lived there, the family comprised my Great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and my mother’s siblings; three aunties and four uncles.   After the birth of my brother we still went to the old house every day. It was a magnet for all its nestlings, long after they’d flown to places of their own and it was near the local primary school so all the children had their mid-day meals at Nan’s and were collected from there after school. There were too many of us to eat at the table at weekends, so the children sat along the big old sofa in the window bay to have their fish and chips (from the shop across the road). Toast was made over the open fire, with long brass forks. White bread from the local baker – we were lucky if we managed to b...