Skip this page if you have a low boredom threshold
My earliest writing memory dates from my very first day at school. I was
given an exercise book and wrote my name in the appropriate space on the cover
without being told to. For that simple act, I was promoted a year and spent the
rest of my primary school career being the youngest in the class. In order to
write, I must have been able to read, but the first book I actually remember
was
I moved on to Birkenhead
School and discovered Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons in the
library there. I have been an avid Ransomite ever since. Indeed, like many
claim (including Ellen MacArthur), reading Ransome inspired me to get on the
water and sail boats for myself. I have all his books, fiction and non-fiction,
as well as Hugh Brogan’s excellent biography and other Ransome-related
works.
Throughout my schooldays I wrote what I now know as short stories and
received appraisals from my teachers ranging from ‘this is silly’ to
‘brilliant, but writing not fit for a pig sty.’ I’m still not sure which
element of the latter comment referred to text and which to the handwriting. I also read stuff like Dennis
Wheatley and Dornford Yates (yeah, so what?) then university (although I
majored in history and geography) made me rediscover writers I’d refused to
appreciate before: Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy.
I began to enjoy poetry – Shakespeare and Hardy, Swinburne, and modern(ish)
poets like Philip Larkin and Laurie Lee.
I’m not a
fantasy fan but like many of my generation I was enthralled by Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings. My tastes now are pretty catholic. Some novels I admire
are: Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time (I have all 12
volumes); Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being; A.S. Byatt Possession;
Georges Perec Life: a User’s Manual. In a lighter vein, I like most of
Robert Goddard’s offerings and anything by P.G. Wodehouse or E.F. Benson.
I used to
feel cheated by short stories but then I read those of A.E. Coppard and H.E.
Bates and realised what I’d been missing. Now I’m hooked, I devour shorts as if
they were chocolate bars. I still admire Coppard and Bates but I’ve discovered
so many more literary heroes: Raymond Carver (a super-hero), William Trevor (a
close second), John Cheever, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and so
many others. Writers such as these seem like gods but I console myself by
supposing that their early works were no better than mine. Maybe.