Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist)

© irene waters 2013

I came from a home that was full of books. My father’s study was lined with bookcases as was the hall and at least one wall of every room in the house. My parents loved reading and when my brother and I were small they read to us. They read us books like Wind in the Willows, The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, Gullivers Travels, The Swiss Family Robinson and Alice in Wonderland and many, many more.

My brother followed in their footsteps and became a bookworm. Although I loved reading I was far from being a worm. I was more likely to threaten to eat worms if no-one would come and play with me.  Christmas holidays were a frustrating time for me. We holidayed at the seaside where the rest of my family would lie in bed all morning reading their books and eating their Christmas chocolates whilst I annoyed them all, agitating to go to the beach. Even threatening to hang myself moved no-one from their books except my brother. He stirred out of bed to watch,  crowing when I failed in my attempt due to poor knotting techniques. 

It was however, on our annual seaside holiday at Christmas that I developed my love of writing. One of the presents I received from Santa was a diary. My Father wrote the first entry to show what one did with a diary. Unlike his demonstration of winding the mechanical bunny rabbit  and how to use a pogo stick (neither of which worked again) he put me on the road to using written words for expression of thought. His first entry read “I went to the beach today. The water felt cold. I went ooh arh, ooh arh, ooh arh.  I loved jumping over the waves. It felt like fun.”  Simple words for a seven-year old but it taught me to write how I felt, it taught me humour and it taught me facts and my response to them.

This lesson is probably the reason I am a memoir writer and find fiction very, very difficult to write. I probably had some creative bones in my body but these were squashed at an early age, a year or two after receiving my diary. I enjoyed writing. I wrote everyday. My school teacher set a composition topic “mud” that we were to write about. I wrote about a horse and carriage clopping down the cobblestone street on a wet, miserable night when suddenly the horse stood still, refusing to budge. Getting out of the carriage a puppy was found in a puddle, covered in mud. I kept the puppy, named him Mud and then wrote a story about the puppy. The teacher was none too pleased. She failed my attempt as I had not written about the subject. I often wonder if she had given me a gold star instead of a big F and public humiliation, would I now be writing fiction.

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