‘Are you from a writing family?’
This was a question Prof. Jonathan Jackson posed to me when we sat down recently to talk about ‘Care & Control’ and my journey as an author so far. I really liked that question and felt it warranted some exploration.
The short answer is no.
My parents were born in Mauritius. They both completed their statutory education there before coming to the UK for work. My mum was the youngest of six, all bar one of whom had followed a similar path before her into the NHS. As the eldest of seven, my dad had to work to provide for the family because his father had died when my dad was a teenager.
They met in Essex whilst they were training as nurses there. At that time, nursing was very much a vocational job. There was no requirement to complete a degree. For various reasons, neither of them pursued any higher education, even later in life. I suppose there was no need to, plus they were busy working and caring for my brother and I.
My dad was the more academic of my parents – he loved getting involved with my homework, particularly maths and science. I think he liked the discipline and absoluteness of those subjects. My mum, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. She’d be the first to say that she didn’t have ‘book-smarts’ but she was savvy and practical.
My dad was a voracious reader and still is. He loved the classics (Dickens, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Agatha Christie, James Hadley-Chase, to name a few); Ma, on the other hand, was more of a ‘Woman’s Own’ kind of girl!
From an early age, they put a lot of emphasis on education. Reading was part-and-parcel of that. Like my dad, I tore through books at a rapid rate. Even after lights-out, it wasn’t unusual to find me sat under the covers like a tentpole with the bedside light reading a book. The love of reading seemed to go hand-in-hand with a love of writing stories. English was always my strongest subject and I was never happier than when I was composing some tale or other.
In my first year of high-school, it got me into a little trouble. I tried to process moving from a small, sheltered primary school to the vast, stern-feeling Bradford Grammar School by writing a story for my English homework entitled ‘The Demon Physics Teacher.’
At my tender age, it hadn’t occurred to me to disguise some of the characters. Needless to say, there was a varied cast of heroes and villains drawn from the faculty. With a glint in her eye, my Head of Year Mrs MacDonald (a heroine of the piece) gave me the required ticking-off before praising my fertile imagination.
Fast-forward a few years, I won my first creative writing competition with a short story called ‘Practical Joker’. It was along the lines of the Point Horror genre I was into at the time. I remember being handed the £20 cheque from the headteacher as my prize, and my dad insisting on giving me the cash so that he could frame the cheque. It still sits proudly on my old bedroom windowsill at their house.
I also wrote (but never shared) at 75,000-word novel. It was crap – the ramblings of an angry, confused adolescent trying to write about things beyond his years, drawing influence from whatever teen dramas were on TV at the time. My parents nurtured this interest by buying me a ‘how-to’ book about creative writing and setting me up with a local author, Lesley Horton (sadly, no longer with us), to coach me.
Lesley led the local Writer’s Circle and had published a number of crime fiction novels herself. We used to sit in her home office and work on my manuscript for an hour each week. I used to marvel at the two bookshelves in there, groaning under the weight of everything from the Oxford English Dictionary to Gray’s Anatomy. One wall had a small whiteboard, sectioned into chapter numbers and dotted with Post-It notes. This was her technique for planning out her novels and is pretty much the method I use today.
Even though that early novel was drivel (it was, there’s no getting around it!), what it did give me was discipline. Discipline to sit down and write, discipline to ruthlessly prune anything that didn’t take the story forward, discipline to focus on detail.
My writing was nurtured by teachers at school (not just the English Department, but also the Classics Department – got grammar?!) and Lesley; again, all made possible by the efforts and sacrifices of my parents.
This grounding is what has allowed me to finally write ‘Care & Control’. I was glad to be able to acknowledge Mum and Dad in C&C and thank them for making it possible.
So, whilst I don’t come from a writing family in the traditional sense, my family have still fundamentally influenced my journey as an author.
Roshan
PS – my dad is in the process of reading ‘Care & Control’ over in Mauritius. Every so often, I’ll get a Whatsapp message in the early hours of the morning with questions like, “What’s an F-bomb?”