Day 125 - Frozen

 FROZEN

Prompt - Frozen : Write about a moment in your life you wish you could freeze and preserve

"Octogenarian's debut novel on Booker short list"

Octogenarian?  True enough, I turned eighty four years old last week.  Debut novel?  Well, sort of.   It was certainly the first one I knew was worth sharing with anyone outside my immediate circle of friends and family.  'First readable novel' would be more accurate.

I will not win the award.  And do not care.  I doubt I'll ever write another book, and what, at my age, would I spend the money on anyway?  The headline means a lot to me, the realisation that I have finally done it, along with the regret that it can't be shared, or even seen, but the man who is responsible for the book just as much as I am.  

He is a moment in time, a memory that has been with me for more almost six decades, a gem I have taken out and polished, sometimes neglecting it for years, but always returning, hauntingly inspirational.

I had written poems and short stories spasmodically since my mid teens.  Just for me, just for the joy of writing.  I knew they were terrible, self indulgent, unimaginative, uninspired and uninspiring in content and language.  But I had fun creating them anyway.  From somewhere i found the nerve to apply to join a local creative writing class.  I regretted it immediately, sure i was getting above myself, being as pretentious as I knew would be the verdict of others.  I would not, could not have gone, except for a phone call.  The tutor, Mike Merrett, called me up a couple of days before the first class, checking up that I would be coming along, knew where to go, how to negotiate the dodgy door handle, bring along any existing samples of my work if I could.  I did, dear reader, try to express my doubts, but they were swept aside by Mike's tsunamic enthusiasm.  He left me feeling that he was too nice a man for me to let him down.  Good tactics, eh?

So along I went, every nerve twitching, but soon found myself laughing at Mike's jokes, smiling at his smile.  Each of us who brought something along had to read out a few sentences.  No comments, no judgements, he wanted to hear our voices.  I read mine out, and nobody laughed, or even smirked.  He gave us some general tips, set the homework for the following week, and we were gone into the night, each of us feeling more special than when we went in.

Ten weeks it lasted.  Short stories, poems, an essay based on a newspaper item, we were gently stretched into corners we hadn't explored before.  Everyone got their own personal critique, and indicators towards their likely niche.  

On the final evening he went round the circled group, gave everyone of us his thoughts and comments and encouragements.  His choosing who to talk to next seemed random at first, but a pattern seemed to emerge and I wondered where I'd fit in.  Last.  I knew I'd improved a lot under his instruction and kindness, I knew, to my genuine surprise, that some weeks my story was clearly the best of the lot.  But I still wasn't ready for the praise I received.  

Most of what he said was lost to me the next day, it had all happened so fast, but I retained the general sense of his intent.  That I should think about writing longer works, think about extending the range of my characterisations, and work through as many ideas as possible to decide what really interested me, where the passion was.  But there was one single phrase that stayed with me, and is still here today.  It is that moment in time, the one I picked up, ran away with and put into my emergency freezer, to be preserved, and taken out and admired whenever it was needed.  

"You should be starving in a garrett somewhere."

In any other context it would be insulting.  But I knew what he meant.  Those words, and the attendant smiles from the circle, the recognition of my peers, have stayed with me through every failure, every fallow period, every crisis of confidence, every twisted spring of doubt and self-deprecation.  Without those words there would be no headline about an octogenarian author.  MM, I wish you were here to see it.