I moved into my studio at Lancaster University at the
beginning of October 2009. So far in this three part blogpost series, I’ve only
covered a year. I could tell a million stories about uni but I will try to be
brief for now.
I’m still not sure I really got four grand’s worth of
my hard-earned money. I know how many years saving while working full time that
was. This was the fees that year, though it did include a week’s residential in
Wales. It’s an oft-seen debate whether it’s ‘worth’ doing a MA, a discussion
that will run and run I’m sure. For me though, it wasn’t just about the
writing. It was about the whole experience. And I was doing that moving
transition thing that normal people do at eighteen. I was just a bit later. By
twenty-five years.
I had a really good group. Diverse, interesting and supportive,
some of whom I’m still in touch with. One is the famous FGE of
#TheImpossibleThing posts, who lives quite near & I’m so lucky to have a
friend.
I absolutely loved the workshops. This was a massive
fear for me before uni. Showing a load of strangers what I’d written? I just
couldn’t. It was a fear which had stopped me from joining a writer’s group for
decades. But I just went for it. ‘Feel the fear’ and all that. Even during the very
first workshop I was thinking ‘Why didn’t I do this years ago?’ Of course we
were all in the same boat. And sometimes it felt like us against the tutor. One
workshop at the residential certainly felt like that.
At Lancaster, you’re encouraged to experiment. I
submitted short stories to the group in the first term, then moved onto my
first ever flash fictions, a monologue, some not too successful dabbling in
poetry and in the final term I wrote a play and discovered how hard that was. I’ve
not read or thought about it since. I think it’s a tad self-indulgent, drawing
on my Christopher Eccleston obsession, the madness of shopping channels, my
experience of coast-walking and the wisdom of a lost friend. Maybe one day I’ll
read it again.
A Lancaster University Rainbow
I planned to start swimming at uni, to go for lots of
walks and be careful what I ate. I’d lost a stone before I left and hoped to
continue. I guess it wasn’t my time. I discovered the uni chippy; chips, onion
rings and add your own cheese. Not exactly healthy but so delicious. I had no
oven in that studio. I couldn’t even do jacket potatoes. I was on a budget but
was enjoying food freedom. I’ve never liked expensive foods. I did walk but not
as much as I could have. I spent a lot of time in my studio writing or in a
café reading the group’s submissions at the weekend. Doing feedback took a long
time for me. I like to be thorough.
This was how I discovered Morecambe. I hadn’t realised
I’d be so close to the sea in Lancaster. Morecambe felt a lot more real than
being on campus. Not sure I ever really belonged there. I would go to Eric’s
Café or the one on the Stone Jetty and sit eating and drinking and writing
notes all over my fellow student’s novel extracts, stories and poems, ready for
discussing in the workshops.
So I basically put my stone back on plus another ten
pounds. This was for later. Quite a bit later as it turned out.
So I cobbled together a portfolio of ten short stories
and a play and wrote the critical assessment that went with it. I had a
fifty-one week let at the uni. In the last few weeks of the final term I sorted
my CV and sent it to two dozen nurseries. I had to get a job and fast. And
somewhere to live once the summer was over.
In the May my aunt had died. She had no husband or
children. Just a bungalow in Norfolk that my Dad, as her next of kin, had
inherited and said straight away he would sell it and give my brother and I the
money. I travelled from Lancaster to Diss for a very strange few days with my
parents. The funeral, a kind of party afterwards, sorting the bungalow’s contents
out, finding a load of cash stashed in various places my Mum said was mine,
sitting on the kitchen floor trying to scrub it clean and wanting to throw up
from the smell of cat. One cat, thirty years.
It was sad my aunt dying at only sixty-four & I
hope I do a lot better than that but I suddenly had some money that would help
me in the future I began to see for myself. I was going to live by the sea, (something
I’d only ever played at before, staying in holiday cottages in Whitby and the
Isle of Wight), get a part time job and write.
I got a few responses from my CV and sorted my new job
during the summer. It was in a nursery in Morecambe. I was already thinking I’d
like to live there. But I had known from the start I wasn’t going back to
Coventry. I knew. Stella knew. No one else did. I was, once again, holding my
nerve. I somehow found a rented place in the nice quiet part of Morecambe where
I still live. By September I was in, albeit camping out with next to nothing in
the way of furniture, and already settled into the new job, which was fine for
now though not enough hours or money.
In these first few months, I was scared I wasn’t going
to carry on writing. I worked ten till one and the nursery was a mere seventeen
minute walk away so I began doing ‘morning pages’ of a thousand words, inspired
by one of my favourite writers, Paul Magrs.
One of the first flashes I ever wrote in early 2010 featured
a character who could control the weather. Her name was Marjorie and I began to
write about her. Within a few weeks I realised I was working on ‘a project of
length’. I began to think about where the story could go, the other characters,
the journey they would go on and it just grew and grew. As pretentious as it
sounds, Marjorie and the others spoke to me as I walked along the prom to work.
I kept going back and adding a little more, splitting it into chapters and
working it all out. I wrote scenes I never thought I’d write, I made stuff up,
took stuff from my own life, set scenes in real places and imaginary places, in
different times of the year, in times past and the present.
Early Morning on the Front in Morecambe
Yes, I was writing a novel, something I shied away
from while I was at uni. It’s called Queen of The World. This was the name I used
for the owner of the horrible nursery. Not to her face. So I was able to reclaim
Queen of the World and turn it into something good and exciting and positive. More
on that in the next part.
After graduation I joined Twitter, thanks to the
encouragement of two friends. Stella and Al, I bless the days you were born ‘cos
I can’t imagine not being on Twitter. The best thing about my first year there was
finding out about lots of writing competitions, entering them and getting
shortlisted or placed and even winning a couple. I got invited to read too. My first reading,
aside from uni, was in a room above a pub in Chorlton (Flashtag Manchester) and
then, later in 2011, I won the Calderdale prize, with a story from my
portfolio. I read the whole thing at Halifax library. Being the winner is
great. It’s unbelievably exciting that, out of all those stories, yours came
out top for that particular judge. Writing was taking me to new places. And,
crucially, I was still writing and submitting and getting stuff published. A
monologue in Mslexia, flash online, short stories and yes, I really was writing
a novel.
After a year in Morecambe the nursery I was working at
closed. I vowed I would get whatever job I could find. Luckily another better
and bigger nursery, which was part of a chain, was looking for a cook. More
hours, more money. In Lancaster so an hour’s walk-bus-walk commute each way but
just what I needed. I’ve now been there over seven years. Before I started
something happened – I forget what - that made my manager say ‘You’re one of us
now.’ What a delightful and rather sinister thing to say? During my first week
there, my lovely Nana died and I was given a day’s paid leave for the funeral.
I’d been visiting her in a care home in Carlisle for the past couple of years.
She was ninety-seven and she finally got what she’d wanted for some time.
Nana!
I was pleased with what I’d achieved in the year after
uni but I knew, if I was staying in Morecambe, I had to invest my money, to buy
a flat rather than rent.
I had no idea what I was doing.
But then I never did.
Coming soon in part three … more Impossible Things!
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