My first writing memory is as a small, pyjama'd girl crouched on a cold, night-time floor. I had slipped my warm bed to fill pages only visible with light escaping from a hallway. I was a child of the late 1950s; the floor was stiff linoleum, the light a stringy, ceiling pendant. And the story wasn't mine.
That shivering night, I rewrote the story of The Elephant's Child, Rudyard Kipling's fable about a young elephant without a trunk. And just as the nose of the Elephant's Child is stretched by a crocodile into a trunk, I made that story fill my homework book. I did not know that the power of a word comes from letting it breathe calmly into the space around it. 'Oh Best Beloved', I had much to learn.
But it took time. Years.
There were people and places I had to give up, sometimes people and places left me. The struggle wasn't always mine. But back came the girl on the linoleum floor. And the writing. The homework returned too and teachers with mantras. The writers' wisdom has muddled and merged but still I remember, to count on every line and that every word must count.
