I was seven when Dad died.

 

That’s a sentence repeated on a loop across my whole existence.

I said it to a counsellor back in the 1990s and my voice crackled -

the emotion drawn after twenty-five years of being jammed inside. Social work studies exploded it to the surface at a point when I was ready to face it. My memories of Dad are vague. A man in pyjamas, ill; singing songs to me while he rested in bed. Everything else, I’ve created from family folklore and my own imagination.

 

Writing fiction brings a cathartic release to the wedge inside that seven-year-old boy. I know nothing about Dad’s life so I have to make it up. Hence, the story of his time in the Merchant Navy, travelling the world - fit and healthy, his future stretching ahead of him; and the impact of his death on my brother, who was ten years older than me and expected to become the man of the house.

 

Dad’s death defined my life and created a fractured existence.

It shaped my relationship with Mum, my brother, and it happened

at a time when I was developing an awareness of the world and my connection with it and other people.  It erased lots of things, not just

a dad – family disappeared along with a disconnected mum.

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I became Mum’s little crutch – her sole reason for continuing to exist. She loved me, but over loved me, giving me a skewed perception of my place and how others would relate to me. I was a bit of an odd-ball – talking to clouds, trying to find the answer to where he was. ‘He’s gone to Jesus’ meant nothing to me as a child, but it placed a life after death possibility in my head, a chance to see him again, leading to a lot of my stories being set in the afterlife with people searching for answers.

 

My fiction revisits lives ended abruptly or that were never really lived. Loss of identity; loss of self; loss of family; loss of relationships.

These all figure as headline acts in my stories, but I try to restore

a sense of living - like my orphaned great grandmother who at sixteen jumped on a narrowboat and travelled across the country to face a new beginning.

 

Social work saved me, but my questions didn’t disappear – the search for answers went inward and story writing gave my imagination an outlet. Looking for a perfect family, a mum, a dad; putting characters with fractures into plots and watching them live or die, even when society doesn’t really want to know or understand their back story -

for example, a serial killer created by trauma and abuse. I look at vulnerability from every point of life and beyond - such as people living in care homes, trying to make sense of their final chapter,

but frail and exposed to the cruelties of institutions. Where possible,

I return a humanity taken away or that was never recognised,

but I never shy from the grit of experience.

 

In the end, the narrative always comes back to that seven-year-old boy who never quite moved on; never shifted away from his dream-world. Maybe he never will, and his search for answers will continue.​​​