Thanks
to the Children
When
our eldest child was six, we lived on a very remote mine in the far south of the
Matabeleland Province. Our move necessitated me home schooling him. It was then
that I started dreaming up stories again. They weren’t, however, about the Mrs
Brown of my junior boarding school days (see ‘Boarding School Again’). They
were all set in an African environment and the characters and creatures were all
of Southern Africa.
Our
house was set on a hill and the abundance of life in the immediate surrounds fed
my imagination. There were snakes galore. Just in time I stopped our younger
son from picking up a spitting cobra on our doorstep. After we’d lost a few of
our rabbits we found a black mamba in the rabbit run. A nightape stole,
beheaded and drank the blood of a few of our hens. My mother who was visiting us
once jumped onto her bed to escape a large hairy spider that ran round and
round the floor of her room.
And
so it was that those creatures, together with Southern African people, flora
and fauna became part of my stories for children of all ages.
You’ll
see a lot of wildlife in the pictures that accompany my Ebooks when the artwork
has been done.
From what I have read of your stories for children recently, Patricia, you haven't lost the skill to extract a good story from your surroundings. I have been fascinated to read the background to your inspiration.
ReplyDeleteAnn
Thanks, Ann. Although I really do want to move on now to adult fiction, and I will, I don't think I'll be able to stop writing for children as well.
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, and I thought we had an abundance of wild creatures back in Mexico, nothing like you describe here. I became quite adept at sweeping snakes out with a broom. Floors were quarry tiles and snakes found them very difficult to move over, they couldn't make much progress too slippery for them. But we never got bigger than an adder, except once when our gardener brought a large white something coiled up in a bucket and asked me what he should do with it, I quickly told him! Tarantulas would stroll across from time to time but alacrans (scorpions here) were the worst, very adept at playing dead. What fun!!
ReplyDeleteSnakes, for me, are the most frightening, Jeanne, and I hope I've managed to write that fear into my characters. I think the scorpions in Mexico must have been very frightening too. A friend of mine was once stung by a small brown scorpion and we had to take her to hosptial for an antidote, the pain was so excruciating.
ReplyDelete