Creative Non-fiction
SAMPLE ONE
Behemoth
I stood in my parents’ kitchen, stirring a cup of tea and half-listening to my father recount a breathtakingly mundane interaction with a plumber earlier that day. As the gentle drone of his voice washed over me, I reflected that we had just finished one of the most personal conversations we had shared in my thirty-seven years of being his daughter. It is wryly amusing how, as he enters his twilight years, it is only in the past six months that we have had real conversations, ones which give me a true glimpse into the past that made him. Sat comfortably in richly upholstered armchairs in his music room, surrounded by books and family heirlooms, a cocker spaniel curled up on his lap, I had interviewed him at length about his first discovery of computers – a pursuit he has dedicated his life to ever since.
My dear papa likes to hold court. He has always liked a stage and would have made an excellent amateur actor, should the notion have struck him. As our discussion started to flow, he warmed to his subject admirably, gently prompted by my further questions and observations. It seems that – as the coveted, adopted child of wealthy parents and perhaps a product of his time – he was indulged in his interests and left to explore them without interference. As an inquisitive eight-year-old, he began sending off for electronic components, building basic radios from crystals and showing a keen fascination for the outcome of elements and constituent parts when manipulated by human intervention. His father allowed him a chemistry lab and darkroom at home and his activities in there were neither questioned nor investigated.
“My parents wouldn’t have known one end of a valve from another. I was left to my own devices to do some quite dangerous experiments; they simply would not have fathomed that there was indeed a danger to be wary of. It is a miracle really that nothing awful happened!”
His deep absorption in all things electronic and chemical continued throughout his school years. He tells me that he was an avid reader of enthusiast electronics magazines and it was in these pages that he first heard whispers of an embryonic computer. He was hooked, his interest piqued - a natural outcome perhaps for one so captivated by the ability to control the output of a switch or transistor.
In the summer of 1964, before commencing a degree in electronic engineering, my father’s parents decided he should be gainfully occupied through an introduction to the workplace. Sent off on a placement in the office of a family friend – “I was paid the princely sum of £3 a week!” – he had his first encounter with the mythic computers he had read about so fervently.
“Of course, a computer in those days occupied an entire room. I wasn’t allowed in that hallowed space, but my desk was opposite the glass-panelled wall looking in, and I spent a long time staring at [the computer]. The closest I got however was the reams of printouts it produced that I had to wade through for stock analysis. A shame really that they didn’t offer even once to let me see it up close. But I suppose they didn’t want a silly young boy to fiddle with it and break something!”
It would be a journey through theoretical discussion at university so complex even his professors were baffled, then an early career in hardware development in industry, onto the purchase of the first Apple II in 1978, before he would run his hands over the surface of a computer. Fourteen years after the tantalising sight of that early computing behemoth, the Apple II cemented the start of a lifelong fixation and career that still consumes him almost fanatically, as it must with all true pioneers and early adopters.
As we finished our conversation, I felt a new depth of respect for my father’s unswerving dedication and innovation over the past six decades, a driving force that will propel him forward until his final days. At that moment I promised myself that from now until my own last breath, I will settle for nothing less than an all-encompassing, tireless passion for my own chosen path.
SAMPLE TWO
I have three grandfathers
I have three grandfathers: a tough, aloof Irishman by way of Northumberland who I stood next to in his final moments, as the priest recited the Last Rites. He wore life with an air of perpetual disappointment, which my mother felt keenly as a child and has never quite shaken off. My paternal grandfather was a photo in a silver frame on my father’s desk. A successful businessman from a wealthy Irish family who lived in an affluent area of Birmingham, he and his wife were not able to have children of their own. Instead, they adopted first my father, as a six-week old baby, and then my aunt a few years’ later, bringing them into a world of privilege and love, mainly expressed via Nanny, Cook and the best schooling in the country.
My third grandfather did not exist until a few months ago. As an inquisitive eight year old, I had found an adoption certificate for my father in a filing cabinet kept in our cellar; my father’s birth name was on there and never left my memory. As a persistently curious, arguably intrusive, adult I sought the same certificate again. A jolt of nervous excitement rippled through my fingertips as I held it: it appeared that my juvenile eyes had not taken in the handwritten name of my grandfather added as someone’s afterthought. Perhaps I had not understood the weight of this key piece of information at the time, or I was not ready for that journey quite yet.
Though I have not left my computer, over the past two years I have travelled hundreds of miles around England and Ireland in pursuit of my biological roots, aided by advances in genealogical testing and online databases. With the discovery of my grandfather’s identity earlier this year my journey has been extended and I find myself in the outskirts of Leeds, standing in front of the house he lived in for over fifty years. Thanks to digital records and the help of the long memories of the tight-knit communities of the North, I know that he and his wife Christina started their life together in a small two-bedroom maisonette, just before the war. Despite the swathing demolition of Leeds suburbs over the post-war decades to make room for progress, Nancroft Mount still stands proudly, a small row of back-to-back 1930s houses on a hilltop in the heart of industrial toil.
Their end-of-terrace home was cramped but the expanse of open parkland next to it, with sweeping views over the factories and power stations onto the distant horizon, must have allowed them to breathe a little. As World War Two broke, Kenneth worked in a nearby factory as a woollen cording overlocker, a job since made redundant by machines. Long days would likely have been spent on an overcrowded factory floor, bent over his work for hours on end. I can imagine him, as a shift ended, trudging wearily along streets tarnished with grime, the air thick with smoke as he faced the uphill commute home. He would have pushed on up the hill, perhaps accompanied by the gentle chatter of fellow workers, each peeling off to their terraced brick refuges. As the road steepened, the air started to clear, unburdening lungs and lifting spirits. Did he pause as he reached the green space at the start of Nancroft Mount, breathing in fresh air and shaking off the day?
Opening his gate, approaching through the short front garden to his front door, delicious wafts of steak and kidney pie might have reached his nostrils, mixed with the aroma of coal burning to heat stoves along the street. Something that, with the advent of war and his impending conscription into the RAF, was about to change inconceivably.
Further samples are available upon request.