Write about something you know, is the advice in many books. Well, I knew about me, or at least thought I did. I was interested in the subject, but would anyone else be? I had no idea. Did it matter? Well, yes, it's no fun talking to yourself. So, I had to try to make it interesting. At least I wanted to know what happens next in my story. So I had one person in the bag. Then the doubts started creeping in. Did I really want to know what happened next? If I'd known, back in February 2010, what was going to happen next, I wouldn't have been bird watching on the north Norfolk coast in February.
I had a heart attack.
If I'd known that our lovely break would end with me flat on my back in Norwich University Hospital, would we have been there in the first place?
Three months later I was flat on my back again, this time in Cheltenham General Hospital, where I wrote this, inspired by the fact that Cheltenham Literature Festival was taking place just a stone's throw away, and I was missing out. My wife popped round at visiting times to tell me what I was missing. Would I have wanted to know this was going to happen beforehand? I think not.
As I sat in that hospital bed, my thoughts wove around ideas of the past, present and future, and what do we know about them? It's a common subject for writers to explore, from science to science fiction.
Is the future already fixed, or is it created as we travel through time? Is history a record of the past, or the past as each writer is convinced it was. Each one sees it differently. My past is not remembered by me as it is by you, even if we experienced it together, same time, same place, same events. My story of it will almost certainly differ from yours, even though we are both convinced that we, personally, are right. There are two different histories already, and we've only just begun.
This came home to me once in my late teens. I had to do a Year's practical on another farm, not the one I'd been raised on, at the insistence of the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, as a requirement of the short course I was to take there. That is why I was riding on a very old trailer towed by Bert, my colleague, using an equally ancient tractor. We had been working with the sheep, treating them for various minor ailments such as foot-rot and fly-strike, two of the many disgusting problems they are prone to encounter. These things are best attended to after lunch, not before when one is about to eat one's cheese and tomato sandwiches from a battered Oxo tin. Wash my hands? Where? With what?
It was the end of the working day and we were rumbling along the Burford road back to the farmyard. As we approached a blind bend, a car came hurtling round it from the opposite direction, tyres screeching and going far too fast to get back on its right side if the road. It was heading straight for us.
Tractors are not nimble. There was no way we could get out of the way in time. There was going to be a crash. The certainty of it slowed my perception of the event right down. Bert and I were right in the firing line. I sat and watched the inevitable.
The car struck the tractor, taking the entire front axle and wheels out from beneath it. The tractor engine block dropped to the road in a huge thump of spraying hot oil and water, and belching boiling steam. The impetus of the mangled car took it through a stone wall and into a field, where car and tractor axle rammed into the earth like a meteorite strike. For what seemed a long time there was silence, and then terrified screams. I was numb, but uninjured, saved by the inertia of the heavy load. Bert was bleeding and climbing from the wreck of his cab. We dreaded what we would find at the car, but Bert sent me running to the farmhouse to get help, while he went to do what he could at the car.
Amazing as it seemed, the two children in the back seat were shocked and bruised while their mother, who had been driving, was badly shaken and had a broken arm.
The accident lead to a court case, which in those far off days, was held in the nearby Burford court-house. Bert and I were called as witnesses. I stood in the witness box and gave what I believed to be a truthful and accurate account of the event. I was then shown to a visitor seat and watched Bert go through the same process. I was horrified. His account of the accident was very different. Worried that the court would think that I, or Bert, was lying, I asked a constable sitting next to me what I should do?
'Nothing,' he said, 'Happens all the time. No two ever the same. Even coppers do it. Court are used to it.' He nodded towards the lawyers.
So much for true histories. Yours, mine or the other person's?
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