THIS MAY NOT BE A true story. As a young journalist, my mother was lucky enough to meet the famous children’s writer Enid Blyton, who stopped in Brisbane briefly. There was a press conference in a hangar out at the airport. Many important people were there—the Australian publisher, someone from the British High Commission, someone from the Australian prime minister’s office, along with reporters from Sydney. My mother was representing her paper, The Courier-Mail. I have seen a photograph of her in those days, in a broadbrimmed cream hat with cream gloves and catwoman glasses, excited to be there with the other journalists.
Miss Blyton herself was surprisingly small, according to my mother, and dressed, as my mother would report faithfully in the next day’s edition, in an aqua twinset, hat and pearls, looking just like the Queen Elizabeth. We see her there, awkward Miss Enid Blyton, shimmering across the Brisbane tarmac, entering the hot tin hangar, fans whirring, everyone looking her way.
The press conference started with an introduction from the Australian publisher and some words of welcome from the high commissioner. Miss Blyton was noticeable for her silence, my mother said, and then it was time for questions. Someone asked, ‘Miss Blyton, where do you get the ideas for the Noddy stories?’
Miss Blyton cocked her head, looked at the questioner like he was a dog that had talked, opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again and said: ‘Why, Noddy tells me, of course.’ In my family, this was a story about mad old Enid Blyton who believed in Noddy. But she was not mad, Enid Blyton, not at all, and now I think I know what she was talking about. In fact, if I were to give advice to a young writer, which I’d never presume to do, but if I did, I’d tell the young writer to listen to Noddy.
Gail Sher says writers write. It is one of her four noble truths about writing. I can never remember the other three. Writers write. It’s often comforting, that notion, that all I need to do is push this pen across this page in enough predawn or candlelight so that I will be able to read it later if I decide I want to. Writers write, and sometimes when they write, they hear Noddy.
When I was a child, I was good at listening to Noddy, as children are. My brothers and I built Lincoln City in the dirt under our house. My oldest brother Ian was in charge. He’d build roads and infrastructure while Andrew, the brother closest to me, would fill the dam. I created stories for Lincoln City, mostly based on terrible events. I don’t remember individual citizens and the effect of my events on them. Character is so much harder than plot, and growing up on Superman and Batman comics with their strong narrative pull, I was never much enamoured of stories that don’t go anywhere.
Our stories often ended with a flood. ‘The dam’s busted! Run for your lives!’ Andrew yelled, taking over whatever plot I was working up and ensuring the story wouldn’t suffer from ennui. With his arm he’d grade the dirt that plugged the spillway on the dam. Our day’s roads and buildings would be destroyed in the ensuing torrent.
Raymond Chandler used to say that whenever his stories got boring, he’d have a man walk in with a gun. Andrew was our man with the gun.
The next day, we’d rebuild Lincoln City.
I have loved stories for as long as I can remember. At rest time in kindergarten, with nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling for those nine hours after lunch, I amused myself with stories. My bed was often shifted to an isolated place because my chatter would keep other kids awake.
Later, I had teachers who saw in me a storytelling need and a strange connection with words. Miss Tyquin in year five gave me marvellous projects to do. Write an Aboriginal legend. How the budgerigar got its stripes. Mrs Thomson in year eight fed my creativity and also red-lined my purple prose. I remember when we had to rewrite the story of Beowulf and Grendel, she circled, His bones snapped like a Cadbury Crunchie bar, and wrote in red: You could do better. She recognised in me a love of words and stories and language, and she fed it with her own. I wrote poetry in later school years, mostly self-conscious and tortured but also innocent and beautiful. I wrote about my father, the rainforest, my feelings for my teacher.
When I became a cadet journalist, I couldn’t believe I was going to be allowed to write stories all day and that this would be my job. I loved interviewing people, finding out what they thought and felt, what had happened to them, and writing about it. I loved playing with the words, working up a lead so that the reader would know everything they needed in that first paragraph. I loved the discipline that journalism demands, the economy I am no longer capable of.
After I came home from Melbourne, I stopped writing altogether. I had nothing to say and no connection to the spiritual place where writing must come from for me. I had no connection with myself at all.
It wasn’t until my late twenties, after I met David, that I started writing again. What had been easy in childhood had become more difficult than I could ever have imagined. It took time. It took years. It is still a struggle.
To write, I discovered, you need to achieve egolessness, not easy when you have an ego the size of Mount Vesuvius. You need to be nothing but this moment and this pen scratching across this page. I cannot be thinking about how much I’ve lost, what a bad person I am, what a wonderful novel I am conjuring, what terrible things reviewers will write. I must be here, show up, bear witness, get out of the way. Writers write.