Dear Friends,

 

Twenty years or so ago, My Weekly ran a competition for a serial. I wanted to enter and so I sat down to think about what I could write. What did I know that readers might find interesting and, what was I prepared to write about which I did not know but was prepared to find out? I remembered that in Teacher Training College I had had to dress a doll in the costume of its, supposed, native land and collect as much information about said country as possible. This was part of every teaching student’s life; in order to be a good teacher one had to show some skills in Art, Music, sewing and knitting. I could sing and play the piano – ‘well enough for infants’ according to the music teacher – and ‘tried to be neat’, according to the art teacher. I decided that the only way for me to pass this step to graduation was to find a country that no one else, including the teachers, knew much about. I struggled with this one and then remembered that one of the lovely air force wives at the nearby US base was Mexican/American.

Mexico. I canvassed friends, even rather clever ones. Few were sure where Mexico was. Perfect.

Dress a doll? Me? No. In one of Margarita Rosa’s magazines I found a picture of an Olmec head. Not a doll, but very Mexican. The art department gave me a ball of clay which I squeezed here and there and voila – Olmec head. I put him on a board I had painted yellow – the desert – and on which a friend, much against her will, had painted a Saguaro cactus. I was halfway to a pass. I learned some songs in Spanish. Then Margarita suggested that I write to ‘el regente’ or mayor of her hometown.

Eventually I did, explaining that I could find little information about Mexico in the local libraries and travel agents. Time passed and the art room was full of Spanish senoritas, Irish Colleens, Welsh ladies holding daffodils, an Eskimo and a very heavy, incredibly ugly Olmec head. Then one day the postman arrived with a large parcel – for me. It was packed full of books – geography books, maps and even music, art and history books and they were written in three of Mexico’s languages; Spanish, French and English. The mayor had never had a letter from a foreign student and invited me to visit. Unfortunately I never managed but after my husband and I moved to California, I studied Spanish and Mexican music and culture in Cuernavaca and Mexico City. Therefore I knew I would try to share some of my love of this ‘beloved country’ in a story.

I also wanted to set the story in Angus where we live, looking across fields to the sea. Not our fields but belonging to farmers who made us welcome from the start, even though we had very large dogs and gave our sons Jacob sheep and hens as pets. Our hens laid eggs everywhere and the ones I couldn’t find always hatched and became chickens that scratched up our neighbour’s seeds. The Jacobs could jump everything but the paddock wall and often we had phone calls from patient neighbours who never berated us when they found one or two really lovely Jacobs eating their flowers.

So, The Farm Girl’s Dream was born.

Our sons are now grown and their children love to visit us – we no longer have sheep or hens and the children are content to note the miracles of the changing seasons, ‘From Granny’s window.’

And, by the way, I won the competition.

 

Best wishes,

 

Eileen