I knew the moment I fell that I had broken something. Stuck in the corner of the room I stared at the cracks in the ceiling. By the time an ambulance arrived, I had decided it was either a map of the Nile delta or from another angle, the coast of Norway. My musings were interrupted by the arrival of both the Fire Brigade and the ambulance crew. Soon I was carried out very carefully by four strapping, young firemen who deposited me delicately, like some precious, ancient artifact, in the waiting vehicle.
The next thing I remember, was being wheeled into a geriatric ward. Suddenly, my feet felt wet. A cup of tepid tea had been hurled in my direction by an elderly patient in the bed on the right of the doors. The hospital porter laughed and commented, ’That’s Annie, you’ll get used to her!’
My bed was in fact directly opposite Annie’s. She had framed photos of all her eight grandchildren tucked up in bed beside her. As I settled down, she called, ’Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘No thanks. I ‘ve just had one!’
A few days later, my elder daughter came to visit and commiserate with me over a broken hip. As she left, she dropped a booklet on my bed, ‘It’s never too late!’, she assured me.
I picked up the thick booklet after dinner. It was a list of writing competitions in UK and the United States. Some of these were for ‘Flashes’, Dribbles’, ‘Drabbles’, ‘Chapbooks’ and other odd forms which I’d never heard of. I decided ‘short stories’ at least sounded familiar.
That evening, I asked Marco, a Filipino night nurse, if he could purloin a few sheets of National Health note paper. I found a competition that required three thousand words of ‘horror’ in an historical context. It had been nearly seventy years since I had written a ‘story’ at school. Three thousand words seemed to me like tackling a literary Sahara. The sheets of NH paper lay scattered on my bed, as formidable as the sands of a desert.
Propped up with pillows, I started planning my story. I had always been interested in the period of stage coaches and dandified highwaymen, before the arrival of the railways. I quickly learned the need for research. Did stage coaches have brakes? Was there glass in the windows? How long did it take from London to Dover?
As I started to write, a figure came and sat beside me in the dark. Annie picked up each page and inspected it, smoothed it out and added it to a neat pile.
By the time I left hospital, I had written several stories and experimented with poetry. Next week is my 84th birthday. I have been writing for just four years and my work has been published in magazines and anthologies in over 25 countries. My ambition remains to have a chapbook published. It’s not too late!