On the whole, my mobile is on silent when I’m at work, and I don’t usually hear the ‘ping’ of an arriving text, so it wasn’t till I got in my car to drive the three miles home that I found I’d got a text from my friend, Clarissa. We’ve just had a good laugh about the content of that message - an enquiry from a Hollywood agent about the possibility of buying the film rights to her autobiography, Spilling the Beans. The mind boggles – as it often does when I hear of the latest developments in her life – As a novelist, I’d struggle to come up with a plot as unlikely as her life has turned out to be.

(This post might make more sense if you read this post, first, A Writing prize and a strange meeting )

Some while before I enrolled on the MA course that I’ve mentioned in the last two posts, I was out with my then newly-famous friend on one of our occasional trips around the countryside, and was thrilled when someone in a small market town approached her and asked if she was indeed, ‘the lady from the tele’.

To start with, it was a novelty, and as soon as the next admirer had moved on, we’d giggle like school girls. I mean, you can’t help being struck by the contrast between that taste of fame and the ordinariness of sitting next to each other at the back of the classroom whispering about anything other than what the teacher was scribbling on the blackboard.

The novelty had long worn off by the time the next series was out. I was still thrilled for her, because limelight is as natural and as energising to her as sunlight is to me, but it made me realise that fame might not always be a welcome companion.

Clarissa’s success is well-deserved, and well-enjoyed. She has, in great store, what it takes to be successful: guts, determination and multi-talent. She’s also one of the most generous people I know, not just with material things, but also with her time and support.

I know that lots of film rights get bought and never make it on to the large screen,(or even a small one) but so many extraordinary things have happened to her in the fifty years since we became friends, that a blockbuster Hollywood film of her life story doesn’t seem totally far fetched.

Actually, I’m finding it harder to believe that it’s really that long since we were eleven!

Bank holidays can be a good time for catching up with friends - that extra day makes all the difference to the weekend. I’ve just been chatting on the phone to Penny, one of my oldest friends – we met in Nottingham through a network of young mothers more than thirty years ago, and are still close, in spite of the fact that we both moved away to different parts of the country after a couple of years.

I’d always known that I wanted children at some stage. No hurry. Certainly no wish to emulate my mother, with 8 surviving children, and a ninth, her first, living for less than a week. Two, would do me nicely. One of each, perhaps.

The only trouble about having my own children was the fact that they’d inevitably start off as babies, and I wasn’t a ‘babies’ person. I couldn’t imagine how some of my friends and relations could spend day in, day out with their non-speaking but demanding bundles that constantly needed to be fed at one end and cleaned up at the other.

Somehow, my memories of my four younger siblings didn’t stretch back to their months of babyhood. There must have been enough other people around, (including my mother) to tend to their needs before they reached the interesting stage when they could be played with like a superior type of walking, talking doll.

Still, if I wanted my own children, rather than adopted versions, (which I definitely did) – then I’d have to put up with the baby-stage, as it was most unlikely that I could hand the new-born over to whomever might want it for its first couple of years, and then be happy to hand it back to me when it could enter into some kind of, albeit fairly primitive, conversations with me.

There’s something disconcertingly different about an actual experience, compared to the imagined one, and motherhood is a prime example of this. Nothing could have prepared me for the overwhelming feelings of joy, in spite of the utter exhaustion after a thirteen hour labour. What was even more surprising to me was how interesting my baby was. Every single day there was a new development – a different tilt of the head, the way the fingers tightened round my thumb, the movement of the lips that was, yes, it definitely was a smile, and no, it wasn’t ‘just wind’.

So there I was, having tumbled headlong into a very different state of ‘in love’. When this baby, my daughter was three years old, just before my son was born, I remember looking into the future and thinking sadly, ‘I love her so much, how will I ever bear it when she leaves home?’

I think of that moment whenever I try to imagine what this or that stage of my life will be like – and how it will feel to be old. Because when my daughter started primary school, and when she joined the Brownies and swore her solemn little oath of loyalty, and when she went alone on the bus to her grammar school, and when she went on her fortnight’s exchange to France, and when she had her Gap year in Hong Kong… all those separate occasions of leaving, were experienced, not by me-as-the-mother-of-a three-year-old, but the mother of the child of the relevant age. She wasn’t the only one growing and changing, I was, too.

It was the same while my son was growing up, so, with any luck, I’ll be able to carry on in this way, whatever life throws at me. (Fingers crossed, just in case I’m tempting fate – and tongue in cheek, because I’m really not superstitious!)

Hurray! A beautifully sunny day, and it’s Saturday, so I don’t have to go to work and can take advantage of the unaccustomed warmth and relax in the garden, listening to the blackbird belting out its song from the chimney pot behind my head. Bliss!

(The rest of this post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

Winning that competition had been an amazing boost to my confidence after all those years of rejections. Did this mean that I could be justified in calling myself a poet? Whether it did or not, it made no difference to the amount of courage I had to summon up when I visited my first ever writing group. It was even more daunting than my trip to Lumb Bank. Everyone there would be a stranger, and unless I chose, I’d never see any of them again after the end of the course. (I’m still in touch with people from that group)

What was particularly scary about the idea of this first writing group was the fact that it was so close to home. Oh my god, I might even bump into someone I knew, and expose my lack of talent and inability to read aloud without my voice quivering and flapping like wind through a line of washing. As it turned out, there was someone I knew, but she, and every one of the other twelve or so present was welcoming and very encouraging about my work.

After a few visits, I began to see that though it had been a good place to start, it fulfilled only one of the two-fold commitment of Adult Basic Education: to offer maximum challenge and maximum support (not always an easy balance to achieve) . Everyone was kind, but I knew that I needed more challenge if I was going to develop my work. Praise needed to be tempered with incisive critique.

Having scoured the local papers and libraries for more information, I located a group called Cannon Poets on the other side of the city. Here, I found what I was looking for: an open-to-all meeting place for poets and would-be-poets. The small workshop groups that formed after the main meeting almost invariably contained at least one or two men or women who were further along the road of experience and skills in creating and critiquing poetry.

Sometimes the feedback came as a rather bitter pill, particularly when I’d brought a poem that I’d felt had been honed to perfection, only to realise that what I was being told was true – there was still more work to be done before I’d got it to the stage where it was actually saying to others as well as myself, what I’d wanted it to say, rather than what, from my exclusive viewpoint I’d thought it was saying superbly.

I’d already discovered that the passage of a few weeks was usually a sound critic - (what a disappointment it was to take a cherished creation from a drawer where it had been left to ‘prove’ itself, and to find, instead of a nicely risen, nourishing object, a few dull stanzas lying flat on their face). No, to be fair to myself – there were sometimes a few real nuggets in there, but they’d been smothered by over-explaining, rather than being trusted to speak for themselves.

(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)

And life went on, and real life caught up with me at last, and I had to take on teaching more adult literacy courses, and then several hours a week supporting the Adult Basic Education Co-ordinator, and then a permanent part-time management post, which left little spare time for the writing that wasn’t getting me anywhere, except for the enjoyment and the learning and the honing of my skills. But none of that was helping to support the increasing expenses involved in bringing up children through their pre-teens and teenage years.

That stage of having the writing pushed onto the back boiler probably did my craft a deal of good. Writing can’t take place in a vacuum, and I was lucky enough, in those days, to actually love my work, both the teaching, and the interviewing of new students coming forward in trepidation to ask for help with their reading and writing. Actually, it was a joy to help so many people to put their thoughts and stories onto paper, regardless of the state of their punctuation and spelling – I could tell, within a few minutes of listening to someone at the initial interview, when I had a ‘real writer’ in the room.

Tape recorders were useful tools for those who had lots to say, but whose writing skills were still in the embryo stage. One of the sayings of the original ‘Right to Read’ scheme, from which the ABE service developed, was ‘ A beginner reader is not a beginner thinker.’ To see the look on people’s faces when they realised that they were being listened to – that what they said was valuable and interesting – that they weren’t being looked at as ‘thick’, it used to fill me with a mixture of pleasure at their enjoyment, and inner rage at what our education system had done to them.

The courage and persistence of so many of them was and still is an inspiration for me.