Just one of the dumb things that I did at school, when I was a lad. From Son of My Father.
I
remember the headmaster because of the one time that I got into
trouble at school. It was the only time that I owned up and got into
trouble, and he got involved. For the most part I was not a
troublemaker, I kept my head down. However, I admit there were
moments of stupidity when I did something unbelievable that got me
into trouble. This was one of those moments, but at least I owned up
to what I had done.
I
was playing football in the front school yard, and I recall that no
one else was around. I kicked the ball onto the flat roof of a small
building. For a moment the ball was heading towards the edge, but
then it stopped and got stuck in the guttering. The building was a
toilet block which had blacked out windows around the top of it. It
was my ball, and I wondered how I was going to get it back.
I remember the moment the title came to me. I was pacing around my home, thinking — searching for a phrase that might hold the whole story together. Titles can be elusive things, they are jotted down, forgotten, some look great, then they don’t. I had a handful of ideas, each discarded for one reason or another.
None seemed to bring the chapters together in the way I wanted.
At one stage, I had an idea that I felt could really work — to open each chapter with a subheading drawn from a song of the time. A piece of music that had shaped not only my personal experiences, but also the atmosphere of the era I was writing about. I imagined each song acting as a lyrical thread connecting memory, mood, and meaning to the story.
Then reality intervened. Copyright.
Yes, “fair use” might have allowed me to borrow a few lines, but even that felt like a legal grey area. The deeper I looked, the more it became a potential minefield of permissions and costs. Reluctantly, I let the idea go.
Still, once music had entered the conversation, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Songs have a way of unlocking memory, and as I sifted through those from my past, one stood out: Son of My Father, a 1972 hit by Chicory Tip.
I can’t say the band were favourites of mine, nor that the song had any special place in my life at the time. I remember it being played on the radio and Top of the Pops, but I was more into music by T Rex, Slade, Sweet and ELO. Years later, the song — and something in its story — resonated. It felt as though it was an ideal title for the book.
Here’s the song:
I later discovered that the title had been used before — in books, in other contexts — but that didn’t matter. For me, it fit.
Because although my book isn’t solely about my relationship with my dad, he is the presence that runs through it. The man, the mystery. As he left my life almost fifty years ago now, the book is most of what I know about him.
Writing Son of My Father was, in part, an act of discovery — not just about the past, but about what remains when memory fades and imagination takes its place.
When I began writing Son of My Father, I realised how much of my dad’s story I never really knew. So much of who he was existed quietly in the background — unspoken, unseen. What I do remember, though, was his creative side.
I know nothing about my dad’s childhood, his schooling, or whether he was academically bright or not. I don’t even know the name of the school that he went to. I’m not sure that I ever did. He probably left school with few if any qualifications. Questions like this were never the subject of conversation between us.
My
Brother wrote the service for mam's funeral. He wrote the
following.
“...
when she was a young lady, it was the simple things like, helping her
mam in the house, learning how to cook, wash and most importantly
sew. Equally another happy time for her was her schooling, she was
clever and bright and always managed to be in the top stream. It has
been said that in other times she may have gone on to be a teacher.”
It
continues.
“From
school she went into the factories (Freeman, Hardy and Willis) and
later after becoming a mum turned to homeworking. The house always
had Sewing Machines in it, Overlocks, Scissors, piles of leather,
trim and fabric and things in the process of being put together. She
was naturally creative and could turn any idea plucked from your
imagination into a fully realised costume in hours.
She
was soon promoted to sample machinist because basically she was the
best in the trade.”
Her schooling was probably typical of that time for someone from her social background. Until her funeral, I was not aware of what she had achieved at school. She would have left school at around fifteen back then.
As I have been thinking about changing the cover of my book, I asked ChatGPT to come up with something that was more upbeat and colourful than the one I had originally designed. I thought the original might be too dark and unappealing.
And this was its first attempt.
I thought it was colourful and bright, but wondered why the face features were missing.
So, yesterday I decided to change the look of the blog layout and theme, and I think it now looks better. It has a cleaner look to it, no background picture.
I also simplified the Son of My Father page, along the lines of chapter headings telling the story of what the book is about, so why not do it that way?
Here's a sample.
Chapter Nine — Son of My Father.
Chapter Ten — Big School.
Chapter Eleven — Related to a Film Star?
Chapter Twelve — The Family From Hell.
Chapter Thirteen — The Girl With Beautiful Eyes.
I also managed to write 2300 or so words yesterday of my new WIP (Really getting with it now, it does mean Work in Progress, doesn't it? Doesn't it?).
I made another visit to a local charity shop that regularly runs five books for a pound sale. This is what I bought this time.
1) Pause by Daniella Marchant. How to press pause before life does it for you. Has a 3.79 rating on Goodreads.
2) The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Has a 3.73 rating on Goodreads. I don't really buy all this Law of Attraction stuff, but I thought that given how it cost twenty pence, I would finally read the book. It also has something to do with a pair of boots I found recently.
3) Happy by Derren Brown. Has a 4.06 rating on Goodreads. I see a trend here. Three self-help type books in a row. Interesting.
4) The Meaning of Sport by Simon Barnes. Has a 3.78 rating on Goodreads. I like sport, so for 20 pence this was an easy pick. We will see.
5) A field Full of Butterflies — Memories of a Romany Childhood, by Rosemary Penfold. Has a 3.67 rating on Goodreads. The lowest Goodreads rating here. Having written a memoir myself, (well, the only book I've written) it is a genre that I like, a real life story.
I came across an article in The Guardianonline that posed the question, “why are biographies so popular?” I could ask, are they?
I like to read biographies. Actually, I prefer the “auto” biography or memoir. I do read biographies, but I am more inclined to go for the account actually written by the individual telling their own story.
I feel that sometimes biography is used as a catch-all word that includes autobiography, biography, and memoir. I quite like the Wikipedia definition of memoir.
I
had a friend at school by the name of Colin. Although we were the
same age, he was quite tall and a lot bigger than me. I suspect that
because of his size no one picked on him at school. We would often
play football in the street opposite Number Thirteen. There were
several garages with pull down sliding doors which we used as a goal.
I'm sure the residents were overjoyed with the noise every time the
ball hit the garage door.
Colin
seemed a decent lad, but as the saying goes, appearances can be deceptive, as I was about to find out.
One
day I invited him over to my house while mam and dad were out, and we
ended up playing with my toy car collection made up of Matchbox, Dinky, and Corgi cars. Pride of place was a new car that Dad had just
bought me, a James Bond 007 Aston Martin. A quick check on the
internet tells me that back in 1966 this cost all of 3 old pennies. I
think I was about seven or eight at the time, so I would have got mine
in 1967 or 68.
As
we were playing, Colin took a liking to my new car. At one point he
said to me, “do you want this?” I thought he was joking and just
laughed. There were loads of cars in my toy box, but Colin only
seemed to be interested in my new James Bond car. When I asked for
it, he just said no and carried on playing with it. He seemed to
especially like the passenger ejector seat, which shot out of the
roof. He wouldn't give me the car. I asked for it again and his reply
took me by surprise.
I played for the school
football team, but it almost didn't happen. We played on a Council
run park that was on the outskirts of the city. The facilities were
basic at best, and there were three football pitches.
Boys in the school team or
close to selection played on the main pitch. The game was usually
between two sides picked by the school football captain and the
football coach. I was never picked, probably because I wasn't a mate
of the captain, and the coach hadn't seen me play. I went and played
on one of the other pitches. Pitch number three it was called. I
played against boys who were not very good. At that level I was
pretty good. I seemed to have a knack for scoring and most weeks,
against inferior opposition, I would score several goals.
I’m
in the back seat of a car parked down the road from a pub. This pub was
in the city, but some way from home. It was the pub where, according to
dad, “this is where your mother meets her fancy man”. It was a cold,
dark night and the streets were empty, other than the occasional drunk
singing the night away.
In the
car, my dad was in the front passenger seat. In the driver’s seat was a
man who I didn't know. He must have been one of dad's mates. He was
tall and broad. He looked like a man that you would want by your side in
the event of trouble. It's possible that he was there for a more
sinister reason. Given that dad’s plan was confrontation, this man may
well have been there to back him up if things turned nasty with “fancy
man.”
When I had the idea to write a book, one big question had to be addressed. Would I approach a publisher or an agent to do all the leg work involved in getting a manuscript accepted? Both of these options seemed like a lot of hard work and time-consuming. You also have to prepare yourself for rejection. It is great to think that your book will be the next bestseller or can't miss read, but a publisher or agent may have other ideas. They are also very busy.
2023 has started with a bang in the world of books. Spare is a memoir written by the British Royal who chose to step back from his role, Prince Harry (ghost-written by novelist J. R. Moehringer.) Released on the 10th January 2023, it has caused a stir, and not just in Royal circles.
This is my first blog post, and it is not my intention to review or write about Harry's book, as I have not read it. Instead, I write about it in the context of my own memoir writing experience, which coincidentally meant that my first book, Son of My Father, was more or less published at the same time.
Actually, my book was published as an e-book on Amazon the week before Christmas, 2022.
Now, the first big difference between my book and Spare is that mine was self-published with no fanfare. Self-publishing used to be called vanity publishing and not encouraged. The traditional route, if the book is any good, is to go through a publisher. That can be a lot of hard work. Many a good author has had their work rejected only to eventually find success. Self-publishing was the easy option for me, and Amazon (and others) do make it reasonably easy to do that.
There is one big drawback to self-publishing. Your new book is one of thousands. How do you get it noticed? I did not publicize it at all. It sat there in the Amazon store waiting for someone to take notice and buy it. Compare that with the 400,000 copies Spare sold on the first day. No surprise in that given all the publicity it received and the fact that this was a book spilling the beans on Royal life.
The BBC report that it has become the UK's fastest selling nonfiction book since records began.
I would have been happy with forty copies sold on the first day. Over the moon.
Any book about royalty, written by a royal, is bound to be popular. They do live a somewhat fantasy life. I suppose, it is a sort of real life, with different pressure. But they are not worrying about paying the rent, or gas and lecky bill. Or whether they can afford a holiday. I was writing about a different kind of life, one where every penny counted. There again, that's what an ordinary life is often about, and it's a more difficult sell.
I will have more to write about Son of My Father in due course, but for now here is the Amazon link.
