There is a little village in the South East of England; perhaps it’s yours, maybe it’s mine. Perhaps it’s a little hamlet with a Cross on the hill above it. Who knows?
Sarah hadn’t set out to be a writer; in fact, when she was at the village school, she found that she had difficulty in reading. Everyone else seemed to understand the words, but not her.
Probably later in life, she would find out that she had some little mix-up in her head, which stopped her fully understanding the way words behaved. She didn’t see what others saw but then again, didn’t we all?
So she started to write down the words, one at a time and traced them out with a pencil. She got to know their shapes and meanings. Soon she was putting two words together, and finally, she was writing whole sentences.
By the time Sarah was twelve summers old, she had become a gifted writer, a very gifted writer indeed.
She wrote little essays in school, which she would proudly read out to the class. To be honest, even her teacher smiled in admiration.
By the time she was twenty-two, she was writing for a newspaper in the big town next to the village and she loved her job.
One day in the autumn of 1939, her editor took them all into his little office, offered them cups of tea and then mentioned that there was a war coming.
“It will be our job to keep the people informed. It will be our job to tell the people what they need to know, and to keep their morale high.”
And that is what they did.
In this little village, of which I speak, which may or may not have a Cross above it on the hill, hard times hit. This little group of houses lay right under the path of the bombers flying overhead. So much so, that it would later be known as the most bombed village in that area.
Every single building was wounded in some way, as was every single heart.
The folks at the newspaper kept their promise of telling the people the stories and keeping their morale high, but there was a limit. The government man who visited their offices from time to time would instruct the editor on what could and what couldn’t be printed.
So one evening, Sarah hatched a plan. She started to write little stories of the village and how it had been before the war. They would include some real characters and some that she had made up in her head but had wished that they had lived in her little hamlet.
These were little stories which brought smiles to peoples’ faces, or perhaps a tear in laughter or one in sadness and with the help of her editor, she managed to print off enough sheets to put one through every letterbox in the streets around her house.
At one end of the High Street, lived an elderly woman who inhabited a big house with empty rooms. No one came to visit, and her own contact with the outside world was Sarah’s little weekly stories.
So one summer’s evening, the old woman lay in wait, and as Sarah came up the path, she opened her door.
Admittedly it startled Sarah at first, but the elderly woman invited her in for a cup of tea. She sat Sarah down and told her that her writing should never stop, unlike the war that was happening in the city over the hill.
Sarah smiled, and then the old woman said something that stayed with Sarah for the rest of her years.:
“One day, probably when I am long gone, you will be a great writer, and you will make even the onions cry.”
Sarah leaned over and kissed the old lady on her head.
“Thank you,” said Sarah.
When Sarah eventually wrote her book after the war, about writing her little stories in a village in the south-east – a village which may or may not have had a Cross on the hill above it – she dedicated the book to the old woman and what do you think was the title of her book?
‘One Day You Will Even Make The Onions Cry’.
bobby stevenson 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment