I don’t remember every piece of homework I was given while I was at school but I’m pretty sure I never had to write a story for English about what I’d done on my holidays. Up until about fourteen it would probably included a description of a trip to the seaside, if I’d had been given a task like that. Living in Cambridge we were able to get to the east coast and back in a day so would go to Great Yarmouth, or Lowestoft, or maybe Hunstanton, so when our writing group topic was “What I did in my holidays”, I imagined a story set there.
My story’s narrator is a child whose name is not mentioned but she has a brother Robert and a sister Margaret. I hoped to imply by those names that this was set in the 1950’s/60’s and also by the clothes they and their parents were wearing. “I was wearing my blue shorts and my pale yellow top and I had my bathing costume on underneath,” but the biggest clues is when she talks about her mum: “Sometimes she would have her transistor with her and put it on Radio Caroline.” I implied that the girl and her brother were quite young, maybe five/six and seven/eight, but their sister was a teenager. In those days going to the beach was quite simple, you’d paddle or play ball or just sit on the sand – probably quite boring for the parents, particularly the father who wouldn’t want to lie aground sunbathing. I’m going to start entering more competitions, and many specify that the entries should not have been previously published, so I’ll no longer share them here.
The topic was a great starter for our group, and everyone wrote brilliantly – the stories are always good, but this time they were exceptional, and each very different. J wrote about a couple of teenagers who accidentally went through some sort of time/space portal and ended up in a different, frightening world with parallels to our own troubled place. R wrote a gripping story about two sisters who had to push a wheelbarrow loaded with firewood through an enemy checkpoint and after the tension of that, Brian Price entertained us with a possibly true story of a young man going to a club/disco for the first time. A, who is a great wit, also shared a funny story which was just as well because the poet Macaque gave us a terrifying and chilling story of a camping expedition, which went catastrophically wrong. It still gives me a shudder to think about it! Luckily Fenja Hill finished the session with a clever story, with a great twist in typical Fenja style.
Here are links to Macaque aka Hamish MacNeil, Fenja and Brian’s Amazon pages so you can read more of their writing:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Hamish-MacNeil/author/B08XS9T7ZT
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Fenja-Hill/author/B07DJQCC8D
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Brian-Price/author/B07WZDHHGW
and here’s a link to the latest collection from our writing group, Writers in Stone:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anthology-Group-Anthologies-Writers-Stone/dp/B0D76WPG8D
Lois Elsden 