Write It Down

I have always wanted to be a writer. Secretly. Secretly, because the world I grew up in didn’t have writers in it. Or writers didn’t come from or inhabit our world. Our world was a world of manual labor, of hardship and learning how to get on with life and not to expect too much from it.

My Dad once said to me, as we headed off to the pub, that working on the roads didn’t pay well but I’d earn enough money for rent and food and a few quid over at the end of the week for a pint. I had just joined Godden and Lawson Civil engineers, the firm my Dad had worked for much of his adult life. I’d taken to it better than he’d expected. He’d expected me to fail.

When I first asked if he could get me on his road gang he’d laughed and said – "Stephen, you’ll never survive. It’ll kill you." But I’d persevered. I needed the work. I had a newborn baby to feed. So, I pushed him. Not always a wise move when it came to my Dad. He said – Stephen, I’m telling you right now, you’ve as much chance of surviving working on the roads, as you have of waking up one morning without a hole in your arse. He was poetic like that. In that working-class poetic way.

I did my best to survive

And so I worked the roads with my Dad and did my best to survive. After a time, I not only survived, I excelled. I was good on a shovel. I learned how to dig – there’s a skill to it - and discovered the difference between a shovel and a spade. I learned how to use a jackhammer. Those things weigh 60lb or more and in cold weather, your fingers can freeze onto the metal trigger. These days, road workers aren’t allowed to work more than 20 minutes at a time before taking a rest from the jackhammer. Back then, there were no safety rules in place.

We used those things all day long. Dragging and driving them into the tarmac hour after hour. On rare evenings when I didn’t fall asleep with my dinner on a tray going cold on my lap, I would write. By hand. My spelling was dreadful. My use of grammar, punctuation, non-existent. But I had an urge to do it. An urge that niggled away at me. Weeks and months would go by without me writing a word, but when I surfaced for air, and had some spare time – and energy – I would write again. I only ever shared my writing with Teresa. No one else. My writing was a well-kept secret. I was too afraid of the ribbing, the sneering, I might get if I were to share it with others. Teresa would tell me I was good. And I would like that, but believed she was being kind because it was me.

I left the roads, and our hometown and we moved to Swindon in search of work. I retrained, became a carpenter. I still wrote little bits and pieces – secretly.

An old typewriter

Then, one day, while working as the maintenance man at the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall, London, I saw that the old electric typewriters were being dropped into a skip to be replaced by new, more up-to-date ones. I asked the maintenance manager if I could have one of the old typewriters and he said I could if I donated £5 to the IOD charity. Believe it or not, £5 was a lot to me back then. But I paid up and took the typewriter home. I wrote, badly, and at irregular intervals, on that typewriter for a good few years. And then came the PC. The PC opened up a whole new world for me, as it did for all of us.

My ambition to be a writer was still there and now I had a machine that could let me see what my writing might look like in print. Not only that, but this miracle of a machine would help me with my spelling and punctuation and grammar. I’d wait until the children and my wife had gone to bed and then I’d write – in the tiny front room of our terraced house. I’d write and I’d smoke and I’d feel like a real writer – like Hemingway or any number of other serious writers I’d seen poised over a typewriter, a smoke dangling from their lips. I wrote a play. ‘Roger and Gerald.’ I wrote a story about a woman feeding a corpse to a bunch of policemen investing a murder. I found out later that story had already been written by Roald Dahl. To this day, I’m not sure if I read it and forgot it and then wrote it for myself. Probably.

My ankylosing spondylitis diagnosis changed things

I continued to write when I could – as often as I could. But it wasn’t until I was diagnosed with AS that I really began to write. It was the AS that created the space and the time for me to write like I’d never written before. Of course, there was the illness and the ever-present fatigue, but I could write. And I did. Hundreds of thousands of words. Poor words. Badly written. But over time, I noticed the writing was improving. And along with it, the spelling, the grammar and the punctuation.

Now, here I am

Writing. Writing for readers. What a remarkable thing that is. To me. It is the most important achievement of my life (aside from the birth of my children and my marriage to Teresa). Right at this moment, I find myself on a writing program for underrepresented writers – funded by the actor, Michael Sheen. I have a 3-minute video of Michael talking about my writing in such glowing terms that I can scarce believe what I am hearing, even now, having lost count of the times T and I have watched it, in awe and amazement.

I have written my first article for a national (UK) newspaper and am writing a second. I am in discussion with the two of the editors at Harper Collins about the possibility of me writing a memoir along with the novel I’ve been writing for over six years now - "The View from the Gasworks." None of these things would have happened had it not been for two things. A secret love of words – even though I didn’t know how to use them correctly. And AS. Had the AS not found me out, I would still be on the building sites. Building. Or down in a trench by the side of the road, digging. A friend recently said to me: The universe works in a positive way - it rewards positivity. And I think he is right. It does.