Favourite Scenes

Writers shouldn't have favourite characters, right?  Well, maybe it's because Becca is a little bit awkward and a little bit bolshie the way I can be that makes me love her so much.

We're allowed to have favourite scenes though, so I thought I'd share one from the end of chapter 12, beginning of 13 in my teenage book 'Re: Becca'.

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Remember the school Games lessons on those horrible barren wastelands called playing fields?  Here Becca has just been (as usual) the last one picked for hockey teams and she's not having much fun. Until...

‘Okay… and… Bully-OFF!’ Miss Jordan shrieks and blows the whistle so shrilly that any dogs within a ten mile radius will be spinning on the spot before heading in our direction.  

       I sigh despondently,  though I take my stance and try to look like I mean it.  But before the game has a chance to get underway, I hear a loud CRA-ACK!   Pain shoots up from the base of my leg and I am immediately pole-axed and lying in a state of agony on the muddy grass, clutching my ankle for dear life.  I don’t even need to turn round to see what the hell has happened to me because it’s taken place so many times before that Miss Jordan probably thinks I’m a secret epileptic or something.  This is a foul carried out by one of the minions under Juliette’s control by a strike to the ankle with a hockey stick and if it didn’t hurt so much I’d be rolling my eyes with the whole boring monotony of it all.

‘PPPPEEEEEP!’ the whistle slices sharply through the air again and Miss Jordan springs over to me, her breath white in the chilled morning air.  She bends down and glares at me as if I’ve just dropped something messy on her nice clean carpet.  Deliberately.  She does my mum’s hands on hips stance and I swallow beneath her, waiting.

‘Becca Banks!’ she scowls accusingly – like I’m doing this to secure a curl-up-and-die part in this year’s school production.  ‘What do you think you’re doing down there?’

Seriously, so many words have to be bitten back where teachers are concerned.  WTF  d’you think I’m doing down here, Miss? Springs to mind but before I know it, I’m being hauled to my one good foot by Claire and Miss Jordan and virtually dragged over to the reserves bench.  The pain is spiking right up my leg and they lump me down and leave me. 

‘Sit it out,’ Miss Jordan huffs and then runs jauntily off back towards the field peeping her whistle like she’s peeping for bloody victory.  Stupid ignorant lesb…

‘This the injuries bench then?’ a voice splits the silence. 

I turn around to see a tall tracksuit looking a whole lot warmer than I feel, hobbling towards me, the hood pulled down close to its owner’s nose.  I can’t quite make out who it is but the voice sounds familiar.

 ‘Can I?’  the tracksuit points to the bench and as I nod, it sits down beside me.  ‘You look cold,’ he says, lifting his hooded face  to the sky.  I wonder why he isn't glued to the female forms as they bounce and bob their way after the stupid hockey ball on the field in front of us.  I open my mouth to tell him that, yeah, strangely enough, I am actually ber-luddy freezing as it happens but I’m hypnotized into silence as my eyes see long nimble fingers tear down the zip, pull both arms out of the sleeves and then the still-warm track-suit top is wrapped around my shivering torso in one seamless move.

 ‘Better?’ Judd Crawley smiles chivalrously into my astonished face.

13.

When our grandchildren ask me to tell them the exact moment I realised I wanted to be with their grandfather for a lifetime - if not longer - I shall tell them that we were sitting together on a very damp, very cold wooden seat at the Hartley Road Upper playing fields.  We’d both been in our respective sports classes and, as luck would have it, had become contemporaneously injured and arrived here, on the reserves bench, at almost the same time.  

Fate.

I sit and relish being in the warmth of Judd Crawley’s fleecy lined tracksuit top, my skin heating up nicely from the mere proximity of his body beside me.  On a deeper level, I also feel all the stuffing which had been so cruelly pulled from my insides not minutes before, return to my body a gazillionfold.  Only this time my innards are suffused with a radiance of proper happiness. I may actually be floating at least five centimetres off this bench for all the reality I’m feeling right now.   I’ve already screwed my eyes shut tight twice and opened them just to be on the safe side; to make sure I’m not concussed or anything – er - from the ankle?  Well, who knows. But he’s still here.  Sitting beside me.  And I have his fleecy top wrapped around my body.  HIS fleecy top.  Around MY body.

Where it began

A blank piece of paper.
An empty writing book.
The thrill of getting a brand new exercise book on the first day of term; the feel of the cover, the colour on the outside and those invitingly pale blue lines inside just waiting to be filled with your very own personal journey through the next few weeks of education. Remember?
God but I loved those new, fresh books. For me they were like a clean slate. Which I’m guessing is where the saying comes from. A clean slate. A new Term. A fresh start.
And I always tried to change my handwriting. I remember clearly trying to make my loops bigger, my dots more pronounced, my tees, whys and effs cursive to shame a mediaeval script and for the teacher to tell me how beautiful my writing was.
Which actually did happen once as my best friend and I jointly won a ‘Most Improved Handwriting’ award and my prize was ‘The Children of Cherry Tree Farm’ by Enid Blyton. The only downside being that my writing was obviously crap to start off with, if it had ‘improved’ so noticeably.
But that’s where it all began for me. That year. At that precise time. I just wanted to fill and fill and fill those waiting white pages up with as many lovely words as possible. My “most improved” written words. And I wanted everyone to read them and tell me how great they were. And the more encouragement I got from my lovely teacher, Mr East, at aged 9, the more I felt the need to cast aside the boring old “What I did at the Weekend” (all much of a sameness - I cleaned out the gerbils, I walked the dog, I ate some more seventies stodge and groaned at ‘Farming Diary’) and so I began to invent things to make the two days I spent away from school sound more interesting than they actually were.
Which heralded my first trip to see the Headmaster. A formidable, Captain Mainwaring of a man who stood far wider than he did tall in his brogues and who could turn stone to jelly with a single well-aimed query.
So, why hadn’t I told anybody that my “Policeman father (actually a butcher, but Policeman is way more exciting don’t you think?) had been mauled into Intensive Care at the weekend whilst trying to arrest three masked gunmen who had broken into our house and tried to make off with my mum’s diamond necklace (realistically glass - diamante at a push) before our Alsatian dogs (in truth one daft Mongrel who’d no more raise a bark than lick a poor intruder to death) savaged them to the ground and ripped their throats out”?
Ah.
I clearly wasn’t giving out any indications of distress following my bloodbath of a weekend and was asked why this was.
And if The Simpsons had been on the telly back then, I’m sure I’d have given my favourite Homer quote in response to my total fabrication of creative genius:
“I’m not lying - I’m writing fiction with my mouth” (for “mouth” read “pen”).
So for me, fiction was just stuff that sounded far more interesting that my life actually was. And I liked it.
Oh, we had to have those three Alsatians put down of course and Dad’s never been the same since he hung up his Chief Superintendent hat and took that desk job at NASA. And Mum, well she keeps all her ‘bling’ firmly stitched inside her gold-leaf embroidered stocking-tops now. Next to her Colt .45.
And me? I write books. No, seriously, I do.