Spectator Competition: Budding poets

For Competition 3442 you were invited to supply the opening of a memoir that would discourage the reader from reading on.

You rose to the challenge of producing writing that was comically appalling with gusto. Sue Pickard’s entry narrowly missed out on a place in the winning line-up. Here she is, writing from the point of view of the Sleeping Beauty: ‘I found freedom in dreams. Let me describe them to you in detail. All one hundred years of them.’ Jeremy Carlisle also impressed: ‘For your illumination I will shine a torch into the cave of my heart. Up and down we will go, deep into my years of depression and my struggle to see the light…’ Commendations also go to Jon Robins, David Silverman, Frank McDonald and Mike Morrison, but there were many strong performers – the field was tightly bunched – so hats off all round. The £25 John Lewis vouchers go to the authors of those entries printed below.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve never been able to observe wet paint without pausing to watch it dry, almost hypnotised to witness the initial shine transform itself like magic into a glossy, matte, or eggshell surface. Whether it’s a park bench or a bedroom wall, fresh paint has a way of capturing my imagination and filling my heart with optimistic thoughts of transformation and a new beginning. And so, as the reader of these pages will soon discover, I have spent my entire life travelling in search of newly painted surfaces. In the 600 pages that follow, I will recount each one.

Robert Schechter

Memorably, it was on 25th October 1965 that my show business career began. On that day I was appointed second assistant sound engineer on Top of the Pops, a position that I held for the next 20 rollercoaster years, giving me an insider’s view of the pop revolution. Along the way there arose all sorts of interesting problems: P.J. Proby’s aversion to lip-synching, for example, and Lulu’s difficulties when fitting a microphone into her cleavage. I’ve so many stories to tell! I was away with gastro-enteritis the week the Beatles performed, but other-wise I was close to all the legends. Oh the fun we had, especially when the Singing Postman was in the building! All to the soundtrack of Jimmy Savile’s constant stream of wisecracks: ‘Now then, now then!’ he’d say. ‘Which of you lovely ladies is coming home with me tonight?’ How we laughed!

George Simmers

I must have been eight, or possibly nine, certainly no older than ten, when I first realised that the grammatical structures of the words I was reading were more interesting than anything else in the works in which those words appeared. By the age of 46, or possibly 47, I had focused definitively and with a huge passion upon what are sometimes (anticipating the terminology of later ancient languages perhaps a little frivolously) referred to as deponent verbs in some of the early Anatolian languages. I shall describe in full detail later the process by which I reached this conclusion, while working at the same time as a library assistant in Huddersfield, but before I go any further in this memoir I feel that it is imperative that I provide, doubtless just as a reminder for my readers, a comprehensive overview of the entire verb-system of Hittite and Luwian…

Brian Murdoch

My paternal grandfather, Claude Taylor, was a baker in Inchfield when it was a (so to speak) independent town, not a featureless district of Greater London. (Greater?) His wife, my grandmother, was Faye, nee Kenden. My maternal grandfather, Gerald Baker, was a tailor in Beachgate, a fashionable resort at the time, now a dilapidated coastal town, and his wife was Mavis, nee Wilming. (Taylor was a baker and Baker was a tailor!) Researching for this memoir, I was delighted to discover that Grandma Mavis’s half-brother, Charles Lorne, was married (for a time) to Grandpa Claude’s second cousin, Alice Duvall, and I was, as I say, delighted by this double connection of the two families. Does this make me a cousin of some kind? I leave this puzzle to the genealogists! Alas, all four of my grandparents died before I was born, so…

Roger Rengold

I will not here relate how, at the age of 16, I became the mistress of the Earl of Casterbridge. As long as Lady Casterbridge is alive, the secret must be kept. While the history of Sir Theydon Bois, Alistair ‘Mad Alli’ McGillivray, the Russian masseuse and me would, I feel sure, enthral my readers, the Official Secrets Act prevents its being told until all those involved have passed on. In any case, a great deal has already been said and written on that subject, some of it not very far from the truth. I was also reluctantly forced to omit the, admittedly most sensational, material concerning the multimillionaire TV presenters and the late Cardinal Pointz, by exceptionally sharp-toothed lawyers.

So, to begin at the beginning, the choice of television viewing being Crossroads, Name That Tune, and a bio-documentary on Barbara Castle, my parents decided on an early night…

Frank Upton

I’ve spent my whole life in lard. Animal fats are not glamorous but there’s plenty of opportunities to make a tidy pile in them if you know your business. You’ll have heard the saying ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’ – well, here’s another one: ‘Where there’s lard, there’s lolly.’ I made that one up myself – and it applies to tallow too. And dripping. And the work’s not boring neither. I’ve met all sorts while building my fortune. I once met Thora Hird – a lovely lady if rather too religious for my taste – who officially opened the new 100-ton lard-rendering boiler in the main factory complex. And don’t forget, we staged a national competition to sculpt zoo animals out of lard – that put Batley on the map! I’d wanted HM The Queen to judge that one, but it turned out she was busy that day. So we used Cannon and Ball instead.

J.C.H. Mounsey