What was Serina Hartwell like as a child? – Now
there’s a question.
I grew up in a mill town, which I talk about in more detail in my page
on mills, in the Hidden section of my websites serinahartwell.info and serinahartwell@blogspot.com.
They were dotted around the place I lived, in fact, there were so many that you
couldn’t go anywhere without coming across one on your journey. The street I
lived in was like a little oasis in a sea of industrial buildings. It was my
whole world as a child and my playground. Today I watch my own kids growing up
and feel a sense of regret, because they never played out like I did as a
child. Their childhoods were a lot different, simply because society changed. Despite
my encouragement, things moved on. My low tech football and skipping rope could
never compete with a piece of electronic gadgetry. As my children grew up, more
and more of their toys included technology, taking them away from the fresh
air, the rain and fields of fun.
I treasure my sheltered childhood. I
experienced a freedom that doesn’t seem to exist anymore for inner city
children. I was a child of great imagination, naturally, as you would expect of
a writer. My childhood memories of school were of getting caught daydreaming
constantly. Every school report had – ‘She has done well this year, but must
not become complacent and she must not daydream in class.’ I have very mixed
emotions about daydreaming, I must admit. My primary and middle school were so
important to me. I loved going to school. I loved every minute of it. I thrived
and worked as hard as I could, and even left my middle school with the
Headmaster’s prize. A prize awarded to just one student out of the whole
school. I still have it now. I was given an encyclopaedia for all my hard work.
My downfall was when it came to long spiels, this was when I tended to daydream.
The parent in me today shouts, ‘you should have concentrated more in school,’
but I don’t really regret it for a minute.
The mixed emotions I talked about
earlier are simple. In order to be a writer, you have to have a great
imagination, but to be a writer, you often find that your personality leads you
to be a daydreamer. The problem I found was while the teacher was teaching me
how to punctuate a sentence and use correct grammar, I had a tendency to switch
off; this was where the daydreaming took over. Luckily, I found that the
grammar worked its way in via osmosis, but because I was daydreaming in class,
and my mind was absent from the lesson, freely wandering around my fantasy
world, I didn’t pay as much attention to the finer detail of punctuation as I
should have (the thing I was less interested in, because I was never going to
use it again, right?). So when it came to writing my book, I made a lot of
mistakes in the beginning. It’s taken a lot of work to self-teach and
discipline myself in order to get my book out, which is the downside. I’m
getting there slowly. I still make silly mistakes and can’t spell for love nor
money, but three years of solid practice is bound to improve you eventually.
I was always surrounded by a solid
set of friends, as a child. They were the best set of friends that anyone could
ask for and I’m still in touch with most of them now, in some shape or form. I
remember my brother and I playing out for hours and dad coming out to call us
in. Of course we would always push the boundary as far as we could. He could
never get us in on the first attempt. Gradually we found the middle ground with
him. He was a fare man. The first call we treated like a warning for a request
that was to follow. The second was the request that we chose to ignore, but we
knew that by the third request, we had to go in. Any requests after that put
dad in a bad mood for the rest of the evening. He knew this, and although he
always put on a show for us, he always forgave us.
A number of my friends didn’t even
live on the street. They came to visit their Grandparents. I remember some of
my fondest memories coming from being allowed to play, when it rained, in
Mark’s Grandmother’s garage. I don’t know to this day why it had a carpet down
in there, maybe it was being stored, or perhaps she put it there for us to play
on, but that carpet took us around the whole universe. It was a magic carpet
flying over an arid desert, the inside of a spaceship, an island in the middle
of an ocean, amongst many other things. About half a dozen kids, or more, all
piled on that carpet that curled up at the edges with me and we had a whale of
a time. To this day, I put a lot of my storytelling beginnings down to playing
with my friends.
I remember that at the top of the
street, there were a bunch of trees. They weren’t very tall, more shrub like
than tree, but they had all grown into one another, leaving a hollow inside. Of
course as children, we saw this as our den and it became another great source
of fun and excitement, which I cherish to this day.
When you read Hidden, you will be
able to read a lot about my childhood. When I wrote about Bronte and Riley, I
drew upon these precious memories. Although Bronte’s story isn’t a like for
like for my own, you do get a feel for what it was like for me growing up and
the solid friendships I had with friends. I set the book in the place I grew
up. It’s just unfortunate that the place has changed so much since I left many
years ago, but its essence still lives on in my memories. I have tried to do it
justice in my writing, to let a little bit of it live on, in my book.
I feature a tree in The Hidden Saga, called
Nelson. Nelson is based on a tree that stood by the river at the top of the
street where I lived as a child, although our tree didn’t have a name. We used
to play around it, on the beck’s beach, as children. It marked the boundary of
the limit of where we were allowed to play when we were small, because it was
on the path that led up the side of the river to the waterfall and to the
village beyond where the grand mill that my mother used to work at, stood. Of
course as children, as you get older, you push those boundaries and play where
you shouldn’t anyway and I have to admit that we didn’t do it as often as we
probably could have done, but sorry mum and dad, we did. I will hang my head in
shame. However, in my defence, if we hadn’t, I may never have written The
Hidden Saga.
A bypass was run through the top of
our street and our tree managed to survive, but there was no protest to save
it, we didn’t need to. It escaped by meters, it lived in the right place. I
visited it when I was taking photos for my book cover for Hidden with my
daughter ‘Crazytooner’, who designed the cover for me. There is still a swing
there, hanging from its biggest branch. That tree must have a tale or two to
tell. It saw all my generation, plus the older kids who used to dominate it
when we were young. Who knows how many others have treated it as their own and
claimed it for themselves? Today there is a new generation of children coming
through and the cycle begins again. I think that tree will see us all out.
Serina Hartwell – Author
of The Hidden Saga
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