Kim Rooney
My first memory of writing is as a small, pyjama'd girl crouched on a cold, night-time floor. I had slipped a warm bed to fill pages only visible with light escaping from a hallway. I was a child of the late 1950s; the floor was stiff linoleum, the light a stringy, ceiling pendant. And the story wasn't mine.
Even then, I loved the life by proxy, telling another's tale. That shivering night, I rewrote the story of The Elephant's Child, Rudyard Kipling's fable about a young
And just as the nose of the Elephant's Child is stretched into a trunk by a crocodile, I made that story fill my homework book. I did not yet know that the power of a word comes from letting it breathe calmly into the space around it. "Oh Best Beloved", I had much to learn.
But it took time. Years.
Those night-time pages fluttered to the back of my mind. I was, like the Elephant's Child, full of "satiable curtiousity" for life's adventures; first and last kisses, the crumple of money, a child at my side. But a literary fretting never goes away, and occasionally words fell like broken stars onto miscellaneous pages. A poem here, an article there. Flutter, flutter.
Then, in the way the Elephant's Child's trunk is pulled into just the right length (after a struggle) I too was stretched into a writer's shape. There were people and places I had to give up, sometimes people and places left me. The struggle wasn't always mine.
But back came the girl on the linoleum floor, striving to see, but writing. The homework returned too and teachers with mantras. Writers' wisdom that has muddled and merged but I remember that every word must count and to count on every line. And each piece should flow free of any fact-fiction veneer, for truth only reveals itself in the telling.
And still I write the life vicarious, though it's only a trick with mirrors: to conjure with another's life is to stare at your own reflection. When I wrote of Grace Darling, battling with waves and destiny, I was fast pulling against my own tides of change. That is the power of tales from hags, harlots or heroines. They are what we might have been or yet become.
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