Hello! It’s Diana Townsend here.
When I was a child, my mother was my
hero. She had a superpower. She created things using nothing more than words.
My father was creative too, but he had
contracted a brain disease shortly before I was born which left him with
serious health issues for the rest of his life.
At times, his headaches were so bad his
skin became grey and waxy. He couldn’t speak, or stand up without losing his
balance. Work was out of the question and sometimes the attacks lasted for days.
That was when my mother pulled out her
trusty Remington typewriter and wrote stories for magazines so we could pay our
bills.
I remember her sitting at the kitchen
table, lost in her own world, the keys rattling like machinegun fire.
As well as paying the bills, writing was
Mum’s way of escaping the difficulties of life and creating a world where
dreams came true and good always triumphed in the end.
It wasn’t until Mum was in her early
nineties that she decided to write her memoir. I was intrigued, because although
I knew the rough outline of her life, she always had always preferred to live
in the present rather than talk about the past.
She asked us to buy a word-processor,
which was the latest in home technology at the time, and spent weeks learning
how to use it.
Then she started work.
Months later, when I finally read the
finished manuscript, I was overwhelmed.
I had known Mum was born into the
poverty of the East End of London and had travelled twice around the world, but
I was genuinely shocked when I read about her experiences emigrating to
Australia as a child, or later, when she returned to England and her home was
bombed during the Blitz of London.
Her life story was a fascinating record
of the eras she lived through, but it also captured everyday life in a family that
never quite managed to fit into the patterns most people consider normal.
Later, when I decided to write my own
memoir, my aim was to capture the reality of living in a wonderfully creative,
but impulsive family who had no qualms about closing their family business to
build a model circus, or sell their family home to buy a derelict school and transform
it into a tourist attraction.
My family are Wonderful. They are Crazy.
Creative. Kind. Unpredictable. Possibly a little Insane, but never boring.
I thought I could tell their story in
one book, but in the end, it took three. And there may even be more in the future!
I hope you enjoy them.
