My First Published Writing, Evah!

published: Wed, 27-Sep-2006   |   updated: Wed, 27-Sep-2006

When I was visiting my parents at the beginning of September, I went up into the attic to "my corner". I call it my corner because it has the remainder of my possessions that are still in England (the rest have long since been thrown away or brought here to the States). Only three boxes left now; mostly business papers. After some ferreting around in them I found a copy of VISTA, the Dorking Grammar School Magazine, for 1970/71. And inside it, my very first published piece of writing.

The magazine's editorial is printed on fairly heavy paper and is surrounded by lighter weight yellow advertising pages. The ads are a hoot:

Join the Bright Girls at the Midland

Want to join a crowd of bright young people who like their work and get properly paid for it?

Here's your chance -- at the Midland Bank.

At the Midland, you can not only get the same pay as the men, but get extra money for taking on extra responsibility.

We encourage you to get on ... give you a chance to study if you want to ... offer you the same opportunities for promotion to management as the men around you. If you're one of the lively ones, come and join us at the Midland.

To go with the subtle girls/men word juxtapositions there's a picture of a happy secretary at a typewriter. And "lively ones"? I have this vision of a Monty Python sketch: "Are you one of the lively ones? Know what I mean? Nudge, nudge." (By the way, Midland Bank were subsumed into HSBC in the late 80s or early 90s and doesn't exist any more.)

What else? There's an ad for Mays, a car dealership on South Street, extolling its selling and servicing of Austin, Jaguar, and Triumph cars. One make still existing out of three ain't bad...

And there's The Record Shop on West Street advertising the fact that it has "large stocks of musicassettes". Ahhh, yes, musicassettes. Mine were all stolen many years later in Catford by someone breaking into my Ford Cortina.

Inside there are the usual reports on school events: the successes from the sports teams, the plays that had been produced, the recital of the Messiah by Handel (pretty ambitious, that), staff leaving and joining (my fave French teacher, Mrs Whitehouse, was leaving because her husband was leaving the area; mind you, it was after this year that I dropped French to concentrate on the science subjects for O-level so it didn't really matter to me any more), the status of the various school clubs (the Senior Chess Club had had a pretty good year, it seems). Also that year, we had The Fire, a real one, hence capitalized. We all stood around on the playing fields watching the firemen going in and coming out. I seem to remember (it's not mentioned in VISTA) that it was someone smoking in the art supplies room. Why they chose the art supplies room instead of behind the gym, where everyone else went, I don't know. Anyway, not much was damaged.

And of course there are the best examples of writing and art from up and down the school. Mine is on page 24. It's not an article on programming or computer science (I didn't know what they were in those days; I wanted to be an Aeronautical Engineer). No, my first published writing was a poem.

THE SCHOOL RULES

Yesterday I said something unprintable.
Today I am writing out the school rules.
My fingers are aching so I drop the pen.
The snow falls silently, softly;
The trees must be aching too.

Ten times a hundred times
My writing blends into a smooth line.
I have to start the page again.
The snow too, falling softly
Blends the ruts into a smooth line.

Was it five hundred or a thousand?
I clearly can't remember.
I have already written them a lot of times.
My father drops sand and salt
On the snow on the gravel path.

I have to finish them before tomorrow
Or else I will get them double.
I wish that teacher never existed.
Probably the snow, falling softly,
Wishes that salt never existed.

At last I have finished.
I put the pen away, can't find it now,
And stuff all the papers in my case.
And the snow finishes
Its battle with salt and melts.

J. Bucknall. 3i.

Mmm. Reading it at this remove, I get the feeling I was trying too hard. It seems a little contrived and obviously structured, each verse having three lines of me and two lines of anthropomorphic snow. And why is my Dad putting sand and salt on a gravel path? But, hey, whatever else I managed to get a semicolon in on the first verse (shades of things to come)! The person who transcribed it for the magazine made spelling and grammar errors that I've corrected here: I'm sure that I would never have written the final "its" as "it's". Never, ever.

I must admit the whole poem has a elegiac and even melancholic feel to it. If I remember rightly, the first two lines appeared fully formed in my brain, and, even now, have a wonderful flow to them. I can't for the life of me remember the homework assignment that produced it ("Write a poem that describes weather and atoning for bad behavior"?), and I assure you that I certainly had never read the school rules.

The "3i" label? Dorking County Grammar had this weird way of labelling classes. Each year (they were called "forms" in those days) had three classes (so, there were about 90 children per year, in essence). I was in the third form, and must have been 13 or 14 since the first form started at 11. There was no streaming of pupils into ability (after all, we were at a Grammar school and therefore should have been equally able), so they didn't want to call the third forms 3a, 3b, and 3c, since that nomenclature implies some reflection of scholarly aptitude. So they named them 3, 3a, and 3i instead. I was in form 3i, having been in 2i the previous year, and 1i the year before that. Clear as mud, eh?