Helen L. Lowe's Blog, page 2

Parental Control – Fiction – Short Story

There had been times in Julian’s Childhood when he had hated being alone at Deerwater Manor. When he had been frightened of sights and sounds he didn’t understand and scared to have doors shut behind him. On this particular evening, he would have preferred the company of unearthly spirits to that of earthbound mortals, who interrupted his valuable practise time with their superficial drivel. He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. Any second now Mother would be back ‘what’s the matter now, Jules?  Has Mr Nerves escaped again?’ Go away you stupid bitch!

The suspense of waiting for his mother’s next invasion was stifling his creative mood, sapping his strength until he felt weak and useless. In a fit of rage he slammed his closed fists onto the keyboard and continued to hit them until the cacophony of notes flowed through his body like currents of electricity. It was a relief to hear the discordant sounds after three hours of striving to play the perfection of a Mozart’s concerto. He was halfway through the third movement of K595 in B flat, Mozart’s last concerto and performed only months before his death. It was recognised as a work of serene transcendent beauty but Julian was beginning to wish he had never heard of it.

His childish display of frustration would not go unnoticed, so he just sat and waited, counting the seconds until the door opened and Mother breezed into room. He didn’t react to her entrance but stayed motionless at the piano, feeling the heat of her body as she stood behind him pressing against his back.

‘You mustn’t let Mr Nerves win, Darling.’

‘Mother, please – the last thing I need now . . .’

‘I know what you need Jules. You know that, don’t you?  Mother always knows what you need.’  She stroked his shoulders with her long fingers and immaculately manicured nails. A mother’s caress.

‘I’ve had enough for today, I’m tired.’  He was attempting defiance, something he rarely managed successfully with Mother.

‘You have an important concert next week – you can’t afford to slack off now.’

He closed his eyes and tried to block her out. His mind was flooded with childhood memories of days shut in the music room. She had beaten him into submission, starved him for days and then force fed him on a pure meat diet which she believed stimulated his artistic intellect. She had stood beside him with a thin equestrian dressage whip and flicked it across the back of his hands; forcing him to practise over and over again until she was satisfied that perfection had been achieved. She no longer needed to abuse him physically, the memories were enough.

‘Practise for one more hour – just another hour, there’s a good boy.’ She kissed him affectionately on the head and quietly left the room.

Julian stared at the keyboard and then at his hands, now unclenched but shaking with anger. She would be waiting for him to start, standing motionless, hands held in front of her with fingers interlocked. She reminded him of a pointer dog or bitch, in her case.

If he didn’t start playing within the next few minutes, she’d be back whining at him with her sharp, nasal voice. How many more years must he suffer her?  Was there no escape for him, no escape from her constant nagging and interfering?  She suffocated him, allowing him to have no thoughts of his own and to make no decisions without her prior agreement. He had dreams of ending her tyrannical control over his life. He knew one day he’d stop her. One day I’ll make her stop.

He had a shower before taking his customary post-practice rest and let the hot water ease the pain in his back between the shoulder blades.  It was a recurring problem that had started as a child when his mother forced him to practise for hours on end, and no amount of treatment from physiotherapists and chiropractors had helped.

Three hours later, he was in the new gym in the cellar.  It had been installed six months ago and gave him a safe haven away from Mother.  She had a phobia about sweat and body odours; it made her feel physically sick.  So Julian made sure he worked out enough to sweat buckets and made a point of talking to her wearing his soaked t-shirt before he went back upstairs.  Today, she was in the kitchen; it was the cook’s day off.

‘What’s for dinner?’

‘Salmon,’ she said, backing away from his sweat.

‘I fancy red meat tonight.’

‘You’ve had that every day for a week and used up what we had in the freezer.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ he said, smiling to himself.  It always amused him when she pretended his obsession with red meat was shocking.  It was her who force fed him red meat from an early age, convinced that the high protein diet was directly linked to his genius.

The post that day brought some good news.  Julian’s publicity manager had sent confirmation of his new European tour.  Mother opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.  After a clink of champagne flutes, they sat down to discuss the tour.

‘I was thinking of inviting Lisa to join me for a few days in Vienna,’ Julian said.  Lisa was a young woman he had met six months ago on holiday and he was quite infatuated with her.

‘She’s not suitable for you, Darling,’ Mother said. ‘Marriage with her would be a big mistake.’

‘Mother, please, no woman is good enough in your eyes.’

She smiled.  ‘Well, that’s true – but Lisa is so . . . so ordinary and I know you’re getting too attached to her.’

‘I can’t hide anything from you, Mother, can I?’

She smiled.  ‘I know you too well, Darling – it’s only natural that a young man has needs, but you must learn to control them.’

‘Speaking of needs – I really do want a good steak tonight and you know I dislike salmon.  I’ll cook. I’ve got a few things to buy in town anyway, leave it with me.’

She gave him a withering look.  ‘Have steak if you must but I want salmon.’

He stood up.  ‘Very well, if you insist, you can have your salmon which I will cook to perfection and I’ll have a fillet steak.’

The meal took longer to prepare that Julian had intended so it was a little late in the evening when he sat down at the table.  It was beautifully laid with matching lace table cloth and napkins and as a finishing touch a large silver platter sat majestically in the centre of the table.

Julian had a delightful meal and Mother seemed really pleased with her salmon.  Her mood that evening was very pleasant and for once she listened to what he had to say without interrupting.  She didn’t nag once or whine at him in her sharp nasal voice.  She just watched him with an unblinking gaze, content to be in the presence of her beloved son.

It was the most enjoyable meal Julian had ever had and he told his mother so.  ‘I hope you liked the way I cooked your salmon,’ he said, pointing with his knife at the silver platter, where a severed head sat with a whole salmon stuffed in its mouth.  A wide beam of a smile spread across his face.  ‘I stuffed it with fresh dill, parsley and tarragon . . . but watch out for the bones, if they get stuck in the throat they can be extremely tricky to remove.’

Childhood & Romanticsim – A True Story

Childhood & Romanticism – When I was 9-yrs-old I was a tomboy. I wore my hair short, dressed like a boy, and played like a boy. I was fortunate to make friends with a girl called Lyn who lived next door and to my delight, was just like me. For several years until her family moved to Mauritius with the Navy (my first experience of a broken heart) we were joined at the hip. I can’t remember wearing a dress over these tomboy years, except when I had to look pretty for some party and when I wore my school uniform.

I remember reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven from cover to cover and adored the adventures the children were involved in. We started our own Famous Five club and attempted to hold serious meetings in the garden shed. We had to recruit more children into our club to make up the numbers but they soon fell by the wayside and it was left to the fanatics, The Amazing Duo, to carry out our dangerous missions on our own.

School days were a trial over these formative years and not just because they insisted I wore a dress. My adventures with Lyn spilled over into my school work when we were asked after every school holiday to write an essay about what we did in the holidays. Now, here I had a problem because we very rarely went anywhere or did anything special in the holidays. My parents stretched themselves to, and beyond, their financial limit to send me, and my older sister, to a private school.

At the time, our father, Fred Lowe, was an area manager for a large cash register company. He made a reasonable living at his day job, but his real passion was magic. He was in the police force in Liverpool before the Second World War, in the RAF during the war, and back in the police force post-war. He started his obsession with magic when he was recovering from a motorbike accident before the war and he discovered that his desire for perfection in everything he did was essential for sleight-of-hand and close-up magic. He was soon performing in shows with his stage act, and a mind-reading act he performed with my mother. They were known as ‘The Amazing Lowes’ (yes, I know, The Amazing Duo’ wasn’t entirely original) and I can still picture her on a stage dressed in a beautiful dress and wearing a black velvet and diamante blindfold while our father walked around the audience and selected items from the audience for her to say what he was holding in his hand.

His magic was the reason he left the police force because, even though he did free shows for the police, and many charities, he was told to choose between magic and the police; he chose magic. By the way, the more senior citizens in our society may remember a time when there were gaps in our black and white TV programs that were filled in by a pair of white-gloved hands performing close-up magic tricks – they were my father’s hands, and I believe the short films went all over the world. I’m afraid I can’t tell you how the close-up tricks or mind-reading was done because, even though we were only children, Father made us swear to tell no one the tricks of the trade.  He said it was the Magician’s oath and everyone in the Magic Circle had to swear allegiance to it. You can imagine what an impact that would have on a child with an overactive imagination.

Going back to my problems at school with ‘what do you do in your holidays?’ Somehow, writing about weeding the garden, cleaning the car or helping our mother with the shopping, seemed extremely boring compared with the adventures in our secret club. So I wrote about the adventures until one day a letter arrived from the school addressed to my parents asking them to come in to see the headmistress. I wasn’t aware of this until later when my father spoke to me.  Apparently, the headmistress told my parents that I was telling lies at school.  She meant the stories I wrote about my school holidays.  My father read some of the stories in my English book when he was at the school, and he told the headmistress that what I was doing was romanticising not lying and that he thought the grammar was of a high standard for my age. Nevertheless, I was told to write only the facts in those essays and, too scared of the headmistress to disobey and mindful of the fact that my parents were working hard to pay the school fees, I did exactly as I was told. It was paramount in stunting my creativity for the rest of my childhood and it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood at the age of thirty that I started writing down the stories that were flooding my mind and threatening my very sanity.

What I discovered when I wrote them down was that I was happier, my head felt clearer and my sanity returned.  It was a turning point in how I perceived myself.  I gave myself permission to write anything I wanted without feeling guilty that I was wasting time.  Writing became an essential part of me and even though I didn’t send my work off for publication I was at last at peace with myself.

An Author’s Confession – About me & my writing

Ok, so here’s the thing, all my life, from my early memories as a young child, I loved to make up stories. To adults, especially teachers, I was a dreamer who couldn’t concentrate on anything long enough to produce a finished piece of work but in my head, I lived in a fantasy world. I never ran out of stories to invent; a pet elephant in the garden, a thief breaking into our home and attacking me with a knife or a spine-chilling tale of a ghost that roamed the corridors of our school.

Never being able to concentrate affected my early education so much that I thought myself fortunate if I came second to bottom in the class rather than bottom. The headmistress called my father into the school to tell him that they considered my story telling to be a form of lying. My father, bless his heart, disagreed and said that I was romancing. Well, that explained my story telling but what about my poor grades.

Fortunately, my father tried his belief in positive thinking on me. He helped me write down goals and make mental pictures of reaching those goals. It took just one year for me to go from second to bottom, right up to second to top.  Nevertheless, my story telling had to go and I was banned from writing anything that wasn’t true (creative writing was unfortunately not encouraged in my school). But this didn’t stop the stories in my head. I just kept them, and my conviction that I was insane, to myself. When I was older and had to choose a career, I picked a job that I had been dreaming of for years, one that wouldn’t give me the time or energy to think up stories. I became a nurse.

The stories stopped abruptly when I started my nurse training in London. In those days (1967), we were expected to work a forty-eight hour week and study in our own time. It was hard work but I loved it and I forgot about my stories. But when I was married and had a break from work after the birth of my second daughter, the stories came flooding back. I thought about them all the time. In the kitchen cooking a meal, in the bath, when I was shopping and when I was driving. It got so bad I thought I was losing touch with reality. Eventually, I told my husband about the stories and he was relieved to find out that there was a reason for my ‘trancelike episodes,’ as he described them. He suggested I wrote them down to see if that helped. It was such an obvious solution that I still, to this day, can’t understand why I didn’t work that out for myself years ago. That’s when I started writing.

I wrote a novel in six months on an electric typewriter (no home computers then) and it was like being set free. When I had finished, the obvious next step was to get it published. Unfortunately, I had no idea how the publishing world worked and I was blissfully unaware of the high standard I needed to attain to get my work accepted. When I look back on it now it makes me smile. I sent it off to two publishers (only two!) and even though one of them made some positive comments I took it as complete rejection and gave up. I continued to write short stories, more of a way to get them out of my head rather than a wish to publish them but the writing became more difficult as I went back to work and had to juggle nursing with bringing up a family.

Gradually, as the children became more independent, I was able to give myself the time (and permission) to take my writing more seriously. I attended writing courses and read every book I could find on advice from successful authors. I started but did not finish three more novels. I now realise that I didn’t finish them because I had major doubts about my ability to write well. That initial and only rejection of my work years ago was still blocking me.

I understand now that every writer has to deal with rejection. They must develop a hard shell to protect their fragile egos from all the flack that will be thrown their way. But things have moved on in the publishing world and every writer, good or bad, can publish their work easily and cheaply. When I found out about ‘Indie’ publishing (self-publishing online) two years ago it was a light bulb moment. I started a new novel, a thriller, set in London’s swinging sixties, that had been in my head for more than twenty years, and I didn’t stop until I finished it. The name of the book is ‘Hartmann – Malicious Rules’. I did three rewrites and four or five edits (I’ve lost count) and gave it out to three trusted friends to make sure it was easy to read and made sense. Then I needed to make a decision; was I going to send it out to agents (not publishers as most of them no longer take unsolicited) or was I going to go straight for Indie publishing?

I decided to send it out to six agents and if none of those were interested I would publish it myself. I sent it out twelve weeks ago and so far I’ve heard back from three of them. Two of them made some very positive comments, but they said it wouldn’t fit into their client list. The third just said ‘no thank you’. The remaining three haven’t got back to me. I could add the word ‘yet’ to the last sentence but in all honesty I don’t think they will. And to be fair, I’m not surprised that it wasn’t accepted by agents because it’s different. I’m not saying it’s necessarily different in a good way, but may not sit comfortably in an agent’s list and range of genres. Also, it’s a debut novel. Those two things alone make it a risk that many agents may not wish to take. If you add in my mature age, agents would not consider me to be a long-term investment. Although, I’ve been told that publishers are not normally put off by a writer’s age because they’re only interested in that one book being a success

I’m sorry if I sound a bit cynical. I don’t have any hard feelings towards agents, or publishers who have made the decision not to accept unsolicited work. Publishers are very busy people who haven’t got time to wade through all the manuscripts that pour through their doors but by insisting the work comes via an agent must, in turn, put the agents under tremendous pressure to sift through the slush pile. I can’t help thinking that this rather lopsided system results in thousands of new and talented writers of all ages being left out in the cold, and agents and publishers trawling through the online e-books to see what talented authors they have missed. It’s a bit like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.

Anyway, my decision is made. Indie publishing it is.

I’ve got a Graphic Designer working on the book cover, and a Marketing Guru to manage the promotion. (If you’re thinking that I’m spending a lot of money here, let me reassure you that my eldest daughter, Suzanne, happens to be a graphic designer, and my youngest daughter, Jennifer, is a marketing executive.) And no, I didn’t push them into careers that would ultimately be of use to me as a writer – though in hindsight it’s a damn good idea, and possibly an interesting idea for a story.

The launch date for ‘Hartmann – Malicious Rules’, which is the first book in the ‘Hartmann Thriller Series’, is 04 December this year (2015) on Amazon and Amazon Kindle, and very soon after that will be available on other popular platforms such as; Sony Nook, Barnes and Noble and Apple iTunes.

Am I worried that no one will buy it or it will get slated in reviews?

No, I’m not.

It was a pleasure to write and it fulfilled a lifelong ambition. Even the painful editing and deleting of my favourite but superfluous sentences was cathartic. It felt like a rite of passage. And just to prove that there’s life in the old girl yet, I’m already working on the sequel, Book 2.

If anyone reading this would like to comment or chat about any aspect of writing, I would be delighted.

Best wishes