Faces Made Of Glue - where it came from
A lot of family on my mother's side come from near the city of Ely in East Anglia. Precisely, a village outside Ely called Littleport. I went back there five or six years ago for the first time in God knows how long; it's grown since I was a kid, but it's still a small place and, compared to where I live now, very green and very quiet. Back in the mid eighties, my brother and I went there a couple of times with our mum for a weekend to visit grandparents and various cousins. This would be on a weekend in July when Littleport Show was held. Think horse displays, beer tents, fairground rides, loads of homemade jams and all that sort of stuff. Later on the Saturday, there'd be a big party at the house of one of my distant cousins at which point, I - being around eight years old - would sneak a mouthful of someone's beer and fall asleep. All good fun.
Except, one year I got lost. I can't narrow it down to an exact year so I'm going to say either 1985 or 1986. That feels about right. We were in a large group of easily seven or eight people: grandparents, my mum, my brother (who would have been twelve or so to my eight or nine) and a few cousins. There are a few bitty memories of the day. Scorching heat; the smells of horses and the beer tents; noise of an entire village and the surrounding area all converged on a large chunk of open farmland, and me in my GhostBusters t-shirt. Me hearing my mother say something to my brother, drawing his attention for some reason, and me turning from whatever I was looking towards to the other direction. Then turning back to see everyone had gone.
They probably merged into a crowd without realising I was a few feet behind. Either way, they were gone and I stood alone in the middle of a huge field, surrounded by people and noise and heat. And let's not forget the panic I couldn't call fear. Not right then.
Of course, the sensible thing to have done was either grab the nearest adult or keep walking in the direction we'd been heading. I didn't do either which is why I spent what felt like hours wandering around the grounds, going to the places we'd already been - fair rides, beer tents, horse show - and then back to the spot we'd separated. All the while, that panic edged closer to fear (much as it does for the boy in my story) while I told myself I couldn't ask for help because that meant I was in trouble. Eventually, I hit on the idea of walking back to my grandparents' house which was about a mile away. So I headed to the exit to discover it opened to a new road. I had no idea where the hell the road went and as Googling it wasn't really an option, it was either start walking or go back to the Show. And here's the difference between real life and fiction: in fiction, it's harder to believe the kid gets saved at the end, but that's what happened in real life. A policeman called a name behind me. Not my name. He said Jason. Where he got Jason from compared to Luke, I had no idea, but I still turned around and finally told an adult I was lost.
The upshot was the policeman taking me back to my family and here I am, thirty years later, writing about it. Luckily for me, things didn't go quite as they do in Faces Made Of Glue. Also luckily for me, those minutes that felt like hours spent wandering around a field in the July sun turned into a seed for an idea sitting here for three decades.
Sometimes, it works out in the end.
Buy the anthology featuring Faces Made Of Glue here.
Except, one year I got lost. I can't narrow it down to an exact year so I'm going to say either 1985 or 1986. That feels about right. We were in a large group of easily seven or eight people: grandparents, my mum, my brother (who would have been twelve or so to my eight or nine) and a few cousins. There are a few bitty memories of the day. Scorching heat; the smells of horses and the beer tents; noise of an entire village and the surrounding area all converged on a large chunk of open farmland, and me in my GhostBusters t-shirt. Me hearing my mother say something to my brother, drawing his attention for some reason, and me turning from whatever I was looking towards to the other direction. Then turning back to see everyone had gone.
They probably merged into a crowd without realising I was a few feet behind. Either way, they were gone and I stood alone in the middle of a huge field, surrounded by people and noise and heat. And let's not forget the panic I couldn't call fear. Not right then.
Of course, the sensible thing to have done was either grab the nearest adult or keep walking in the direction we'd been heading. I didn't do either which is why I spent what felt like hours wandering around the grounds, going to the places we'd already been - fair rides, beer tents, horse show - and then back to the spot we'd separated. All the while, that panic edged closer to fear (much as it does for the boy in my story) while I told myself I couldn't ask for help because that meant I was in trouble. Eventually, I hit on the idea of walking back to my grandparents' house which was about a mile away. So I headed to the exit to discover it opened to a new road. I had no idea where the hell the road went and as Googling it wasn't really an option, it was either start walking or go back to the Show. And here's the difference between real life and fiction: in fiction, it's harder to believe the kid gets saved at the end, but that's what happened in real life. A policeman called a name behind me. Not my name. He said Jason. Where he got Jason from compared to Luke, I had no idea, but I still turned around and finally told an adult I was lost.
The upshot was the policeman taking me back to my family and here I am, thirty years later, writing about it. Luckily for me, things didn't go quite as they do in Faces Made Of Glue. Also luckily for me, those minutes that felt like hours spent wandering around a field in the July sun turned into a seed for an idea sitting here for three decades.
Sometimes, it works out in the end.
Buy the anthology featuring Faces Made Of Glue here.
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