‍My writing journey began with my crazy mother pretending to be a rabbit….

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‍An older cousin came home from school distressed. I hadn’t started school yet, so his upset was a mystery to me. Adults were always telling me school was fun, and I was longing to go. But my cousin had been set an assignment he didn’t know how to do. In grade 2, he was instructed to write a short story about a rabbit.

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‍Mother to the rescue! Not his mother…. mine. We were living, at the time, with my aunt and uncle and their family.

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‍My mother was a deeply frustrated woman. A child of the Great Depression‍a highly intelligent woman who loved learning and aspired to be a teacher‍she was compelled to leave school at the end of grade 6. A teacher, I think, is born, not made. My mother was one. In the winter of her life, she taught public speaking at a high school and was lauded one of the best teachers the the principal had ever engaged, despite her never having pursued any formal education after primary school. Despite, also, her being extraordinarily shy-withdrawn anywhere outside family and closest friends until she joined Toastmaster in her 60s. Determined only ever to listen, she went on to place second in a national championship!

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‍ I digress.

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‍My cousin wrote that the rabbit ‘went to his burrow’.

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‍My teacher-mother said that wouldn’t do at all. So down she went, on all fours, and began to hop in a fashion as close to that of a rabbit as she could manage, all the while pleading with my cousin to tell her what she was doing.

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‍No, not walking. Not running,” she chided. ‘What do you do on one leg when you play in those squares your father drew on the cement outside.”

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‍t took a while. At first he protested that he didn’t play that game. The girls did. Eventually, though, the word came. The sentence was changed to ‘the rabbit hopped’. Then my teacher-mother embarked on the task of teaching him to use an adverb to describe how the rabbit hopped. And then an adjective to describe the rabbit.

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‍I was mesmerised. My mother was always fiercely determined I should pursue her dream of a teaching career. In my mind, even at the tender age of four, my destiny was confirmed. I would be a writer.