YA fiction 1st person narrative
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Teen (13-17)Accents
British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink that is my feet are in it. The rest of me is on the draining board which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea cozy. I can't say that I am really comfortable and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap. But this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring. I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the henhouse though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. Drips from the roof are plopping into the water. But by the back door, the view through the windows above the sink is excessively Dreer beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls of the edge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy plowed fields stretch to the lead and sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had lately is good for nature and that at any moment, spring will surge on us. I try to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight. Unfortunately, the more my mind's eye sees green and gold, the more drained of all color does the twilight seem. I'm writing this journal partly to practice my newly acquired speed writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel. I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought. As up to now, my stories have been very stiff and self conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them. He said, I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me. I wish I knew of a way to make words flow out of father. Years and years ago, he wrote a very unusual book called Jacob Wrestling, a mixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry. It had a great success particularly in America where he made a lot of money by lecturing on it. And he seemed likely to become a very important writer indeed, but he stopped writing. Mother believed this was due to something that happened. When I was about five. We were living in a small house by the sea. At the time, father had just joined us after his second American lecture tour one afternoon while we were having tea in the garden, he had the misfortune to lose his temper with mother. Very noisily just as he was about to cut a piece of cake, he brandished the cake knife at her so menacingly that an officious neighbor jumped the garden fence to intervene and got himself knocked down. Father explained in court that killing a woman with our silver cake knife would be a long weary business entailing soaring her to death and he was completely exonerated of any intention of slaying mother. The whole case seems to have been quite ludicrous with everyone but the neighbor being very funny, but father made the mistake of being funnier than the judge. And as there was no doubt, whatever that he had seriously damaged the neighbor, he was sent to prison for three months when he came out, he was as nice a man as ever nicer because his temper was so much better. Apart from that, he didn't seem to me to be changed at all. But Rose remembers that he had already begun to get unsociable.