And now for something completely different

Among the fragments of memoirs I've posted there was one - more than one, actually, including one consisting of excerpts from Wendy's diary - about the voyage home to Adelaide after my year at the MRC Social Medicine Research Unit in London in 1961-62. We traveled home the same way we traveled to London, on a Danish cargo ship that carried 12 passengers, including Wendy, Rebecca, David and me. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean about half way between the Red Sea and the coast of Western Australia, we ran out of reading matter for Rebecca and David. They were getting bored with Wendy and me rereading aloud to them from Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, The Magic Pudding and Charlotte's Web. Wendy and I were getting a bit fed up with rereading the same stories over and over again, too. 

So I made up a story to tell them. 

The story sprang into my mind fully formed, or so it seemed, even the names of the principal characters, fraternal twins Jennifer and Christopher, aged 9-10, their Dad and Mum, a 300-year-old parrot, the one that sat on Long John Silver's shoulder in Robert Louis Stephenson's wonderful adventure story, Treasure Island. I never wrote this story down. A few weeks ago, as a break from memoir-writing, I began to write down my story about Jennifer and Christopher, their Dad and Mum, the parrot whose name is Gloriana, several villains,  several other characters, and their adventures as the twins, the parrot, the twins' parents, hotly pursued by the villains, travel from Adelaide, South Australia through the irrigated districts beside the Murray River, the pastoral country of western New South Wales, the pineapple and sugar cane country of Queensland and eventually to the treasure island near the top end of the Great Barrier Reef. 

I set the story in the early 1930s, the time of my earliest memories.  It's not quite finished yet, but I have had that interesting experience many writers have described: as I wrote, the characters came to life in my head, did and said things I hadn't known about until they happened. I don't have the creative writing skills to do a very good job, especially with dialogue, but with patience and much rewriting I am fairly confident that I'll eventually write something I won't be ashamed of. The story has nine chapters. The first six are in good enough shape for me to send out to several children aged about 8-12 who can better judge than I can, whether I've managed to write in a style and language that will appeal to children in that age range.   

I've invited my grandchild Charles (formerly Christina) to illustrate the story. Charles has just had abdominal surgery, and I haven't heard yet whether he feels up to accepting my invitation. I hope he will. The story needs illustrations and I'd like to keep these in the family.