I was an arrow

The demise of WHSmith, and its strange appearance in my life

I was startled to hear, a few weeks ago, that the stationer’s WHSmith had been sold to an investment company and was to close some stores, and rename the rest TGJones. (Who is T G Jones?) I think of WHSmith rather as a person might think of someone who was significant in their childhood and whom they now rarely bother to visit, but think of off and on with fondness.

I don’t drop into WHSmith that frequently now, but when I was growing up in Leamington Spa from the ages of seven till eighteen, it was a significant presence. For one thing, it was the only place that sold magazines that were literal windows into a world outside a provincial, largely white town in the very centre of England which, for reasons that felt obscure, was all of a sudden but very persistently where I lived. These magazines included The Face, which had musicians like Björk on the cover, or a young model called Kate Moss, a teenager herself, screwing up her face, clutching a straw hat to cover herself, and apparently laughing; they also sometimes included a New Yorker or even a copy of the weekly ELLE in French. All of this, in times before the internet, was unimaginable sophistication and seemed to wave flags of hope: there was a life outside Leamington Spa, waiting to be lived.

WHSmith was also a bookshop, and somehow when I was fourteen I learned about their Young Writers Competition, which was annual, and not new – that would be the 35^th iteration. I don’t remember how I came across it. Was it an ad in the newspaper? A sign in the shop? A copy of an earlier year’s anthology? A poster in school? The Young Writers’ Competition not only invited stories and poems from anyone under the age of 16 every year, and awarded prizes to some of them; the winning entries were also published in an anthology by Macmillan, that I suppose was sold to school libraries, and also available in the shop. It was an actual book, with an ISBN number (if I knew what that was). At the moment I found out about all this, it was simultaneously apparent to me that I would be entering this competition, and that, indeed, it was the next thing to do. It was for me. I was young, and I was a writer. Privately and silently I decided to enter. There was one story I’d already been working on – for most of my childhood I was always writing a story, and usually painting a painting, interrupted only by the school week. I never showed either to anyone, or did anything with them, even though I was proud of both. I finished the story I’d been working on, which was about a teenage boy in a boarding school who reads EM Forster’s The Longest Journey and finds in the doctrine of philosophical idealism discussed in the novel an analogue for the unreal feeling of his own life, then leaves the school. (Why a boarding school? Maybe suggested by the book that inspired it, or by the fact that I never went to but was vaguely fascinated as well as repelled by boarding school – fascinated by the possibility of life apart from one’s parents, but repelled by the idea of needing to ask permission to walk into town and contemplate a little light shoplifting at Superdrug. Maybe boarding school or public school in general just seemed like the right kind of setting for people in stories.) I wrote another story for the competition too – this was about a couple of teenagers, I think, who go boating in the river near the local park and find a dead body.

Having finished the stories in a weekend, I carefully wrote them out by hand as legibly as possible on sheets of plain paper borrowed from my dad’s study, put them in an envelope with, I suppose, another piece of paper with my name, address and school name on top, and posted them. What’s interesting to me now is that I didn’t really think about it after that. At some point the following year, I got a letter, I think, telling me that I was a runner up in the competition, meaning I hadn’t won a special award, but my stories would (both) be published in the anthology. There would be a ‘book launch’, in the local branch of WHSmith, and the publicists for the competition also set up interviews with local newspapers and BBC radio. I was slightly horrified by all this, having decided in my extreme youth to publish only under a pseudonym that I was still finetuning, but there was no way out. BBC Coventry and Warwickshire (RIP) sent a reporter from Coventry to interview me and my English teacher. ‘Did you always know Anjali was special?’ asked the reporter.

‘Every child is special,’ said Veronica, my English teacher, comfortably re-erasing me into obscurity.

The book launch, which I tried to but could not avoid, and eventually mutinously attended, accompanied by my parents, was a brief affair in which the manager of WHSmith presented me with a copy of the book and a photo was taken. But there it was. My work was out, in the world.

I retrieved my copy of the anthology, titled My Hand is Elastic, from my brother’s flat last year. The front cover has an illustration of a contorted, pencil-holding hand (the title is a quotation from one of the award-winning poems). The back cover notes that ‘A record number of entries were carefully judged by an eminent panel, chaired by the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes’. Inside, the back of the book lists the published young writers, with a star against the names of those who won an award, two for those who won a special award (maybe Veronica was right). I was irritated that I hadn’t won an award, but I also didn’t care, and in any case, the exposure even from not winning one was a little more than I was able to deal with.

Two things strike me now. One is that this, and a bursary I applied for and got at sixteen, were the last hurrahs of my writing life for about another 13 years. As soon as I started reading for an English degree, which was a highlight and delight of my life, I also became absolutely unable to finish a short story, let alone anything longer, and this state of being replaced writing a story a week as a norm until, at 29, I went to do a master’s in creative writing. The other thing I note, particularly now, as I struggle to write the novel I’m working on at present, is the confidence I had at fourteen. It wasn’t the kind that comes from being praised or celebrated, nor was it accompanied by any sort of personal confidence. I was an awkward individual, especially after moving to a new country where I was always the odd one out. Still, there was a simplicity in how I approached the things that felt most essential. I’d known since before I could read and write that I was going to be a writer. I’d always read and written. So when I heard of this competition, I was immediately sure I’d be selected. I didn’t even look for, or in a sense welcome the validation it brought; I just knew I had to do it. Now, in a world where everyone, apparently, is a writer, I would be more likely to second guess and talk myself down from any kind of attempt. But as a child, without thinking particularly well of myself or having anyone else who thought highly of me, I was like an arrow: I saw the next thing to do and did it.