Barry Lee Thompson

I often used to sit with him while he worked on a story. I could say that all the while he was writing, but often he’d only be reading over something he’d already written. He took ages over the smallest detail. I’d be in the armchair by the window, reading a paperback novel I’d brought from school, and without moving my head I’d look over to catch him engrossed in some part of the page he was on, and I’d stare and stare, waiting for him to turn that page over or to put it down or look away from it, but he wouldn’t, not before I’d tired of watching and gone back to my book.

Sometimes I’d hear him clear his throat – as a preamble, an announcement – and I’d look up and then he’d read something aloud, a sentence or a phrase or small group of words. ‘How did that sound?’ he’d ask. ‘It sounded fine,’ I’d say. Then he’d read the same words again, and ask me how it sounded that time. ‘Fine,’ I’d say again, unsure of any difference in the readings. He’d nod and search my face as if looking for the thing I wasn’t saying, then he’d say, ‘Okay,’ and return to his page. I’d wait, thinking he’d be coming back to those words, but he never did. I came to realise that this was because he already had his answer.

He might ask what I thought of this word or that word. ‘What does the word mean?’ I’d ask. ‘It doesn’t matter what it means,’ he’d reply. ‘What do you think of it?’ And I learned to report the first thing I’d felt, felt not thought, when I’d first heard the word a moment before. ‘It frightens me,’ I might say. Or, ‘It sounds hard.’ Or I might tell him how it made me think of biscuits and hot tea. ‘Why? Why does it do those things? Why does it frighten you?’ he’d ask. ‘Is it because you don’t know the word? Does the uncertainty bother you?’ And on we’d go, like this, probing. All the while he was looking straight through my eyes into the bowels of my soul. I felt it as a discomfort, that nothing could be withheld or hidden, but I didn’t understand it fully. Now I know he was acquiring details, taking pains over tiny crumbs that were often neglected. A wonder for me was not that he was never bored, because I think he was too absorbed to be bored, but the wonder for me then and now was that he ever got a complete story written from beginning to end.

I didn’t realise at the time that he was teaching me a way of writing, to experience words in a particular way, or showing me how to see life in a particular way. I don’t think he realised he was doing this, or he wasn’t doing it deliberately. Perhaps it was entirely selfish on his part, using me to test his stories. But I learned discipline, learned to take my time. His was a way of writing I’ve come to adopt for myself. I don’t have anyone sitting in the armchair by the window, though. No one to bounce ideas off. The chair is there – empty, but sometimes I’ll imagine my younger self sitting there as I must have sat back then, and I’ll read out a word or a phrase or a passage, and for just a moment I’ll hear the response, that the passage evokes a tea-tray in a cosy fire-lit room, or that a certain word is harsh, too harsh, or that it’s troubling, or even that it touches something inside, something that is really quite frightening.