From the age of five or six, I knew that I should be a writer.From the age of five or six, I knew that I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. I was a somewhat lonely child and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays.
Although I didn’t make it clear at the start—well, all right, I deliberately omitted tell tale quotation marks and ellipses—those are not my words. They are George Orwell’s, in ‘Why I Write’. I sort of hoped you’d immediately recognise that, even if you didn’t know the writer in question. ‘That’s not Matthews’, I fancied you saying. ‘Lonely child?’ I imagined you expostulating. ‘Disagreeable mannerisms? Never!’ Far from being disagreeable, once I recovered from a broken jaw, caused by the over-zealous application of forceps to overcome my reluctance to enter this vale of tears, I was particularly lovable and nice. As no-one knew I had a broken jaw, however, my incessant howling lasted for about 12 months until, presumably, the old jawline painfully settled into the lopsided orientation it has borne ever since. This made it difficult for anyone in the vicinity to recognise that lovableness and niceness lay beneath what appeared to be a small bundle of acoustic catastrophe.
More seriously, I would never have owned to Orwell’s opening sentences. I did not know I would be a writer and I would not have regarded being prevented from writing as outraging my true nature. I might have thought roughly along those lines at times but I would never have admitted to them.
I grew up among people who were full of rich vernacular, of story, anecdote, florid rumour, hyperbolic speculation. If I did know anything at that early age, it was that these stories were worth telling, but I had not the faintest idea how to go about it. At university, ambushed by an exquisite range of attacks on my lushly romantic temperament, I became a bad poet. I would have qualified for Spike Milligan’s ‘Worst poem ever written in English’ competition (though no doubt would have conceded the laurels to the eventual winner, a poem by an ‘Indian gentleman’ entitled ‘On The