Once I had overcome my instinctive resistance to doing it at all, I looked for models, as I used to do for my fiction. So far as I know I have not 'made anything up'; nor have I used the device of dramatisation. That belongs, with metaphor and allegory, imagery and symbols, in the dozen novels and forty-odd short stories I have published. Some autobiographies give the impression of owing more to the imagination than many novels; among them those which, while purporting to tell you something very particular, end up telling you nothing much at all. What I want to learn from a memoir is who its author knew, what kind of struggles he or she had, from where help came and what achievement felt like. The extent of his or her sensitivity I can glean along the way.
From people who ask me about it, I know the interest there is in the particular period in English Letters in which I was first active. If that is one audience for what I have to say, another, partly overlapping it, is those who enquire about the process of writing itself and the ones who join residential courses in creative writing.
I should be a very unusual writer indeed if there were not readers who were indifferent to what I have offered, when they didn't actively dislike it. But I have known the intense satisfaction of finding a substantial readership over the years, and it is surely not too much to think that a good proportion of it will really rather like knowing a bit more about one who has been lucky enough to give them pleasure. SB In My Own Good Time - extracts
There is a room, a square, all-purpose, working-class living-room, in the mid-1930s. It has one sash-window on to the street. There's a sink in one corner and a gas ring beside it. A coal fire burns in the high grate of the iron range, which has an oven for baking, and a movable hob for boiling kettles and heating pans. A sideboard against the wall has a looking-glass over it, and some ornaments and a couple of painted vases standing on it. Taking up more floor space than anything else is the big square table. High tea has been cleared off it ('sided') some time ago, and since it is Sunday it now has over it a cover of rich crushed velvet or velour, in dark green or maroon. (Sometimes, but rarely, I find myself in a room with a table-cover of deep rich blue, which pleases me as it is my favourite colour.) The high mantelshelf sports a matching pelmet.
Four pairs of feet rest on the hearth rug. I am perfectly content sitting at the table, three-quarters lost in my own world. If I am not drawing on a sheet of paper I am reading. This book is about heroes and heroines throughout history. It has some black and white illustrations, and the one I'm looking at shows a young woman in chains being threatened with some terrible ordeal. Her dark hair is parted down the middle. Her chin is lifted and her eyes flash defiance at her captors.
