As the third of four children growing up in a tumbledown house in the country I had my fair share of scraped knees and bicycle accidents. What made me different to my friends and siblings, however, was that I could always be found with a book in hand.

By age ten I was reading the classics: Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, the Bröntes. I knew back then that I wanted to be—and would be—a writer. After all, great readers become great writers; which meant I should just read everything, I thought. My parents (in their wisdom) decided that the younger three of us needed to receive our education at a semi-military boarding school. It was during an exercise where the whole class needed to sweep a field in combat fatigues, holding World War Two-era bolt-action rifles, that I truly realised my destiny was to write.

Halfway across the field the Major fired three blank rounds into the air, after which we all had to run in zig zags for 100 metres and then throw ourselves to the ground. As someone who usually followed the school rules I did so, duly smacking my mouth on the butt of the rifle. And there I lay.

‘What is the point of this…’ I wondered.

The Lieutenant approached me: “Everything ok, Johnson?” By this stage the rest of my class had got back up and were repeating the meaningless exercise.

“Do I really have to do this?” I asked with the confidence of a fourteen-year-old who’d just found her voice. “I want to be a writer,” I sputtered through bloodied teeth.

“Writing’s not going to help you in a combat situation, Johnson,” he replied. ‘No, it’s not’ I thought to myself, finding enough sense to keep that to myself. I lay there in that mud for a good fifteen minutes, after which my troop and I were punished with twenty press-ups for my insubordination. Despite the punishment I think the Lieutenant had a certain sense of respect for me, as he never questioned my unwillingness to take part again. This was the first time I realised that my longing to become a writer was actually a calling: and one that I shouldn’t give up on.

And so I didn’t give up. I kept on reading voraciously, still take a book with me everywhere and write every day.

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