I am constantly reminded of how curious grandchildren can be when they are not asking you what it was like to live with dinosaurs!

The second eldest, who is a rather clever 17-year-old, considers it interesting that I’m a writer, and having just met a ‘real’ author who came to visit them at school, asked me a few questions, some of which sounded like those that had been asked of my ‘real’ counterpart.

Like, “how old were you when you first wrote a story, and what was that story about?”

I didn’t think it was when I was at school, but sometime after that, and after a lot of reading.  Perhaps it had been one of those moments when a light bulb goes on in your head, and I said to myself, I can write these stories too.

Of course, that wasn’t an answer, so she asked again, when did I start writing?

That required a little thought, and several triggers gave me a date, where I lived at the time, the fact I used my mother’s old portable typewriter, and the fact that I had not been long out of school.  I was, in fact, about 17.  It was 53 years ago; I’ll let you do the math!

What was it about that I couldn’t tell her, but I said I had rescued a lot of old scribbling of mine and put them in a box to look at later when I had the time.

I guess that time had arrived.

And, yes, there was the book, the individually typed pages, some with corrections, unfinished.

The pages were brown with age.

The story, well, I read the first few pages, and it seems I’d started down the thriller path then, the story so far, an agent comes ashore from a trawler to a bleak and isolated village, perhaps on the Scottish coast.

Then there was the inevitable next question: “What was the first story you read that put you on the path to wanting to become a writer”.

That was easy, Alistair Maclean’s HMS Ulysses.  I showed her a copy of the book.

That led to, “but this is about the British Royal Navy in World War 2…”

Perhaps I didn’t answer that correctly. It was after reading about a dozen of his novels, most of which were precursors to the modern-day thriller, perhaps more along the lines of action-adventure.

The next question, understandably, is “What was the first book you ever finished?”

That was The Starburst Conspiracy, the manuscript of which was in the box along with another completed novel and quite a few short stories.

Back in those days, I remembered that I had sent some of my stories off to various publishers and had entered several short story competitions, all to no avail.  And for several years, until I because to old, I used to write and enter a novel in the Vogel novel competition but never made it to the shortlist.

It’s probably why I gave up writing for several years, until I worked for an interesting company that had a rich history of phosphate mining in the Pacific and was given permission to look into the archives, began writing what could only be described as a saga, and by the time I’d left, it was over 1200 closely typed pages long.

I showed the bulky manuscript to her, but by this time her interest had moved to something else.

For me, however, it seemed there was a lot of unfinished business.