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 19-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 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? 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: “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 some years, until I because to old, 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 many years, until I worked for an interesting company that had a rich history of phosphate mining in the Pacific and, being 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.