Just sent off an entry to the Scottish Book Trust for their ‘The Book That Changed My Life’ initiative. thought it worth posting on the site:
The Book That Changed My Life
I’m sitting on the edge of my Gran and Grandpa’s creaking old brass double bed It fills every inch of the room and it is where I will divvie up the Scottish Cup tickets for the North East of Scotland for the nineteen seventy six cup final between Rangers and Hearts (3-1 in case you wanted to know) – my Grandpa was connected to the Scottish Football Association. It’s the late summer of nineteen seventy-five and I’m three floors up on the corner of Cross St and Mid St in Fraserburgh and the smell of the fish gutting factory is heavy in the air. I’m thirteen years old and I’ve just finished ‘Tom Swift and His Cosmotron Express’. Tom and his friend Bud Barclay have just seen off the evil VIPER and I’m clean out of books. I’ve read every Hardy Boy, Tom Swift and Famous Five book going and my Gran walks into the room
‘I’m going to the library. Do you want anything?’ she asks.
‘A book,’ I mumble. I’m so a teenager.
An hour later she returns and drops James Herbert’s The Fog on the bed. I pick it up and read the first line – “The village slowly began to shake off its slumber and comes to life.”
Life changed.
People lopping off other people’s private parts – blood – violence – SEX. I was hooked and the fact I read it from cover to cover that afternoon and went out the next day to get James Herbert’s first book – The Rats – told me that Tom and the Hardy Boys were history.
Since that moment I can’t remember a day that I haven’t had at least one book on the go – more likely three or four. I was, and still am, a book junkie.
It is all so prescient now – right now – as I’ve just had my first novel published – Falling – and I can trace it all the way back to that day in Fraserburgh. Without my grandmother’s efforts to please her eldest grandchild I reckon my life as a novelist would have been stillborn.
Thanks Gran.
