I was meant to be a creative writer. I was a loner.
Don Eric Carroll
If I were to tell you of my early life you'd perhaps realise how and why this came about. Life started roughly, now it appears smooth. From a babe of one year to a toddler of five years I spent my time in Leasowe near Liverpool, in a sanatorium for crippled children and TB patients; I had TB. It was wartime and a difficult place to get to. I recall my Mum coming to visit just the once in those four long years, bringing in tow my stepfather, who I didn't know was my stepfather until over a decade later. And once I knew that I realised why I was treated so differently from my siblings.
The ward I was in was huge, or so it appeared to me. And quite empty. I remember looking at a large picture on the wall opposite. A moving picture. I saw clouds and ships at sea. It was many years later when I twigged to the fact it was a window.
Leaving Leasowe I began school late, and not at all having seen trees or streets or motor cars. I left school at 14 and worked in a shoe factory until my papers arrived for my joining the RAF as a Boy Entrant. I could hardly wait to be rid of the northern town where I was born. The Royal Air Force became my 'surrogate' father. At age 18 I was on a troopship bound for Aden, then sent to a desert island off the coast of Arabia. I was a loner once again.
I married at 20 and we lasted ten years; we were very young but we produced a daughter. I have seen her twice in 43 years, and so far have seen two of my four grandchildren.
Time moved on. I suppose I was still looking for an identity. I left behind the tyranny of school, the discipline of military life, the tedium of conventional marriage. All of a sudden everything in my life changed.
I began teaching professional cookery at the Bermuda College and I also began painting in oils and watercolour. I dabbled in photography with my twin-lens Rolliflex and made a 70-minute documentary film on Bermuda. At the same time I was writing poetry and children's stories, and a play. I became known, was on local television and radio and even on stage at city hall. My second book won the American Society of Writers Award. I later moved on.
I resigned my college post and flew to Mexico, lived in a commune in a Spanish colonial town, writing, and spent much time on a ranch, writing. A loner.
I painted murals, I was a bartender, I taught English as a foreign language back in England, I worked as a VSO Volunteer in Egypt, and was later a live-in chef at a retirement home in Devon.
Now retired I am back in my hometown, still writing. I guess these days of my septuagenarian year I am much like the eponymous hero in my recently published novel, Pancho. No longer the lonely one, but enjoying the company of many good friends. I can safely say I have never felt so tuned in with people and so very happy and content with life.
And there are more manuscripts to work on, squeezed into a hectic active social life. I was meant to be a creative writer - not a loner…
