As a child, I was unhappy and unloved. I didn’t understand, as we don’t as children, why I was treated differently from my siblings. I felt different, that I didn’t really belong but was not sure why.I suffered horrendous sexual abuse by a family ‘friend’ and often felt my life to be unbearable. There were happy times, days spent with my ‘bestie’ Carol 1 and her family. The days I spent at weddings as a member of the church choir. School was also a friend where I was treated the same as anyone else. But home was not like that.
Every child needs and deserves the love of their mother and when that doesn’t happen, they may create a ‘mother’ in their minds to help them through the loneliness and pain. Carol’s parents were like a mum and dad to me. My own ‘Dad’, William, was a lovely gentle man, but was never allowed to show his feelings to me, at least not when ‘Mum’ was around but I knew he loved me.
I would make up stories in my head, stories about people who came for me to take me away from the horrors of my early life. A story that I was adopted and my real parents had come to take me back. They had been very young when I was born and couldn’t cope but had come back for me. That, in my child’s mind, explained why I was so different from my brother Tony and my sisters Georgina, June and Patricia. I also made up fairy stories, anything to focus on at the worst of times. Closing my eyes during the abuse and going to a place where I was safe, happy and unafraid.
When my own children were small, I noticed a lack of books for the very young that were magical, funny and educational. Not heavy stuff but a way of teaching children good old-fashioned values. How to be kind, how to be generous and unselfish and how to help others.
On a caravanning holiday with my small daughters Lisa and Marie, I invented a hedgerow character, a little furry animal who would rush around the long grass at the edge of the road. He was a kind and helped other little animals if they were in trouble. To keep the girls occupied on long journeys, we would look for this little creature. I described him and was shocked and surprised when my eldest daughter shrieked that she had seen one! I had to go along with, the fact that she did, as she had told us, but I knew of course, the little furry never existed but she maybe used her imagination and believed she had seen him.
Years later I wrote a children’s book. 10 stories of this little creation and for reasons I will say later, I called him Wozwell. I tested the stories in local schools and to local children and was pleased that they went down very well. I sent them off to a publisher and they were very interested. Then my brother was diagnosed with a terminal illness and wanted to see my book in print. I felt I didn’t have the time to wait, so taking the bull by the horns, and with the encouragement and support of my daughters and David my husband, I produced The Adventures of Wozwell the Womas. Local shops took them, libraries in schools asked for them but the most amazing thing was when W.H.Smiths took them! I was over the moon. My brother and his wife Lin, came over to see us, as they did regularly and we went into our local town, Fareham and there, on the shelf between Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton was Carol Ann Wright!! Tony rushed out of the shop smiling and jumping in the air with a star jump. He was so excited and proud. A lovely memory of an amazing day.
The Sunday Times reviewed my book and said it could be the beginning of a cult. That the world needed some magic for young children and it began to sell well. I did book signings, school readings and many magazine and news items. All of which I have in my own memory box.
A few years before, someone I was very close to, left a tatty old teddy bear on my desk where we both worked. I picked him and saw how worn and sad he looked and thought, ‘I can’t thrown him out, he wasn’t always so poorly, he was well once.’ Hence Wozell’s name was born. I still have this teddy.
This was my first book. I have since written a further 10 stories which will be going off to a publisher soon.
I have written my own life story but for legal reasons and because of the sensitivity of the contents, I wrote the other book and it’s sequel, under a pseudonym. The first is a Sunday Times bestseller and still selling well.
Writing Wozwell was and is a joy. I would write in my garden in Catisfield and now write in the garden ‘here on the farm’ or in my lovely study over looking the Welsh hills. The stories still make me smile and the memories of that first day in Smiths will stay with me forever. Tony is still around, we were told 2 years was all he had but that was back in 1989 and he is still here, so the medics don’t always get it right.
The Adventures of Wozwell the Womas are still on sale and maybe soon there will be another book. On a good day, I write my serious true stories and on a bad day, I write Wozwell. Always cheers e up.
My life here is good. Of course I get bad days, some brought in from the outside but not enough to spoil my happy. I won’t let it or them.
Childhood memories are hard and I try not to go there. My life as a Mum was always good, hard at times but good and I have wonderful funny, silly and poignant memories to call upon when needed.
I believe we can push the bad away with the good and that is what I do from today. Whenever a bad memory rears its ugly head, we need to close our eyes and recall a good one. It is a technique I teach clients and a very useful one I use myself.
Thankyou for reading.
x
carolannwright 