WHY I WROTE THE BOOK

When I was in my early teens, I was in the car, with my father and mother, and my mother was talking about something that had happened, in the past. And I said, ‘The past! What’s the past? It’s only the future that matters.’

My parents, particularly my mother, were furious. But it took many years for me to understand the clumsiness of my comment and why it angered, and upset, my mother so much.

My grandfather, on my father’s side, fought in France during the First World War. He was badly wounded and shipped back to England. It was on a hospital train, rattling its way through France, he met my grandmother, Bertha – it was she who nursed him. After the war ended, they married – theirs was a happy ending.

My mother’s father, my grandfather, also left home and went away to fight in the First World War. But he came back a shadow of himself. He was someone, and I have a very dim memory of him, who you weren’t allowed to touch or talk to – because if you did, he would explode, physically and verbally.

It has taken me many years to understand and appreciate all this. So, I wanted to write a book which showed the link between now, the present, and the past – which tried to explain, show, that we wouldn’t be living the lives we have now without the sacrifices our parents, grandparents and, perhaps, even great grandparents made for us during their lives.

I also wanted to write a book which would say to its reader something along the lines of, ‘stop thinking and living small, start thinking and living big’. And, if you’ve got a gift that non-one else has, whatever it is, then use it. And, if that means being different to everyone else, being a bit weird, even eccentric, you should still use it, even more so.

Differences should be encouraged, explored and shared, rather than hidden away.

Hidden away …

It’s the old skeleton, the one we, and the society we live in, hide in a cupboard. We lock it in and throw away the key in the hope that it will never get out. But, of course it will. Because the day we are born, is the day we die. And that’s the one thing, whoever we are, wherever we live, man, woman, rich and poor, we all share – death.

In ‘WE’VE COME TO TAKE YOU HOME’ Sam can only conquer death if she overcomes her fear.  I wanted to write a book which would, even in just a small way, get that skeleton out of that cupboard and shake it around a bit. Try and make it into something we could actually accept, even talk about, be just a little less afraid of, rather than something we run away from