purplerabbits

I'm typing up some notes from old creative writing classes, to save me carrying itty bits of paper from flat to flat and then never looking at them. Most with be going in my seshet journal, but this one is more like an LJ meme, except that it's all about words...

What are my earliest memories of speaking and writing?
All four legged things are cats. "Cat!"
My lamb is called Sweet Cherry - I get very angry when people get it wrong.
I can write when I get to school: I write my name on everything. We watched Bill and his magic box when I was learning to read at home, but all Bill ever does is make the swings disappear and then the roundabouts disappear. There is a girl but she never does anything except look impressed or dismayed. I don't remember her name. Names are important to me.

Who do I remember speaking to most?
Everyone, all the time, but especially anyone I can impress. teachers seemed to like me but maybe I annoyed them, I certainly remember thinking up things to get their attention, sometimes the most terrible lies. I told a complete stranger outside my house that I had no shoes on because my mummy couldn't afford it. I told everyone what Sweet Cherry said, and I talked to him all the time. I talked to the fairies. I talked to my shoes. i still do.

What do I remember about learning to write
I learnt so early and easily that I forget. I got bored one day when we were writing a story in class and decided to waste time looking up a word that I already knew. I spent ages in the library bit of the classroom (I preferred reading to writing) so that I could write "the cat sat on the encyclopaedia". I was 7: I was surprised that my teacher was impressed rather than cross.

What were the words that I wasn't allowed to say
One day I asked my dad what he'd say if he was caught on Candid Camera. "I'd say piss off", I said. He was incandescent but he didn't tell me what it meant, which was what I'd wanted as I'd just seen it in grafitti and didn't know.

Do I have an early memory of being misunderstood
I said that one of the girls in my class was black. She was Malaysian, and I thought she was really pretty, but my mum and headmistress thought I was insulting her.

With whom did I feel most open and confident expressing myself in words
I felt I could write anything as I could make it into a story, but in speech people assumed I was telling lies, even when I told them about the fairies and traveling to meet people in dreams> By then I had decided that people were really very stupid, but it didn't do to tell them that, either.