The long and winding road to becoming a writer, teacher and co-ordinator of a popular book club – by Amanda Patterson

When I was six, I found heaven. It was in a book by a man with a strange name – Roald Dahl. I wondered if he made that up. I used to wonder a lot. About almost everything. I had more questions than the world had atoms.

“Thank goodness you like to read,” my mother said. “Or you’d drive us crazy.”

My mother applied for special permission for me to go to the school library. Grade One’s weren’t supposed to have a library card. She couldn’t keep up with my appetite for magical stories. I loved The Magic Faraway Tree, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. I would have bought every book in the CNA if I could.

“It’s highly irregular, Mrs Patterson,” said the principal. But my mother was firm, and he relented, handing her the card.

And I did like to read. I fell in love with books when I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I loved every letter, every word and every sentence on the page. When I finished, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to write a book. I wanted someone to read my books. I wanted to make someone feel the way I felt when I read the perfect story.

I read the long hot summer afternoons of my African childhood away. My sister and I would swim, ride horses across the veld, catch frogs and then retire to shady spots of our garden with our books. We shared our chocolates. I would arrange the Nestlé chocolate coins on the edge of the pool until they melted in their shiny gold wrappers. We waited until they were mushy and licked the foil clean, noses buried in the mystery of the pages.

I was always careful not to get chocolate on the books. I hid the novels under my towel when I became too hot, and jumped into the blue of our pool. I grew up in a world without the internet, television and cellular phones. Books fed my imagination, and filled my soul. I was never bored.

I read and wrote my way through a privileged, blessed childhood. I had parents who adored me, and the ability to apply everything I learnt. “Your daughter must become a writer,” said English teacher after English teacher.

But life has a funny way of sending us on a detour on the way to our dreams.

I was sixteen when I matriculated, and writing a book seemed slightly ambitious at the time. In high school, I decided that I would become a translator. It seemed glamorous. Until I sat in the tutorials at university and realised that there was nothing exciting about translating the parts of an automotive engine from French into English. At least, not for me.

And I fell in love. Deeply, madly in love. My first husband became my dream, and I married him before I graduated. He was drafted into the army and I had to resort to my writing to keep him close. I still have the letters, written in the cold Johannesburg winter on the steps of the Great Hall at Wits University.

The desire, the whispers, the longing burnt into the paper from the cool Highveld to the bitterly cold barracks that housed him in Kimberley. His words, drafted in reply, in hope, in love, in tears of frustration, soothed me, made me real. Words have never left me wanting.

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