Again, I ought to have said what happened, because what happened was far more interesting. In it, I wrote about buying a bucket and spade, and provided all the expected detail - except in this case it was all made up, probably because there was a slight element of shame or humiliation involved. Sometimes when I'm talking to students about writing, about the necessity to open that inner path, I go back to that 'Day at the seaside' essay. why not say what happened?' was still somewhere in your future? Something in me knew that I was on the right, intimate track - but it took me years to follow up. This had actually happened to me, so the image and the recording of it had a different feel. In the middle of the list of usual, expected activities such as diving and swimming, neither of which I could do, I wrote about going into an amusement arcade to escape from a shower and being depressed by the wet footprints on the floor and the cold, wet atmosphere created by people in their rained-on summer clothes. But I do remember a moment, early on at St Columb's, when the topic was 'A Day at the Seaside' and I made a connection between the performative student in me and a more inward creature, the writer-in-waiting, if you like.

I had no particular gift for writing what were called 'compositions', and no particular enjoyment of it. And as I went up the ranks, I enjoyed the parsing and general analysis side of 'English' better, the spelling tests and so on.

Were you the kind of pupil whose essays were held up by the teacher as a shining example to the rest of the class?įar from it.

Electric light by seamus heaney