Re: Knowl Park
Author's Notes
The idea for this story originally came to me from a random thought I had about a year ago along the lines of, “I wonder what my life would have been like had I been born a hundred years earlier.”
During Lockdown 1, I then started to make up stories in my head to stop my brain from seizing up, based around this idea, gradually expanding on how I might have met my wife and friends, and the type of adventures we might have had.
All the surnames are made up, but many of the first names are based on real people from my family tree, and my life. For example,
Thomas and Albert were the grandfathers I never knew
Arthur and Samuel were my great uncles, and farmers.
Victor was a great uncle who won a medal for bravery as an unarmed stretcher bearer in WW1
William was a great uncle who was killed in WW1
Sarah was a close relative we lost to cancer a few years ago.
Amanda is a close platonic friend
Jonathan was a school friend
Kenneth is my brother’s middle name
Most of the story is pure fiction, fantasy even, but a few of the minor events are true.
Amanda and Philip are loosely based on my wife and me, how we met and became cousins when she was eleven and I was twenty-one, how for years she had a crush on me both before and after I realised it, and how we finally got together when she was seventeen.
My Mum was indeed a farmer’s daughter, and my Dad worked for a bank. They really did meet when mum was sixteen and dad was twenty-two, but not in the way I described.
Geoff Prentice the blacksmith/Amanda’s stepfather is based on my Uncle who was a toolmaker, and married a divorcee with two girls, including the one who had a crush on me, several years after his own divorce.
Rose Wheeler the blacksmith’s wife and Amanda’s mother is based on my second Aunt who is now also my Mother-in-Law.
I learned about the difference between lift pumps and force pumps from an illustrated general knowledge book when I was about ten.
My Dad witnessed a man being impaled by the shaft of a runaway horse and cart when he was a child, only to find when it stopped that actually the man had become trapped between the two but was otherwise uninjured.
I used to live in a house called Knowl.
Most of the rest though is just the result of a wandering mind trying to find things to do during isolation.
I’ve enjoyed writing it, and I hope some of you at least enjoyed reading it.
Had it not been for a couple of the regulars on this forum, I would never have written it, so to them I say a big thank you.
Fruity.