Loving and Writing, Writing and Loving - Softcover

Reynolds, D. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1462014682 ISBN 13: 9781462014682

Verlag: iUniversePublishing, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In his late thirties, English playwright and screenwriter Timothy Hainault wants to accomplish two things in life: to write well, and make something of himself as a worthwhile human being. Turning to autobiography to gauge his progress, he revisits his childhood and youth, and following the loss of his mother and older brother, his only sibling, also his late-teens break from his father's quietly steadfast Christian faith; and makes connections as well, with a bearing on what he wants for himself, between his work and certain personal and professional relationships of his. And never more so than with Congravino, his latest play-about Restoration playwright William Congreve's constant pursuit of excellence, firstly through his art, then personally in his lasting love affair with Henrietta, the young duchess of Marlborough-a runaway, critically acclaimed success in London, and later at Canada's Stratford Festival. As with two earlier plays of his about writing and loving, Hainault again associates validation as both a writer and a self he can be true to with his finding a soulmate he can love unconditionally-and once more too in the person of a beautiful and talented actress whose romantically-driven stage character is of his own making. Only this time-and potentially even more problematic than before-his Canadian Henrietta has some complicated personal issues of her own to resolve.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

D. B. Reynolds is the RT and EPIC Award-Winning author of the Vampires in America series of paranormal romance, and an Emmy-nominated television sound editor. She lives in a flammable canyon near Los Angeles, and when she's not writing her own books, she can usually be found reading someone else's. Visit her blog at dbreynolds.com for details on all of her books and more.

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Loving and Writing, Writing and Loving

By D. B. Reynolds

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 D. B. Reynolds
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-1468-2

Chapter One

The sudden loss of my mother not long before my eleventh birthday broke in on me and marred my childhood, to say the least of it. And yet, some twenty-eight years later, I find I can look back on and write of my early years in Westcliff-on-Sea on the S.E. Essex coast in a predominantly positive and uncomplaining frame of mind. Despite sorely missing Mum's always giving and comforting presence, I'd managed eventually to just get on with things without feeling too sorry for myself—as I knew she'd have wanted me to. Mum had sometimes called me her 'brave little man,' which I'd gone on trying to be for her whenever she'd come to mind.

In keeping with the archetypal Christian tenets my parents lived by (and my father diligently taught), my brother Paul and I were raised with all due loving care and attention. For our lasting good, they believed, Mum and Dad instructed us patiently in the things of God as evidenced in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—'The Way, The Truth and The Life'. But not so much pointed out and explained to us as shown them by example in the varied course of life's day-to-day doings and circumstances. Little wonder, then, for my brother and I, that what it meant to love God and please him in thought, word and deed amounted to much the same thing as loving and pleasing our parents.

But childhood ends, and in youth the questions start to form. What one feels and believes isn't quite so clear-cut as sometimes it was just the day before. And so it was for me; and my increasing lack of attention in my teens to matters of Christian faith and practice started to show.

Whether my father has ever blamed himself for not taking me to task for this I'm sure I'll never know; but there's never been any hint of reproach in his dark, pensive eyes for my having failed him at all. (Dad doesn't have a judgmental bone in his body, actually.) Just occasionally, however, there's a glancing expression from him not unlike the one on the face of Jesus in a church vestibule portrait, with that same welcoming 'Come, let's commune together' look about each of them—a picture I'd found difficult to ignore without feeling I'd offhandedly snubbed the Good Lord himself. The elegantly framed, non-reflective glassed print of Jesus Christ was titled 'The Constant Friend'.

Arthur and Daphne Hainault's joint design for living was in all respects a well-ordered one. Each week, from day one, the routine at 66 St. John's Road in Westcliff scarcely ever changed. Our shared lives that day revolved around morning and evening services and afternoon Sunday school at CPM—Cliff Place Methodist—in neighbouring Southend. And it was the same old thing on weekdays, too. Before the rest of us were up, Dad was en route for London on the Fenchurch Street line to his commercial sales job with Aylesworth's, a legal publishing firm located conveniently beside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, as it had been for donkey's years. Dad joined Aylesworth's, a family concern in business since 1805, when he was eighteen in 1949. By the time he got home again every evening Paul and I had eaten and made ourselves scarce. The family ate together only on the weekends—for Saturday tea, three meals on Sunday, all squeezed in hurriedly between church activities. On Saturdays, Dad would prepare for Sunday—he was the CPM's long-serving Sunday school Superintendent—attend to some household repairs or improvements, or tinker with the second-hand clocks he collected. In the summer he'd work in the garden or get out into the S.E. Essex countryside for some hiking and birdwatching, sometimes with Paul, who also liked that sort of thing. I, on the other hand, would usually be off somewhere watching or playing cricket (and football in the winter). Other than our summer holidays together, usually in Oxfordshire or on the Norfolk coast near Cromer, we spent only a limited amount of time doing things as a family outside the confines of CPM. But a sense of togetherness stayed with us. Our prayers—perhaps even my own increasingly perfunctory, less frequent ones—may have helped keep the family ties strong and binding. After all, we were the Hainaults—one in Christ, sticking together, the four of us against the world and its many harmful ways. United we stood, presenting a solid, safe and secure front to the world at large—one strong, cohesive family unit; as my parents and Paul too would have reckoned us to be, at any rate.

At home on winter evenings, after dinner (as he always called it) and a good chat with Mum—she always waited to eat with him—Dad would rise from the table and pointedly pass the downstairs middle room where the television was, and head for the bay-windowed front room. There he'd settle in front of the electric fire and listen to the occasional radio concert, talk or documentary; mostly, though, to get his nose into a good book. And there he'd stay until Mum would go in with his nightly cup of Horlicks and a plate of cheese and cream crackers, signalling time for bed as she did so; never a minute before or after ten o'clock.

At least three-quarters of Dad's collection of books in the front room were housed in a floor-to-ceiling, solid mahogany, glass-doored, early Victorian bookcase—his only self-admitted 'worldly possession' for which he'd coughed up, he said, 'much too much in a premeditated act of fiscal irresponsibility.' For the most part, the contents of this 'hard-to-regret extravagance' of his—classic novels, some modern ones, short story, poetry and play collections, history, biographies, natural history, travel books, philosophy, Bible commentary, Christian apologetics and inspirational titles (with a Wesleyan slant)—he'd inherited from Anthony Timson, his second father, as Dad has always seen him as such. As a World War II evacuee from London's East End, Dad had gone to live with Anthony and his wife Agnes in Hook Norton in Oxfordshire. He'd ended up staying with the Timsons, who were childless, for nearly five years.

A considerably smaller, more modest bookcase—an Art Deco-style knock-off—contained new and second-hand volumes Dad had picked up himself including two shelves of titles he'd got for Paul and me, as well as Sunday school attendance prizes we'd been presented with. (Dad had made sure that the CPM's annual prize-giving tradition had carried on; getting a good book into the hands of a kid was important to him, as it had been as well to Anthony Timson, who'd been in charge of the Hook Norton Methodist Chapel Sunday school when Dad was in the large-sized village.)

Our front room library's children's section included many of the usual favourite titles, all of which Paul and I had read with little parental persuasion. We'd both enjoyed Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows a great deal (and later had seen A.A. Milne's dramatic version in London). On the whole, though, I preferred humans to talking animals. King Arthur, Robin Hood and Elizabethan and Napoleonic sea captains and their stout crews were more to my taste. I'd lapped up Scott's Ivanhoe, Kingsley's Westward Ho! and Forester's Hornblower books before I was out of junior school.

Of course, as a reader in a seriously Christian household, one starts early with the Bible. To begin with, with large-print, copiously and colourfully illustrated storybooks meant to catch the young eye and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniversePublishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1462014682
• ISBN 13: 9781462014682
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland