A Short Story

After my father died, and while she was still living in Maldon, Essex, my mother joined a local writing group. To celebrate their efforts, its members produced this little booklet in....

....June, 1992. Her first contribution was a short story set in East Africa. That it harks back to those days doesn't surprise me at all as she loved her time there and, as I do, probably thought often of it even though she had left Mombasa over thirty years before. The story features....

....the little yellow weaver birds that came to drink and bathe in the birdbaths we had both at the Hoey House at Nyali and our last house in Cliff Avenue. 

The story becomes a little lost when she also tries to add....

....the flowering of the baobab tree, a rare and very moving event which few have the chance to witness.

It's so easy to be critical of a short story. I have written upward of fifty that I finished, ten of which were, perhaps, good, two winning quite major prizes, and a good fifty more that lie like wrecks along the way, so I know how incredibly difficult they are to write. However, if I can claim to have some talent in this difficult format, at least I know whence the seed came.