Alison Norrington
Author of Three of a Kind, Class Act, Look Before You Leap
I can’t claim a special ‘love’ or ‘passion’ for reading because it is tantamount to my existence - kind of like brushing your teeth and ‘eating your greens’ – although not so boring!!! My parents introduced me to reading from a very early age and so by the age of 7 I was reading books for 12s. It seemed that to read was to be able to communicate with the world and as a child reading took me up to the top of the Faraway Tree and into the hi-jinx of Mallory Towers. As I reached my teenage years my friends and I sneak-previewed The Joy of Sex - the pencilled drawings of the two long-haired, nudies sketched in various ‘positions’ caused many a scream and laugh as we smuggled the book under our coats and into the phone box after school. As a child I was lucky enough to have parents who had a lust-for-life and took us out most weekends - seaside, castles, museums, kite-flying, roller-coaster riding and even to the airport to watch the planes take off and land. All of this, however, proved to be a strong, sound foundation and springboard for me and my brother into working class life with an edge.
My interest in reading went up a gear as I found at comprehensive school that English was split into two lessons - Language and Literature. Irritated at first by the mundane analysing of text, I soon began to find it fascinating how Roger McGough’s “holding hands and hardly hearing” was reminiscent of whispering. How we pulled apart Hamlet and Lord of the Flies, questioned why the characters acted as they did - their actions and reactions. In the heyday of the 1980s with my teenage discrography of “singles” blasting the tinny sounds of George Benson, Shalamar and Luther Vandross, I was again irritated in Music lessons as we analysed the screeching of Pink Floyd and Ian Dury yet here I discovered more layers. I was made aware of the background drum beat and was soon able to pick out the sounds of the bass guitar beneath the squawking of the vocals.
I left school at 16 to work for British Telecom in London and for some reason (I still can’t figure why), I seemed to attract crazy people. There was the guy who fell asleep beside me on the train, half-drunk, who asked me to wake him up when we reached his stop. Of course, as a self-conscious teenager I nearly died when I had to resort to elbowing him extremely hard in the ribs, as I tried to wake him. The rest of the carriage were politely trying not to laugh. There was the guy with the glass eye who insisted on demonstrating it to me! The blind-date that took me out for a night in London, and promptly went on to be violently sick on the train home and then the office manager who took great delight in showing me the tiny lump that protruded through his trousers on each of his thighs – his ‘secret’ fetish for wearing suspenders under his pinstripe suit! I really didn’t want to know!
I left BT after a year - and an embarrassing saga where I’d thrilled in typing scandalous and offensive passwords - my opinions of my stuffy work colleagues only to, weeks later, be summoned and explained how all illegal passwords were printed out to check for hackers. Ahem.... So I began working for Ford Motor Company. This initiation into working in personnel introduced me to many people, from factory workers to directors and whilst I tried desperately to inject a degree of humour into the corporate day, I found the whole office structure very stifling and after 8 years, I left to go travelling.
I settled on the Greek Island of Kos, in a resort called Kardamena, working first in a bar and then in a shop, printing slogans on t-shirts. After spending 2 days scrubbing this shop floor with a toothbrush whilst my friend cooked on the beach I questioned my priorities and joined her. So by the end of that summer I was back temping in offices in Essex. Although I had a very good suntan by this stage...
Finding it hard to settle down I came to Wexford to visit some family and stayed for 4 years. During this time I hand-painted pub t-shirts for the 1994 World Cup, turned my hand to signwriting for some shops and then met up with a, now very good, friend, who wanted to publish her own Irish-based magazines. At this stage the magazines were primarily UK imports, and so Kaleidoscope was born and the realisation that I could write as well as read dawned upon me. I wrote a humorous article on aromatherapy and attempted to sell advertising space (I was useless!). I made many friends in Wexford and enjoyed a mad social life and drank much more than was probably healthy! I soon realized I need to get a “proper job” and moved back to Essex with my Irish partner. My son, Ryan was born in May 1996 and by November 1997 Conor was here too. I worked part time in an employment agency and a stint in a European office in Ford re-ignited my interest in European culture and I soon began working on Accent - a novel which has been shelved - for now. It seems strange that my main concern at this stage was how they’d ever fit my long surname on the front cover.... My 30th birthday was looming and I was dreading it. I really didn’t think I’d be a frumpy housewife by 30 (I wasn’t, but I felt it inside) and as my brother gave me my birthday card suggesting I enjoy my birthday with “passion attitude and alcohol” Class Act was born. It was my story, kind of, and was just screaming to be written down.
So it took me a year to write the book, met up with some fascinating people in the process, right down to sitting in on the piano evening classes in the local Adult Education Centre and liaising closely with a friend in Valencia, and finally sold up to return to Ireland having spent 10 years yo-yoing between the 2 countries.
Shortly after my move to Wexford my relationship broke down, although we are still very good friends, and I am now looking forward to the future, to peeling off more of the layers and to encourage them to grow on my two children. I enjoy the writing process entirely, from the first ‘ping’ of a storyline, through to the researching (foreign countries are always good!) right down to the final final final edit which transforms your manuscript into a novel. I still question my decision to be a writer, sometimes on a daily basis, and wonder whether I should do the sensible thing and get a ‘proper job’, but my passion for writing, creating and developing characters and storylines is too strong. So I’ll continue on my journey as a writer, and try to ignore the pearl of wisdom as coined by fellow author Kathy Lette – ‘the most lucrative form of writing is ransom notes’!
