When I was seven years old, the government of Poland, the country I grew up in, decided that it was time to end my existence of feral ignorance and begin the long, drawn-out process of improving my mind through formal education. My parents complied, and off to school I hopped, dressed in a hideous, fire hazard cornflower blue polyester tunic dress with a white collar of the same fabric. Mousy-coloured pigtails and white knee length socks completed the look. I kept my school things in a not-yet-vintage leather satchel, which bounced and rattled on my back whenever I ran, which was most of the time.
I had extremely low expectations of school, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover how much I enjoyed it. Reading and writing were my favourite. So much so that a few months in, I felt my writing skills had reached the point where it made sense to start planning my life’s success around them. As soon as I mastered all the 32 letters of Polish alphabet, and learnt to negotiate the language’s often treacherous spelling rules (gżegżółka, rzeżucha,źdźbło), becoming a writer seemed the easiest and most obvious career choice.
My confidence boosted by full marks received in weekly spelling tests, I saw the path to literary success unfold clearly ahead. Truth be told, I had never enjoyed such clarity of vision ever again.
By first snow in my first year of school, I was ready to write my first bestselling story, and as it happened, in one of life’s perfectly timed coincidences, I was provided with a perfect story line for my book.
When I was seven years old, the school week in Poland stretched for six long days. We toiled in the classroom from Monday to Saturday, making sure we were well prepared to build a better stronger and ever more Communist Poland when it was our turn to do so.
Sunday was the only day allocated for rest and relaxation. It was also the day when my parents liked to celebrate God in all his glory, which meant getting up early, putting on my Sunday best, walking to a tram stop, taking a tram to church, sitting through Mass, and reversing the journey home just after midday. I saw church going as a boring and repetitive chore, much less fun than school, but there was nothing I could do about that. I spent the Mass hour dangling my feet from the pew and daydreaming. The church was all grey stone and hushed solemnity, which made me feel uneasy and weary. I did not share my parents’ religious fervour, but I knew better than to disclose this to them in any way. It took me another twenty years to come clean to them about my lack of faith. For now, there was no escaping Sunday morning trips to church.
That meant that rest and relaxation had to be squeezed into Sunday afternoon and evening. I was fine with it, because I knew by the time the day ended, I would have been rewarded with the best hour and a half of the week, in the form of another episode of the Odyssey mini-series on TV. I was transfixed by the story from the opening line. ‘Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, left his home many years ago, and has not yet returned’. I remembered the line well, as it was repeated every week by the voice-over summary of previous episodes. The line sounded so perfect and powerful to me, that I decided to use it as an opening line of my own first novel, which I also decided to call, naturally, The Odyssey.
Every day I sprinted home from school, pigtails bouncing, satchel rattling, cheeks burning. Taking the stairs to my flat two at a time, I was already forming the next sentence of my book. I knew I had to be disciplined about my work, as I only had a few days until the next Sunday episode, and I wanted to make sure I put down everything accurately, paying attention to detail, so my future readers were able to fully savour everything that The Odyssey had to offer.
As my book grew in volume, I was feeling increasingly smug about the whole thing, and complimented myself on my stroke of genius idea of turning a TV series into a book. My excitement was growing with every one of Odysseus’s new on-screen adventures. Initially, I planned to keep my book a secret until it was finished and ready for publication, but keeping secrets had never been my strong point, especially at seven years of age, so after a couple of weeks I was bursting at the seams with the thrill of it, and I told my best friend Ewa all about it.
After that Ewa became an everyday afterschool visitor to my house, whereby the two of us would go straight to my room, where we would stay silent for a couple of hours scribbling away together, and then she would leave. A few weeks into this book writing joint enterprise, I felt it was time to enlighten my parents to what was going on. I broke the book writing story to them over dinner sometime during week five. I told them how I was writing a book called The Odyssey, based on the TV series we all watched every week, and how I was trying to be as close to the series as possible, but that I was also thinking about adding some more adventures for Odysseus, and perhaps skipping some of the Penelope and the suitors’ story, as I thought that part rather dull and slow-paced. My parents listened politely and smiled, but their reaction was not as enthusiastic as I had imagined. In fact, I was pretty hurt by their lukewarm response to my sharing my life’s biggest boldest project with them. Nevertheless, now that my secret was out in the open, I talked to my parents of little else for the next couple of weeks, thinking that perhaps the idea might grow on them, given time and they would realise the enormity of its potential.
And then it all came crashing down. My dad sat me down on the scratchy yellow sofa in our tiny living room, and told me about Homer. The way he simply blurted it out, no preliminaries, no kids’ gloves in sight, man, it was brutal. By the time my dad had finished talking, I was broken, my book was reclaimed by some guy who had been dead for twenty-eight centuries, if he ever even existed.
The Odyssey notebook laid abandoned at the bottom of my desk drawer until we moved house a couple of years later. It was irretrievably lost in the move.
It was to be another thirty years until I picked up writing again.
Ania Heasley 