At a funeral recently (a common event for someone my age) a woman I wasn’t aware of meeting before came up and spoke to me. ‘When you and I were children,’ she said, ‘you used to holiday at your aunt’s bach in Paekākāriki, and I holidayed across the road at my grandmother’s. Do you remember that?’
I remembered my Aunty Freda’s bach but still didn’t remember this woman.
‘Well, you had a bunk room with four bunks, right?’ she said.
We did.
‘Us kids used to come and lie on those bunks and you would tell us stories out of your head. You would have been six. I think I was four or five.’
She laughed. ‘So you were a story-teller even back then. It must be in your blood.’.
It pleased me to think that I liked to tell stories as a child.
She told me she’d read all my books, which is always lovely to hear
My mother wrote stories and plays and poems. I don’t know whether the story-telling is in the blood but the love of stories is certainly passed on.
Blog photo by Alex Nickless
Jenny Pattrick 
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