More Junior Authors sketch (1963)
Oct. 17th, 2020 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hedgebird posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
sutcliff_spaceAnother "Autobiographical sketch of Rosemary Sutcliff", from More Junior Authors edited by Muriel Fuller, which you can view on Internet Archive.
I was born in Surrey, England, but during the first ten years of my life, I don’t think we were ever two years in the same place. My father was a naval officer, and when he moved from one ship or dockyard to another, of course my mother and I followed him. When I was two we went to Malta, and when I was four we came home again. I can remember Malta, not in long connected memories, but in little bright pictures. I remember the tall, cool stone-floored rooms of our house, and the little garden that had just space for a wellhead in it, a lemon tree and a frangipani and nothing more. I wish I could say that I remember the ships in the Grand Harbour, but I don’t; all that I remember about them is a party on board H.M.S. Benbow, when I made my tea exclusively of crystallized orange slices.
I suppose I must have been about five when I began my career, not as a writer, but as an artist. I took, for no apparent reason, to drawing robins, very fat robins sitting on logs, and I continued to draw robins with great singleness of purpose for years.
When I was ten, my father retired, and we settled in Devonshire, and I went to a private school in the near-by town. Four years later it had become painfully clear that I was “Educationally Sub-normal,” or else just plain incurably lazy where the three R’s were concerned. On the other hand, I really could draw – other things besides robins by that time – so they allowed me to leave and go to art school. At art school I did well, and took to miniature painting. I was eighteen when I had my first miniature painting hung in the Royal Academy, and about ten years later I was elected a member of the Royal Miniaturist Society. But before that time I had started to write.
The beginning of that story goes back, I think, as far as my first robin, for it was at about that time my mother began seriously to read aloud to me. She read aloud most beautifully, and her choice of books, which besides Peter Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh included, even in those early days, most of Dickens and Trollope, Beowulf, and Lord Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, gave me a feeling for good writing that stood me in most useful stead when my own urge came upon me. Certainly the three Roman stories in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which she read me many times, were the start of my feeling for Roman Britain, which I later put into The Eagle of the Ninth, my favourite so far among my own books.
Nowadays I have given up painting entirely. It was my first love, but writing has come to mean more to me than ever painting did. And I live in Sussex, just half the county away from the place where Puck of Pook’s Hill was written.
I was born in Surrey, England, but during the first ten years of my life, I don’t think we were ever two years in the same place. My father was a naval officer, and when he moved from one ship or dockyard to another, of course my mother and I followed him. When I was two we went to Malta, and when I was four we came home again. I can remember Malta, not in long connected memories, but in little bright pictures. I remember the tall, cool stone-floored rooms of our house, and the little garden that had just space for a wellhead in it, a lemon tree and a frangipani and nothing more. I wish I could say that I remember the ships in the Grand Harbour, but I don’t; all that I remember about them is a party on board H.M.S. Benbow, when I made my tea exclusively of crystallized orange slices.
I suppose I must have been about five when I began my career, not as a writer, but as an artist. I took, for no apparent reason, to drawing robins, very fat robins sitting on logs, and I continued to draw robins with great singleness of purpose for years.
When I was ten, my father retired, and we settled in Devonshire, and I went to a private school in the near-by town. Four years later it had become painfully clear that I was “Educationally Sub-normal,” or else just plain incurably lazy where the three R’s were concerned. On the other hand, I really could draw – other things besides robins by that time – so they allowed me to leave and go to art school. At art school I did well, and took to miniature painting. I was eighteen when I had my first miniature painting hung in the Royal Academy, and about ten years later I was elected a member of the Royal Miniaturist Society. But before that time I had started to write.
The beginning of that story goes back, I think, as far as my first robin, for it was at about that time my mother began seriously to read aloud to me. She read aloud most beautifully, and her choice of books, which besides Peter Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh included, even in those early days, most of Dickens and Trollope, Beowulf, and Lord Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, gave me a feeling for good writing that stood me in most useful stead when my own urge came upon me. Certainly the three Roman stories in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which she read me many times, were the start of my feeling for Roman Britain, which I later put into The Eagle of the Ninth, my favourite so far among my own books.
Nowadays I have given up painting entirely. It was my first love, but writing has come to mean more to me than ever painting did. And I live in Sussex, just half the county away from the place where Puck of Pook’s Hill was written.
