Mary Rensten

Where it all began...

It is twenty to eight on a Wednesday evening in May 1975 and I am standing outside the College of Building in the Hatfield Road in St. Albans. I am apprehensive, but also excited. I want to turn round, get into my car and go home. At the same time I want to stay.

I take a deep breath and begin to climb the stairs, following a sign that says Verulam Writers' Circle. I have nothing published, I have written very little, but I have this crazy idea... just because I was good at "composition" at school... that maybe I could become a writer. And now, because I was intrepid enough to speak to Joan Rice after a Housewives Register meeting that she addressed, I am about to meet a group of real writers. The higher up the stairs I go the more alarming the prospect becomes.

And then I'm there... in a large, crowded room. There are lots of people, all talking, all knowing one another. All of them writers! I find a seat. Someone speaks to me. That's nice, until she asks what I write. The meeting begins. The speaker is Gordon Clough from the BBC. I am impressed; I am even more impressed when members of the audience begin asking questions and talk about their own experiences of writing for radio. I hear the names of some of the writers: Muriel Miller, Bernard Dumpleton, Eileen Elias, Betty Puttick. We have coffee. Joan Rice is not there and I don't have the courage to speak to anyone. I busy myself looking at some books and leaflets laid out on a table; I go to the loo.

With the interval over, there comes what is to me the most impressive part of the whole evening, the reading of the Success Book: the name of the writer, the title of the piece, the publication - magazine or newspaper - in which the work appears, the fee paid.

How glorious... to have your name and your accomplishment read out to your peers! Yes, that is what I want; that is my goal. To write for magazines and newspapers; to belong to this group, the Verulam Writers' Circle; and then, best of all... when I am published, to have my name in the Success Book!

And so it was, that having submitted a piece of writing to the Committee and been accepted, I became a writer.