On Being a Writer in Wales: Odette Debono 

Odette Debono

White Sheep tells the story of my childhood, of growing up in the docklands of Newport to a single mother, and of my difficult relationship with her.

It is a story that follows me and my two younger sisters as we navigate an unsettled landscape of booze, men, and our mother’s outbursts.

The child who wrote this book will take you from the terraces of Pillgwenlly to Merthyr, other places in between, and after.

Writing this memoir has been less of a process and more of a traumatic episode, dumped onto the page in fits and starts, then finally brought together like enemies on the field of battle.

When I was a kid living in Merthyr Tydfil, I would pick out Mum’s Dennis Wheatley’s and eat up the horrors within.

In the Barbie-pink bedroom that I shared with my sisters, I would pointedly try to ignore the horrors from the next bedroom, or downstairs; the heavy slap; the grunt as she fell to the ground.

The fantasy world, of both books and TV, along with hours of attempting to daydream myself into another life, have always been a safe place for me. Too much realism gives me a headache and a flutter in my chest.

So … was writing White Sheep cathartic? People ask.

They mean well.

I look at them as if they’re mad, with a Hell no! face, and a twist on my upper lip – very much like my mother’s when the mood took her.

In the beginning…

… there was university. At forty-seven I was lost. I didn’t know what I wanted, or more importantly, what I needed. I think I may have been struggling with perimenopause. A good friend of mine slipped through my lack of confidence to tell me in no uncertain terms,

‘O, you really should try for uni.’

Pah! I thought. Who’s gonna take someone who didn’t even sit any exams?

Foundation courses, that’s who. University of South Wales, Caerleon campus, changed me forever, beginning a writing journey which has brought me here.

Since that time when I was about eleven and got a toy typewriter for Christmas, I had, as I’ve always described it, ‘pottered’ with words; never ever going beyond a few lines of poetry, or a page of some fantastical fiction or moody mystery.

And that’s exactly what I wrote at first.

It was with some surprise, then, when I started writing about extremely personal experiences for others to read. What was I doing?

It felt like a betrayal, but one that only my classmates and lecturers were privy to. No one need know that I was spilling my family guts all over the page.

I continued like that, doling out angry snippets, until I started the MA in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, a year after my undergrad had finished.

The pieces got longer, the writing improved immeasurably, and suddenly, there it was, the beginning…

I was never going to write a book about my family, about our most intimate moments, but somehow it leaked out of me, bit by bit, even though over the years I have tried to think about, to write, anything else.

Grandma’s House

I began to revisit Pillgwenlly. Some people won’t go near the place, slagging it off from a safe distance, but it holds no fear or repulsion for me, having lived there until I was eleven or so.

The house we shared with Grandma is still there, despite the whole other end of the street being flattened for the leisure centre years ago. The beautiful red brickwork that had defined the terraces for generations had been replaced with thick layers of outdoor magnolia, soulless and bland.

So small, I thought.

And this is where I began my book, aching to describe the innards of that tiny house.

I wanted to pass on to the reader a story that no one else was telling, from a voice that was as unlikely to be telling it as my chances of going to the moon I so longed for as a child.

As I stood in the middle of the street, looking up at the bedroom that I had shared with my siblings and Grandma, all squashed in her old lumpy bed, I couldn’t help but wonder, Who’s in there now? Can they hear the old record player? Can they smell the Woodbines? Burnt toast on a fork?

Odette Debono’s memoir, White Sheep, is published in paperback by Parthian Books, priced £12. 

She will be launching the book at Newport Festival of Words on Saturday 21^st March.