It's time to tell the story

Anne Pia Guest Blog (Part I)

Did I have an unfulfilled ambition to be a writer? I did not.

I had a number of unrealised dreams but writing wasn’t one of them.

I had always longed to be a musician.

I would have wanted to become a conductor. That was my dream. The whole idea of working with talented musicians, the gift of moulding raw material into a fresh version of a wonderful piece of music was thrilling to me. It possibly was not so unrealistic.

I had the qualifications to study music but my post-war Italian family was always looking for economic survival and had a firm view of a woman’s role (to “support” your husband and have a job that allows you to have the time to bring up a family). They persuaded me to do something more secure.

So, I studied languages and literature at university and started teaching. It turned out well.

I found I had a passion and an appetite for it. I moved through sectors and institutions in senior roles; ultimately to education policy and I retired as an HM Inspector of Education working in adult learning across Scotland.

Having always been someone on the margins of everything myself – Italian family, the daughter of a single mother in a Catholic school, the girl no one took home from a party, the one who struggled to make friends in her early school years; the one who was too shy to stand out in the classroom or anywhere; the one who allowed herself to be bullied in her career by men and also by women – I understood that it was the students who struggled either to learn from or to fit into the system, that I wanted to champion.

It was their absent voices, the voices of the frightened, the under-confident, the angry and the frustrated young people, that I wanted to hear and make heard. I wanted to turn up the volume, give them the words, the opportunities and the power. I wanted to free them from oppression and the power of teacher over learner in a classroom, and from what is defined by the ruling classes and society as a whole, as a success.

I retired in 2009 at the age of 60 and in 2011 I had a significant personal crisis.

I bought a tent.

I had never been in one before, but I took off for several weeks to the Outer Hebrides. It was during that trip, that I thought I might write. I saw fields of machair for the first time; heard Gaelic spoken in the local shops; I showered where I could, ate grilled sausages for dinner, and learned the languages and rhythm of the Hebridean light and tides.

I saw different ways of living a life and met inspirational people of all ages.

Later that summer I visited Holy Isle, the Buddhist Centre for World Health and Peace near Lamlash in Arran. I worked as a volunteer cook.

Eventually, I found meaning and solidity. I found healing in the people I met and in that “thin”, sovereign landscape where they tell me, there is very little distance between our tangible world and that of the world beyond.

One morning, before dawn I got up and wrote my two first poems, raw, not well crafted but they were a new, unexpected beginning.

Anne Pia