Extract from The Making of Me

Robert Westall

EDITORIAL NOTE

Robert Atkinson Westall was born on 7 October 1929 at 7 Vicarage Street, North Shields, Northumberland. He never attempted to write his autobiography, apart from a contribution to the Autobiographical Series, ‘Something About the Author’, for the Gale Research Company in Detroit, Michigan, USA. However, after his death in 1993, his agent and literary executor Laura Cecil and I discovered many autobiographical pieces of writing among his papers.

I have collated these pieces, placing them in chronological order and, using the ‘Something About the Author’ article as a basis for this book, have inserted the pieces that illustrate the major periods of Bob’s young life. I have used previously published stories as well, notably Chapters 7 and 10, as they are largely autobiographical. I have also used Bob’s experience as a boy on Tyneside, during the Second World War, previously published in his book Children of the Blitz.

It was a great privilege for me to know Bob well for twenty-seven years of his life, and to be in the position now to be able to produce this book.

Lindy McKinnel, Lymm, Cheshire

 

1 Dreamtime

The beginning is a dream: a dream of invincible happiness. It persisted right through my childhood until I was a young man. It always came as I was dropping off to sleep, and it was always exactly the same. It differed from my other dreams and nightmares because nobody else ever came into it. It was simply an experience of falling head over heels through endless blackness. It should have brought terror, except that I was falling very slowly, turning over and over as in a slowed-down movie, and the darkness was deliciously warm. And I had no fear of hitting the bottom, because I knew the bottom was a warm soft trampoline that would send me spinning upwards again in an exhilarating way. There were sounds: huge watery sounds like the running of streams and the roaring of the sea. And my happiness was total and invincible.

I have never told anybody before, because I later worked out that the dream was a memory of how it was before birth, and I thought that if I told people they would think I was mad. But now some psychologists hold that having memories of before birth is a quite tenable proposition.

Because I have known total invincible happiness, I am always on the lookout for it again. I often shudder to think that my paradise was only my mother’s vulnerable body that might have been ended in a flash by a fall or accident. I look for it again: it makes it easy for me to believe in my Christian heaven. Death, at most, will be a slow retreat back into that endless joyful twisting and turning.

In my second dream memory I am buried inside the foundations of a house, struggling to get out into the light of day. The foundations are of a deep-red brick. There is a tunnel through them, a kind of maze, full of right-angled corners that are narrow and hard to wriggle round. I get very near to panic, but I manage to contain it and keep on wriggling. In the end I get my head and shoulders out and just lie there, gawping at the blinding light and breathing gratefully, with my body and legs still inside the foundations.

I think this is a memory of birth. This theory too is now quite respectable in psychological circles. It left its mark on me as a child, as an adult and as a writer. As a child I could never bear to be hugged tightly. I used to kick and yell and shout, ‘Don’t struggle me! Don’t struggle me!’ In my writing, situations of close physical context are always of combat, struggle and horror.

I am an optimist but at heart I am a loner. I make forays out from fortress-me and grab at my heart’s desires and drag them back inside to brood over them. I drag my hurts inside and brood over them, too. Ask me how I have fun, and I would say people. Ask me how I recharge myself and I would say alone, with a cat on my knee and Bach’s Double Violin Concerto and a single glass of whisky. I don’t mind someone else being in the room providing they don’t get too noisy. If I were sent to prison, I’d choose solitary, with books.

This means that there is so much about people I can never understand. Sibling rivalry seems like madness. I have no desire to keep up with any possible Joneses. I do not need the approval of a peer group. I shun fellow writers. I’d rather sit in a café in a strange town, an ignored stranger, while the old ladies come in with their shopping and get on with their chat, treating me as of no more significance than a hat-stand. Old ladies’ talk, anybody’s talk, is totally fascinating.

Nutritionists say our bodies are what we eat. I say our minds, even our souls, are what we absorb, perhaps even before birth. Of course, our minds can spit things out again, like our mouths. What we spit out we do not become. What we absorb we can twist and change, as our bodies digest food. We turn facts inside us into lies, myths and legends, but they remain the truth about us. I am the lies I have told myself. I shall try to dig out the truth and if it is not the truth about the world, it is the truth about the making of me.

Extract from The Making of Me

Robert Westall © 2026


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