In a Place of Disconnection: Short Stories [Paperback]

Description

With thoughtless parents, two divorces and far from good experiences with the legal services, the author has not found life easy in fact at times felt victimised and even abused.

But she has never let go of a sense of a relentless steel rod inside her - the thirst to learn, and belief in herself as a writer, Most of her life experiences she has fictionalised to a greater or lesser degree. Some stories are not autobiographical at all. But where she has just enjoyed following her imaginations, it has taken her down shady paths to at least the sad - sometimes sinister or very dark.

About the Author

Pamela spent most of her working life bringing up four children and doing casual jobs.. she took a degree in English and at a local university and then taught in Adult Education and became a Market Research Interviewer. When her work dwindled in the Recession of the 1990s, she tried for a while to run her own private Adult Education business.

She has always wanted to write and began in her twenties. She has broadcast her own talk on the radio, published some short stories and articles, and had prizes in a few writing competitions. Pamela lives in The Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames.

Book Extract

Years later she was to remember how, in those days sitting in their garden she heard over and over again the same horrific sound. She had never heard anybody mention hearing this and repeatedly, daily, but she did. A shriek: a scream of a small animal she supposed, in the beak of a predator flying overhead. It was a sound of pain and terror, she thought at the time but not a call for help. It was the ultimate sound of utter misery and terror at a fate - destruction - where the one who cried had no hope or even thoughts of rescue.

She would lie on a deckchair in those days, in some kind of pretence to the world (or neighbours?) or to herself that she was having a nice time. The deckchair...two deckchairs, sat in the garden of their house. He would like, require, that she be seen to be having a nice time.

The screeching amazed and puzzled her for she did not remember hearing it before (and indeed has not since) and she almost hated it for its daily persistence, impinging on her world. For how could anyone nearby bear such hopeless terror and excruciating pain, and such helplessness?