Bryony's Blog

When I first began teaching fifteen years ago, the school where I worked was not particularly interested in special needs teaching or differentiating between students in a class.  I had a small group of boys that I would take for remedial lessons every week and that was the extent of the help given to them.  Some of these pupils had an educational psychologist's report and were deemed dyslexic, but not much notice was taken by the school - which is not to say that their conditions were ignored, they just weren't given much emphasis and no one was excused from doing anything because of their difficulty. Some educationalists take umbrage at this way of doing things.  The last twenty or so years have seen a considerable change in the way in which learning difficulties are viewed.  Students taking the University of Cambridge's examinations can apply to have a reader (someone who reads the questions out aloud) or a scribe (someone who writes the answers do...

One of the worst moments in your life is when you come to realise that you are not happy in your job anymore.  There can be varying reasons for this and it may be a passing phase in which case the feeling itself  passes and you are able to continue your job as you have done in the past. It's something else when you realise the job itself and what it demands of you is changing and it's no longer what you want. I think of myself as an 'accidental' teacher.  I didn't have any plans to go into teaching, it's more of something I fell into after leaving university.  I had a Master's degree in English Literature, but I had no particular training in anything.  A couple of years' of teaching would look better on my CV than a career in waitressing, I thought.  How little was I to know that I would spend the next fifteen years in the job. Teaching is a profession that grew on me. I didn't always enjoy it at the beginning, but I came to enjoy it immensely....

Ever since I was child, I have had a fascination for watching things grow.   When I was about ten, I kept glass jars on my windowsill in which I grew peas and watched, mesmerised, as their roots sprouted and spread.   I also kept onions in water, much to my mother’s consternation, and observed them sprouting.   My mum is a keen gardener and I loved going to nurseries with her as a child to buy flowers and shrubs.   I loved the organisational intricacies of gardening – leaving space for a shrub that might spread and a creeper that might climb and not planting this flower with that in case one dwarfed the other.   However, I was never really much of a gardener - as a student in the UK, I kept an African Violet called Shamwari, on my windowsill, but it never flowered and my attempts to grow things in pots also invariably met some form of disaster or another.                   In ...

  Looking back on my debut novel, This September Sun , I am conscious of how ambitious a project it was. It is a long book and it took a long time to write, but it also needed a fair amount of research. Researching the past, even if it is only the 1940s is not as easy in Zimbabwe as it may be in a place like Britain. There are not many books either written about or set in the time. Those that are, tend to be political history which, although relevant to a certain degree, are often rather tedious to read. Film coverage is not that easy – actually it is fairly impossible – to come by and I had to rely on newspapers in the archives and interviews with some now quite elderly people.   The former are fascinating. I could lose myself all day in old newspapers. They speak of fundraising balls, teas and fetes. They advertise luxury accommodation at hotels with porters and cars meeting each train, film reels at the cinema, a list of who’s in town and who’s st...

Africa is a big place.   Really big.   When you fly over it, you get a sense of its immenseness; everything from cities to mile upon mile of open ground.   In turn, it is easy to feel very small and insignificant, a mere dot on the landscape.                 As a writer in Africa, it is also easy to feel a sense of that aloneness.   I live in a small mining town called Solwezi in north-western Zambia.   If there are any other writers here, I certainly have not met them and I am not sure how I would.   There are no writers’ groups advertised, no literary events take place - and no one seems to be particularly perturbed. After all, why should they be?   Writing is a solitary job, isn’t it?   It’s just you and your notepad or your laptop.   What else do you need?                 I am sure...

In a hot, airless little room in Bulawayo, an elderly man rummages through disintegrating brown envelopes and rusty files.   Faint labels carry captions such as: ‘Railway Staff 1932-33’ and ‘Wages March 1952’.   There are dusty black and white photographs on the wall of men in dark suits and hats.   Unsmiling, they all look alarmingly similar with their handle-bar moustaches and their arms crossed resolutely across their chests.                 ‘No.   I thought I might have something, but no.’ He reluctantly admits defeat, so convinced was he that he might be able to help me in my search. I am in the archives of the Railway Museum in Bulawayo.   The buildings themselves are run down and we are surrounded by the great hulks of rusting train carcasses. The museum, now a separate entity from the National Railways of Zimbabwe, is run by a couple of train enthusiasts, who are extremely kn...

I think one of the hardest things about writing a novel is convincing others you are up to the job.   For some reason, saying you want to be a writer is akin to saying you want to be an astronaut or a brain surgeon.   You get that look – you know the one adults use with children?   Oh, that’s nice! And really you know they’re inwardly shaking their heads or, worse, they’ve already dismissed the thought so that, the next time you mention it, you either get a blank stare or that look my mother used to give me when I insisted on doing something she didn’t like – Well, we’ll speak to your father about it, but I doubt he’ll like it either.                 Zimbabwe had descended into complete economic and political chaos while I was in the throes of writing This September Sun and suddenly everyone was writing their memoirs: the war years, the years on the farm, their years in Africa.   I rem...