Entrants Were Given the Task of Being As Creative As They Could in Just One A4 Page. Entries

Entrants were given the task of being as creative as they could in just one A4 page. Entries were accepted in any genre and we received over 100 entries across both categories including stories, poems, letters, monologues and many more varied styles.All of the entries were judged blind to ensure each individual piece was given a fair chance. We really enjoyed reading the enormous variety of writing and we’d like to say a big thank you to every writer who submitted an entry to this year’s competition. Sadly we couldn’t share all of them here, but we do hope you enjoy this selection of commended and winning entries.

Judging Panels

Adult Judges
Clare Donoghue
Full-time published crime fiction author from Taunton / Louise Lappin-Cook
Co-centre Director at Tacchi-Morris Arts Centre
Graeme Ryan
Head of Drama at HeathfieldCommunity School who also writes poetry and scripts for production / Claire Martin
Librarian at Heathfield Community School who has a passion for literature
Under 18’s Judges
All of the judging panel were students from Heathfield Community School who have a passion for reading and were selected based on their keen interest in creative writing. They were helped by Claire Martin who guided them in choosing the three winners.
Lizzie Blunt
Year 7 student / Sophia Hall
Year 8 student
Maddie Thomas
Year 9 student / Sam Burch
Year 10 student

Contents

Some of the names below are the pseudonym under which the entry was submitted

Adult Category

Words – S. Langley

The Egg – Judith Tremaine Drazin

One Silken Afternoon – Judith Tremaine Drazin
Apart from the Squeal – Zachary Flange (Warning: Contains graphic content)

The Diner – Molly Rogers

42nd Street – Tom Orchard

The Journey – Tom Gardner

House of my Dreams – Hetty Hunt

Seascape 1969 - Liana

Vitruvian Woman – Heather Pearson

Eat Your Greens – Rowan Patterson

Gone – Rowan Patterson

Jacob and the Angel – Laura McFall

El Dia De Los Muertos – Anne Wilson

Under 18’s Category

The Old Man and the Tree – Kirill Nezhentsev

Gone – Charvi Jain

War Games – Pearl Andrews-Horrigan

Shopping List – Johanne Gorman

Freedom – Katie Pretty

Not Drinking – Phoebe Brice

Why? – Annabella Lemon

Alone – Caitlin Hill

The Chrysalis – Adelphi Eden

Words

I rise at 5 quietly leaving the family sleeping. The morning frost is thick on the ground, steam rising from the garden fences in the hazy sunshine.

The colours of the day have not yet decided what intensity to wear.

Into my little car, slow to start but always willing in the end.

Empty streets lead me to the depot.

In my own country I know the quickest routes, the widest roads, low bridges and weight restrictions. Here I depend on the digital maps, I have few words so speak with smiles and thumbs up.

This morning I creep into the City collecting the sealed bar-coded wheelie bins of shredded paper from Westminster offices.

Back to the depot where they are made into bales.

The bales are bound with tight tape, keeping in their secrets. They are heavy from the weight of responsibility of the words they contain; memos, mandates, directives, decrees, statutes, warrants, endorsements, ratifications; shaping the lives of a nation.

Sack truck, ramp, roller door, never to be read again.

Take them away, the ideas and the meaning; turn them into something acceptable, something everyday. Sneak them into people’s homes.

Once out of the City the fields unfold. I think of my grandfather’s farm in the foothills of the Sudetes, the flat planes, wooden villages, smoke form dachas nestled in the forests.

Concentrate! Or you will miss the exit, turning this beast is not easy in these remote lanes where the strips of documents will be reformed.

The villages have calming schemes, like the slaloms on the winter slopes.

Tiny industrial estates with breweries, Indian takeaways, pet food shops, double glazing, indoor play areas, a concrete gym, then finally the waste paper recycling plant. Huge processing pulping, churning, bleaching, flattening; reshaping the words that no longer make sense- did they ever make sense?

Before I leave the recycling plant, I use the toilet.

Who’s words am I flushing away today?

On my way home I stop at a roadside stand “Farm Fresh Eggs” for my family, kept safe in their boxes of jumbled up words.

The Egg

Tea-breaks were scheduled to last for ten minutes but Miss Mildred Tiffin, retired librarian and a stickler for rules, remained sitting defiantly in the only comfortable chair considering, though planning might be a better word; for Miss Tiffin a pillar of the community was planning to steal an egg. The charity shop to which she now devoted her services every Wednesday, received many strange donations, outsized purple corsets, stuffed, moulting birds, a whey making machine, a machine with no visible purpose, but the egg had excited more comment than most.

“Is it real?” asked the youngest volunteer who boasted as many studs as places to put them. “Might be cardboard left over from some pantomime.”

The manager tapped it lightly with a finger nail. “Seems real” she said “but what animal or bird could have laid that?”

“An elephant” the only male volunteer suggested flippantly.

“Elephants are mammals” Miss Tiffin, who was never flippant, snapped. “They give birth to live young. Perhaps an ostrich, though it would be hard for any living creature to expel.” She broke off blushing. She was a prim woman and these were dangerous waters.

The egg remained in the office store room because there was really no shelf large enough in the shop proper and Miss Tiffin was mesmerised. When she touched it, the surface was hot, listening, she heard pecking, though no-one else did. “I am a desiccated old woman” she told the egg. “No family left and only token friends. I need someone or something to love, preferably something glorious; a bird of paradise, a phoenix, perhaps a baby dragon.” The possibilities were endless.

Peck, peck, it was getting louder, time to act but no time for subtlety. Putting on her long brown coat she manoeuvred the egg gently onto her stomach and did up the buttons though it was a tight fit. The shop was crowded, eyes swivelled in her direction and there was some smothered giggling.

“Have you never seen a pregnant woman before?” said the seventy year old Miss Tiffin loudly, brazenly, haughtily. The giggling died away.

“Well snap” said the studded one faintly as the door clanged shut.

One Silken Afternoon

I sent my lover,my
Treacheroudlover,into
The garden on a hot
Silken afternoon to
Charm the birds down from the trees.
And through my window I could
Watch them come.Softly at first
Green breasted finches,bluebirds,
Now a nightingale in song
The still air scarcely parting,
Then with beating wings those
Lordly swans and spearing
From the North an eagle.Now
With claws outstretched,the Harpies
Woman birds, bird women.
He is looking frightened now,
My treacherous lover.
So I will wait a little,
Safe behind my window.
Before I go to meet him
In the garden, on this hot
And silken afternoon.

APART FROM THE SQUEAL

On this day, violent death is in the air. A September dawn in 1956: away from his London home and family, it’s the final day of Joe’s three-week Wiltshire stay with his much-loved childless aunty and uncle. A curious yet very ordinary youngster, Joe is just ten, but on this day, this very special day, his life will change forever …

After successfully coaxing away all of Auntie Kate’s misgivings, as the sun rises, Joe eagerly sets off with Uncle Sean to nearby Stroud. An hour later, Joe proudly hitches the full-sized, borrowed overall around himself. He watched closely as the fretful creature raises her pinkish head. She sniffs, smells the blood and waste of her predecessors and screams in terror as she senses her fate. Her bowels open abruptly and urine streams and steams. Kicked and prodded towards the killing-area, her shrieks and piercing squeals – once heard, never forgotten – echo off the drab yellow walls. The stocky stunner-man, soon bestriding the wriggling young sow, curses and grapples as he strives to place the bulky tongs behind her ears. Some scuffling moments, then a thud-bang as the electrodes drive an amp through the pig’s brain; seconds later, she collapses to the floor, quivering and slavering but no longer screeching. Adroitly, the stunner fixes some chains around her back legs and with a heave, hoists the assembly to hook onto the overhanging steel conveyor that loops around the slaughterhouse. Still fitfully trembling, after a casual push from the stunner, the cataleptic upended animal trundles into the killing room. Her past and future? Rendered irrelevant. Her conclusion? Now inevitable.

Fascinated, Joe cautiously follows and stands gazing at the unfolding scene before him. The giant rubber-booted sticker-man seems to disapprove of such juvenile scrutiny as, clutching a short double-edged knife, his reproachful eyes glare past the comatose pig and fix upon the boy’s. He mutters malevolently then, still staring, thrusts in his blade and twists then extracts it before stepping smartly back to escape the crimson torrent cascading from the spouting throat-wound. The blood flushes and splashes along a ten-foot channel in the concave concrete floor and gurgles down a drain-hole into a collecting sump below. For twenty seconds or so the carcase twitches in its death-throes and then, after a rough shove from the sticker, it swings on its chains bizarrely as a conveyor ratchet catches the shackles and jerkily rattles the body to the next process. This is scalding: a raucous, scrubbing and boiling machine that, after drenching and pummelling the cadaver, singes, scrapes and gathers up its bristly hair before propelling it towards the specialists waiting outside. Steam (and now some tears) mist up Joe’s glasses, but riveted, he wipes them and moves on. Shiny steel blades and chopped shimmer in the flickering neon lights as firstly a deft, precise entrails-remover, then a cleaver-wielding, brawny chine-splitter do their work. Officialdom now interrupts the butchery process as a Ministry inspector scrutinises still-warm lungs for signs of porcine tuberculosis while a colleague (Joe’s Uncle Sean) notes down weights and ratios of fat and lean for subsidy purposes. The used-to-be pig is trundled to a bloodstained offal-man who skilfully removes kidneys, heard, liver, spleen, bladder and other diverse innards before separating then tossing the edible and inedible organs into designated bucked. Joined only at the neck, two large meaty flanks now remain; swiftly the head, a limp tongue drooling inches under glasses (yet, to Joe, somehow beseeching) eyes, is rapidly separated and nonchalantly flung into a large cubic container that already holds many gruesome facial likenesses. This small sow, a source of bacon, pies, leather, ham, shaving brushes, chops, pet food, black puddings, pork, sausages, and more – a living animal – has departed. Just meat, groceries and merchandise persist. Aghast, Joe runs for the sunshine outside and throws up his breakfast.

“Everything’s used but the squeal, Joe.” Sean observes as he drives them both home. But, devastated by what he’s seen, Joe fights to smother the nausea that has already consumed him. To reinforce his revulsion, gobbets of gore had sullied his shoes; blood-specks have dried on his own specs; his hankie is pink from when he’d wiped his hands and glasses. Joe, certain that he reeks of blood, urine, excrement and dead or dying pig, manages to stifle a sob. He feels ashamed at having pleaded to visit; Auntie Kate had been so right.

Now I’ve a confession: I am Joe. Sixty years on, a full-colour movie replays in my head during my dark times; pig-shrieks and gurgling lifeblood form the soundtrack. I see the sticker-man’s staring eyes, his knife, the stab, the cataract, Such images dominate my dreams till I wake – shivering, often shouting. I’d touched violent death for the first time. But a lifelong loathing endures – for me, meat, all meat, any meat has been forever eschewed.

The Diner

The dinerwas sitting in the centre of the restaurant, where he could be seen clearly from every other table. His waistline bore testament to his love of fine dining. He had already sampled several dishes from the menu, none of which had met with his approval and all of which had been despatched back to the kitchen with a gruff complaint (albeit with the plate at least half empty). “Too much salt!”. “Undercooked!” “Over booked!”. “A disgrace, for the prices you charge!”. All around him people were tutting into their napkins and shaking their heads.

After the waitress allocated to his table had returned to the kitchen in tears, the head waiter had stepped in.

“If Sir is not happy with our regular menu, perhaps he would like to try our Special Reserve Dish’, he suggested discreetly. “It’s something we offer only to our most discerning clientele.”

The diner bridled slightly with pride. He could not help but feel flattered. “Well ……what is it?” he asked, affecting disinterest. The waiter smiled, and tapped the side of his nose with a discreet finger. The diner laughed, excited despite himself to collude in the secret. Then in a low voice he asked “Aaah, perhaps I should ask how much…..?” The waiter wrote a figure on his pad, ripped off the sheet and placed it in front of the diner. His eyebrows shot skywards for a split second, then he regained his composure. “That will be no problem! Bring it at once!”.

He sat back with a satisfied smirk, his lips glistening slightly with grease. He lifted one buttock and released a small puff of gas, belched softly, then settled back to await his surprise, his fingers clasped across his bulging stomach.

Back in the kitchen the head waiter and head chef were in conference, their heads nearly touching. The chef nodded and smiled. He went to the cold store and returned bearing a fish. It measured perhaps two feet from nose to tail. Its scales gleamed deep rich blue and silver. He took his time to prepare it. He handled it with loving care, letting his fingers caress its smooth flanks. Finally he stood back. The fish lay in state on a vast platter, garnished all around, magnificent. The chef leaned down close to it, and seemed almost to whisper an endearment.

“Service!” he shouted. The head waiter swept up the platter and bore it aloft into the restaurant. All eyes turned to see. The diner sat up, letting his chest fill with air in sweet anticipation. At last! A dish worthy of a gourmet like him! The platter was placed in front of him. He gasped in pleasure. It was a masterpiece! He raised his knife and fork ready to plunge them into the glorious blue skin.

In a split second the fish launched itself towards his face, sank its fishy teeth hard into his nose, then fell back perfectly into place. The diner, too shocked to scream, felt the pain in his face then more pain, overwhelming, surging through his stomach and across his chest. He clutched at his heart and felt his breath fading. He toppled slowly sideways and lay slumped, lifeless, on the floor.

People leapt up from their tables in horror and clustered around.

The waiter stepped over the fallen body and reached for the platter. The fish winked.

42nd Street

The Beetle crushers clicked and tapped their clogs across the village square. Folk Festival Day was warm and muggy -shirtsleeves and pushchairs, painting dogs, the smell of burnt onions, fresh pizza and spit-roast Dexter beef, wafting from West Street and the courtyard of The Brewers Arms.

A fiddler bowed a single note and the crowd, squatting on lines of straw bales, stilled to a murmur. Two guitars mirrored the note. A bearded mandolin player fine-tuned his strings as eight rainbow-colours dancers slid fresh flower-stems into hats of yellow straw.

Leaning on his stick, the old man shuffled towards the one remaining bale, helping his frail companion ease slowly down. It wasn’t comfy, the bale, but at least it was a seat.