Short Story
A TALK TO SCHOOL LEAVERS Jenny Campbell, Sherborne Scribblers
‘F
or the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: if today was the last day of my life, would I do what I am about to do today? And whenever an answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.’ The person who said that was Steve Jobs, the American business magnate who died from pancreatic cancer in 2011. Was he talking about the voice of conscience, do you think? Perhaps. But he may also have been talking about that still, small voice inside each one of us which defines WHO and WHAT we truly are. In Hamlet, Shakespeare, as always, had exactly the right words for it: ‘To thine own self be true; and it shall follow, as the night the day, thou canst not, then, be false to any man.’ During my own school days, there were two occasions when I did not so much listen to that still, small voice as recognise two subjects which made my heart sing. The first was writing – or composition as it used to be called – and led to entering my first writing competition, in the Bournemouth Daily Echo. The subject was ‘The Island I Would Most Like to Visit’ and the competition was run in conjunction with the local Gaumont cinema to promote a film called The African Queen. It was open to all age groups and I, at fourteen, wrote about Hawaii which came second to a middle-aged entrant’s Easter Island; but that love of writing has continued throughout my life and given me so much pleasure over the years, not least in the likeminded friends I have made. Despite an eventual career in nursing, I have also pursued another interest which began with my first French lesson at school. The sheer joy of being able to communicate in another language was a revelation to me and I still remember the shock of that realisation. Decades later, nearing sixty, I did a 3-year Open University French Diploma course which included
110 | Sherborne Times | September 2020
