The Button Family

 RHYS BOWEN:

I’ve often wondered where creativity comes from. Why are some children curious, creative, inventive and others sit placidly while the word passes them? I suspect it has a lot to do with early childhood. We are told we get all the imagination we’ll ever have by the time we are five. These days so many kids have structured childhoods, play dates, activities, and no down time to create their own little worlds.

                I suspect that one of the reasons I became a writer was that I grew up amusing myself, inventing my own world.

I suppose I was lucky in a way. My early years were spent alone, only child, with my grandmother and great aunt. They told stories and joined in games of pretend with me. But I had an awful lot of time on my own when I had to amuse myself. One of my favorite toys was my grandmother’s box of buttons. She had removed the buttons from every worn out garment and kept them all in a big box. I played with them every day. One day I made a family of pearly buttons and they went shopping. One day I sat them in rows and they were a school. One day I took all the chipped and damaged buttons and put them in match boxes for a hospital. The white buttons were doctors and nurses caring for them. Or a bigger box became a bus and they went to the seaside.  Endless play.

                When I was five we moved to a big house with an acre of orchard. Again I had plenty of time alone and created my own world there. I built a treehouse (with a little help from my father) and played at being marooned on a desert island.  I made a trapeze on an apple tree and became Patsy of the circus. Plenty of time alone as we lived outside a village and the village kids were highly suspicious of me since my father ran the factory where their parents worked and my mother was the school principal.

                It’s amazing how inventive children will be if you let them. My own kids loved cardboard boxes. I made them forts and houses from the bigger ones. They pulled each other around in smaller ones as trains and cars. They had a dress up box full of odd items and were always pretending to be princesses or fairies. They put on plays. They painted and wrote stories. However I noticed when other kids came to our house they really didn’t know how to play. They could do what the rules on the box told them for the various toys. Make Lego structures, but then never have an imaginary family living in the Lego house.  I remember Anne coming to me when she was about two. She handed me a match box and said solemnly, “Open it very carefully because there is an elephant living inside.”

                So Reds: Do you think that your childhoods shaped the way you became writers? How about you, Reddies? Did your childhoods make you creative? Did you bring up your kids to be creative?