I took early retirement from university teaching in 2001, and my principal aim in this was to do what I had wanted to do for a long time, namely, to be an artist. There was a time before then, however, when I had contemplated quite a different course of action.
It might have been as long ago as 1983 that I took part in a language course in Ohrid, in Yugoslavia. There was plenty of spare time, and I was never one to spend my evenings in the disco or the bar. Suddenly, I had the idea that it might be nice to try writing some short stories. I produced a couple of these quite quickly, and read them to some friends on the course, whose response was rather positive and encouraging. Over the rest of the year I wrote quite a collection of these, and the reaction of friends was invariably supportive.
When I made preliminary enquiries about publication I was advised that it is difficult for an unknown writer to sell short stories, and perhaps I would be better advised, in the first instance, to try writing a novel. A few of the stories had a connecting thread, and I decided that the situations around which these were constructed could be developed into a longer work, and over the following year I did indeed complete a draft novel, which was also well received by friends with whom I shared it.
Encouraged by this I approached a literary agent. His comment was that although it was well-written, and clearly the basis of a saleable item, it was too short, and if I wanted to go ahead with the project I should find a way of developing the core idea. By this time, however, I was also starting to become involved in painting, but also things were starting to become quite busy on the academic front, with growing opportunities for publication there, as pressure mounted from my department to advance my career. It became increasingly clear to me that some choices had to be made.
To cut a long story short, I decided that writing fiction would have to be abandoned. I enjoyed writing very much, but there was just so much that I could do with my time, and it was important to me that I did something reasonably well, rather than just dabbled in several different things. The consequence was that, when the opportunity arose for me to take early retirement, I threw myself into painting and the possibility of my becoming a writer was laid aside. I was wondering earlier today, however, what might have happened had I chosen differently. Did I make the wrong choice?
Many years ago (back in the early ‘seventies) I was quite interested in the stories of John Wyndham. He had an idea that recurred in more than one of them, that a person’s trajectory through life might, by some means, become split, so that different versions of themself might exist in parallel universes. In a moment of fantasy this afternoon I wondered how that might have worked out in my own case. Could it be that, somewhere in the world, is another John Allcock, who is making his way as a writer of novels, but who wonders occasionally whether he could have ever enjoyed life as a painter.