PEOPLE IN YOUR HEAD

As a small child I thought my Welsh grandmother must have invented people because she knew so much about them. While other people read books: my grandmother read tea-leaves; from these strange marooned squiggles lying at the bottom of tea cups, she seemed to discover more about people’s lives than Charles Dickens ever did from wandering endlessly around the streets of London. When I was ten, I plucked up the courage to ask her how she did it - she told me she was clairvoyant. I was puzzled, wondering why she called herself Clare Voyant when her real name was Sarah Jones. And what did her answer have to do with my question, anyway? I never managed to pluck up the courage to ask her again and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity as the adults in my family talked all the time. Welsh children from large families were taught that silence was golden. [Or at least a faded shade of ochre.] At ten, I thought the adults must be making up for hours of enforced childhood silence by talking endlessly.  A gathering of sometimes ten or fifteen animated, loud Welsh voices in a small room forced me into a world of fantasy where I could wander unnoticed for hours. There I created people who I would use years later as an adult.  

All of us have people from the past and present walking around in our heads waiting to written about. I wonder how many people there are in your head?