Percy’s Pawnshop

An Author’s note.

Percy’s Pawnshop is the result of COVID-19 incarceration.

A life-long desire to write was never fulfilled, and as an older-generation retiree, the opportunity to use unexpected confinement was too overwhelming to ignore. After several months in a small world of imaginative exercises, writing short stories I thought were exciting but disappointed in reading, I decided to return to basics, perhaps take a second chance to do what I should’ve been doing as a boy in the 1950s, instead, of dodging teachers to wander around town and smoke under railway arches at the back of my small school in Cornbrook’s Westminster Street.

Taking a few short but informative online courses reaped dividends far more significant than anything I’d ever experienced in a lifetime of successfully running a business. Words became alive as punctuation and forgotten guidelines kicked the stories into shape. Painting pictures and emotion with words that also conveyed humour emerged to produce exciting, adventurous and gratifying work. Re-visiting a dismal childhood found more than a few of the characters that made life tolerable at that time. In writing, many evoked tales of their own, so different stories are planned to feature a few individual characters in this publication, creating a series of works surrounding the building. Using their memory to influence this fictional story was both cathartic and deeply gratifying. I thoroughly enjoyed creating ‘Percy’s Pawnshop’ and sincerely hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

There are instances in the book I was delighted to write, snippets sourced from a limited vocabulary to paint a vivid, atmospheric picture relating what lay in my imagination and memory.