Exeter Writers

For thirty-four years, Caroline Passingham was in primary education as a deputy head, advisory teacher, visiting lecturer, workshop leader, and county course leader for teacher training.       She says, “Being in the classroom with little people was the best. I am drama trained. For my M.Ed. I researched the use of drama in education, and how meanings can be conveyed, especially through objects. Creating stories, contexts, characters, atmospheres, and meanings with children, was for many years, a large part of my working life.” How did you feel when you found out that you’d won? My husband passed me his tablet and said, ‘You’d better read this email.’ Apparently, I started to blub, and words came randomly like, ‘No. What? I can’t believe it. I can’t! No, no.’ And then the music started, a real La Bamba moment. ‘Arriba! Arriba!’ trumpets, bongos, maracas, castanets, all going for it as the fireworks exploded. How long have you been writing?  I have been sixty-nin...

 The Last Fall by  Caroline Passingham It was a keen blade that made such cuts. Sheets of wrapping paper severed with surgical precision hung down each side of the box. Ripped sticky tape had stripped away some of the brown skin of the cardboard, exposing ribs. The opening flaps, once rigid, now drooped limply. Innards spilled out.      Habiba angled her head this way and that, as if it would help her to see differently, as if the things before her eyes could change if she would only allow them to. Her mother had told her that acceptance would come, that her marriage would begin like a rushing waterfall, hitting rocks on the way down, but that the water would eventually reach the last fall, and then calm.      She turned to it again but could only see his butchery as the knife cut through the ribbon, the knife that he kept razor sharp, the blade that he sank into the goat’s soft throats and then their underbellies.      ‘Your mother...