Fiddelity - Truth or Fiction

Despite stating that "Fiddelity" is a fictional story, I have been asked many times how much of this story is true.  Real life can and often does trigger a fictional story. There may be hints of real people in this story of mine, but they are a mosaic of different people, some known, some imagined, some merely observed. 

My parents had a very loving relationship and were great friends to one another; so this was not about them. My dad never spoke of the War or his career. But the “mom” in the story was in a small way my mother. She loved nursing, she often spoke of the War years fondly, had wanted to be a doctor and probably never wanted to be a mother of five boys. She did get pregnant and she did have to come back to Canada from the field in North Africa in 1944 before the War had ended. And she didn't get a promotion she was up for. But she didn't lose the baby. It was my eldest brother. 

My mom, who had been something of a "Tom Boy" in her teens, did teach me how to fight when I was being bullied in school soon after we had come to Canada. She also taught me how to throw a ball and to catch. 

And in junior school, when I was eleven or twelve, I had wanted to play the violin, but there were not enough instruments to go around. The violin I was after was given to a girl in my class, because boys really did not play violins… (which proved to be a fallacy). And at my high school, I had wanted to join our chapel choir, which had quite a fine reputation, but the Choirmaster (who had been an organist at Westminster Abbey) told me to join the glee club instead. I subsequently discovered it did not exist. But I certainly dared not tell him off and I, therefore, did not get expelled. 

Neither was I captain of the soccer team, nor president of the students' council, but I was captain of the Colour Guard in our Cadet Corps, and a member of the Colour Squad on our gymnastics team, on the light weight (those were the days) rowing team and, in my final year, a Prefect and the Head Boy at the School. 

​Also, I am indeed now a seventy year old learning, or trying to at least, to play the violin/fiddle. Oh yes, and there is a Poppy. She is the six year old daughter of a friend, and she does have red frizzy hair, and a toothless smile; but she does not play the fiddle. 

That is about the extent of any connexion in the play to my autobiographical life.