Around the World in 88 Years -E Book - Arthur Burt

ing it with carbon paper. I wrote the stories and he did the pictures.We sold it all around the district at two pence a copy andmade a bit of money out of The Weekly Wonder. The headmasterat school heard about it and invited me to edit the schoolmagazine. So at age 14, I became an editor.I began to do well at school and finished almost top of my class.I was fairly good at sports, but I knew that I could write. I longedto be an author. But then, how do you become an author? Youdon’t just become an author. You move in the direction of Journalism— newspapers and things like that.Father knew a man in the journalistic trade, and as soon as I leftschool, this friend put my name down on an availability list thatmoved around the newspapers. Writing became my whole life. Iwrote a story, Crossbones Islands, and another one, In OtherWorlds, but I never got them published or printed. I lacked asponsor or critic or anyone to take an interest in me, so I gotnowhere.In all essay-writing competitions, I won a prize, not always thefirst, but always a prize. I began to get very big headed andthought, “I am editor of this school magazine. The headmaster atschool has told me how clever and how gifted I am and how Iwill go places.” Then, for the very first time, I entered the nationalcompetition. Previously, all I had entered were the NortheastCoast exhibitions, but this was the National, for the wholecountry. But I didn’t get a prize. That really pricked my ego. I hadbeen the big duck on the little pond, but this time, I wasn’t eventhe little duck on the big pond. I got nothing, and that really didhit me hard.Stephen Jeffries… “God is real!”My father came home one day in 1926 and tossed a leaflet ontothe table. “Read that!” he ordered.It said, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”(Heb 13:8) The leaflet announced special revival services withPastor Stephen Jeffries at the town hall in Bishop Auckland.7