Frank Hinks

I was born in England in 1950 and brought up in Bromley, which we always liked to think of being part of the County of Kent, but more accurately forms part of the southern suburbs of London. From a young child I wanted to be both a barrister and a writer. To be honest I have no memory of actually wanting to be a lawyer, but my Great Aunt Dora always said that one day I was watching the US trial lawyer Perry Mason on TV and said that that is what I want to be when I grow up. However, I have clear memories of wanting to be a writer, starting many books under the illusion that they would make my fortune.

I found it a great deal easier to be a successful barrister than a successful writer: Open Scholarship to St. Catherine’s College Oxford, Double First etc etc. I tried various kinds of writing including a full length children’s adventure story, a novel, and poetry, but with no success. Indeed, no one showed the slightest interest in my stories until with the birth of my eldest son Julius I gained an enthusiastic audience of one. To begin with he was content with one story, but soon wanted a different story every night. He would help me by giving me the first sentence of the story. “Dad tonight I want a story about the witch Griselda” (who had purple hair like his mother) “Snuggle” (the misnamed family cat who savaged dogs and killed the vicar’s chickens) “the rabbit Scrooey-Looey” (a half –demented and extremely rude glove puppet who lived on the top shelf in the nursery) and it starts like this…” Then I would have to take over the story with no idea where it was going.

These stories were never intended for publication and would have led to nothing had it not been for the property recession. 1990 was a fantastic year for me at the Bar with substantial cases for the Grosvenor Estate and the Crown Estate Commissioners. In 1991 everything went dead. The property side of my practice disappeared leaving me with a 50% reduction in income and a grand room in Lincoln’s Inn with not enough to do. That was when I first wrote the stories thereby reviving my childhood dream of becoming a writer. In the words of the Rolling Stones “You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometime you find you get what you need.”

What did surprise me was discovering at the age of around 40 that (despite never having any ambition to be an artist) I had a talent for illustration. The stories needed illustration. My wife a professional artist (abstract painter now installation artist) would not have dreamt of doing children’s illustrations, but was happy to provide instruction and criticism: I sometimes like to think of myself as self-taught as an illustrator but wife taught would be a more accurate description. She provided a very critical home audience, telling me everything I did wrong until amazingly I eventually produced something which met her approval. I have never been influenced by her style, but amongst other things she did suggest that I produce the colour illustrations in gouache (opaque watercolour) and encouraged me to produce flat blocks of colour free from paint strokes.

To begin with I illustrated the stories with black and white ink-pen drawings and produced them in aid of charity for the annual Shoreham (Kent) Festival of Music which was based on our house and the church next door. As part of the Saturday morning children’s events I would tell a story to an audience of children, parents and grandparents numbering up to around 150. The response was enthusiastic and I knew that I had something of value. In 1995 I started illustrating the stories in colour. In 2002/3 (to coincide with a one man exhibition of 117 of my paintings at The Chapel Gallery Hall Place) the first four stories were published with a full page colour illustration for every page of text. I have now produced 18 stories with around 550 paintings.

There is an enormous difference between what one can get away with during bedtime storytelling and what is needed for a published book. Each of my sons (particularly Julius) has had an influence on the stories, but at the end of the day they are principally the products of my imagination. The stories are not simply remembered from bedtime storytelling, but inspired by a mixture of bedtime storytelling, real family incidents, myths, fairy tales and ideas which seemingly come out of nowhere. There was not even a magical land of Ramion in the original bedtime stories. One day I was coming back from an antiques fair and walking along Oxford Street when suddenly the name of Ramion came to me. It may have been a tourist calling out to a son, but what came to me was not merely a name but a complete world.

At the Bar the demands are principally from the outside. In writing and painting the demands are principally from the inside. There is (or should be) creativity in both, but writing and painting do provide an outlet for creativity of a kind which I do not get from practice at the Bar. The pictures illustrate the words, but as part of a continuing process in which text can change in the light of the illustrations which force me to think about images in a very concrete way.

The Bar is my profession. For most of my working life it has had to take priority. If ever there is a lull in my work I press ahead hard with the stories. Despite the disapproval of my former Senior Clerk (whenever he caught me working on an illustration he looked at me with utter disgust) I have never been conscious of my books limiting in any way the success of my practice as a barrister, but when I applied to become a judge the books as a commercial activity were deemed incompatible with judicial office and hence fatal to my application.

At times the Bar is so demanding both physically and mentally that nothing is left for anything else, but at least in my practice those periods of intense pressure come to an end and then I am delighted to have the release of the books. At earlier times in my career when my creative side was largely unfulfilled the two different sides of my personality and talents seemed at times at war with the one side having no respect for my ability to pass exams and make money as a barrister and the other side viewing my attempts at writing as largely a waste of time. The two sides have now made peace and even the barrister side can see that I also need to be a writer/artist to have a full life. On my death bed I am not going to regret failing to do another multi-jurisdictional trusts case, but I will regret failing to write all the stories I was born to write.

On the whole I do not set aside specific times to write or paint, but I am disciplined in not wasting the time I have free from the Bar. If a case comes to an end and I am not otherwise fully occupied I apply myself to the stories knowing that any day the Bar may become once again all absorbing. A story may float around my brain for 10 or 15 years with me from time to time writing down ideas in an ideas book. Then suddenly one day for no apparent reason I will sit down and write the story within a week or two, although it will take many months afterwards of polishing and illustrating before that story is fit for publication.