This article covers some of the attributes that Joyce Collin-Smith had in common with other writers mentioned on here.
The articles about Stella Benson’s imagination and imaginary friends spell out what life is like for someone who is very good with words, has a very vivid imagination and feels alienated from the real world.
Joyce Collin-Smith is another example of such people.
Joyce Collin-Smith’s childhood
There are some very familiar elements here.
Joyce Collin-Smith tells us that she was a thin, ailing, solitary, excessively shy and nervous child. Fearing rebuffs or incomprehension if she voiced her thoughts, she busied herself with private activities, including writing or imagining stories.
Something was always hanging over her:
“Childhood was haunted by an urgent thing forgotten.”
Could this be unfinished business from a past life, or perhaps a pressing mission for the future?
She did not feel at home in the world:
“...I would feel my heart thumping with continual anxiety. The world was for ever an alien place, in which I sought eternally to find an acceptable mode of behaviour.”
She had the ‘stranger in a strange land’ feeling in common with many other people of interest, including the fictional witch Barbara and fellow writers Stella Benson and L. M. Montgomery. They were all independently singing from the same song sheet.
Stella Benson mentioned how difficult life was because of not knowing what to say or do and not knowing how to live in this world:
“I wish I were a real girl and had experience, instead of pretending all the time to be young, and feeling so unsure, like a bad pupil at a dancing class with the corner of her eye fixed upon what everyone else is doing...”
Joyce Collin-Smith too needed instruction in ordinary living:
“I looked for something, anything, that might give me a signposted set of directions, a map, a series of clues, a pattern of living that I could easily follow.”
Joyce Collin-Smith’s imagination
Typically of many such displaced people, Joyce Collin-Smith for much of the time retreated to and lived in another, inner world.
She saw everyday life as just a reflection, and an inferior, negative one at that, of what she believed to be the real world. She wanted this other, better world; she withdrew into dreams and fantasy. She found a place inside herself where she could escape from the invasion of foreign presences, onerous tasks and uncongenial surroundings.
Imaginary worlds feel just as real as the real world to some people:
“From a young age I could visualize, see faces, hear voices, make people, places and situations in my mind. They were as real as my everyday surroundings and there were times in young childhood when I had difficulty in distinguishing between the two modes of experience...”
Kindred spirits are in short supply for such people.
Stella Benson said:
“I don’t know whether other people are the same as me in having an imaginary world filled with imaginary people to whom at every spare moment of the day one’s thoughts return.”
Joyce Collin-Smith too wondered how to find her own kind:
“Somewhere there must be records that would tell me of others like myself.”
Joyce Collin-Smith’s imaginary friend
Although she had a sister in real life, Joyce Collin-Smith says that for many years her only companion was an imaginary friend. She saw him as a half-remembered counterpart, a soul mate and her long-lost brother.
Later in life she felt such a desolation of longing for him that tears poured down her face. The world seemed a dreadfully lonely place in which to live.
It hurt so much that she decided to put it all behind her and out of necessity try to be more at home among her fellow human beings in this world.
Some people do put aside their dreams and try to make the best of what is available to them (and often come to regret it); others decide that they would rather have nothing than settle for something that is not what they always wanted.
Joyce Collin-Smith did eventually meet her ‘long-lost brother’ in the form of her brother-in-law in this life. He was tall and thin, exactly as she had always pictured him. They were so alike that they could have been related by blood rather than marriage.
Their relationship didn’t turn sour either, as happened with Kathleen Raine and Gavin Maxwell.
Joyce Collin-Smith was one of the lucky ones in that her imaginary friend not only materialised in this world but was the perfect soul mate she had hoped for.
More about Joyce Collin-Smith
The year 2019 and the month of November are an appropriate time to publish this article.
Joyce Collin-Smith was born in January 1919 under the sign of Capricorn. She was close to 92 years old when she died, which was around this time in November 2010.
There is a tribute website to her.
Joyce Collin-Smith late in life:
