“Sport gave me confidence and friendships, everybody needs something like that”

Saturday 16 March 2024

About 16 months ago Tom Allen stepped back from his career in the classroom.

He asked a simple question, “what should I do?”.

“I wrote so many short stories for the children I was working with while I was teaching, so I just started writing.”

Initially it was a memoir of his time teaching, but that quickly evolved and what has emerged is 'The Life of Riley - Unbreakable' the story of a young footballer whose world is turned upside down when his mum receives life changing news.

In it he is drawing on his own experiences.

A former Grammar School student, he began coaching at St Martins FC when he was 18 and has never really stopped.

He moved to Bristol when was 25, having been to university and spent time travelling.

As a teacher of 9 to 11 year olds he would run lots of after school sports clubs, taking the children to tournaments and festivals.

He is now a coach at his son’s football and cricket clubs.

“I see the stories happening on the weekend,” he said.

“I see the agony and the ecstasy of sport, I see the embarrassingly over competitive coaches screaming at the referees, I see the fury in some of the players and the acting out what they've seen in the Premier League. 

“All of that makes for a really rich bank of ideas that I can tap into. That definitely plays out in the book. I've tried not to sort of write out any incident that's happened super accurately, but I’ll use them as as inspiration.”

One of the hardest parts of the book to write was about bereavement.

Every year, 46,000 children in the UK suffer the death of a parent.

“I've taught children where that's happened. I want it to be the kind of thing that should be open and spoken about.

“The theme is in the background most of the time, I didn’t want it to be right there, all the time, super heavy. 

“Obviously a lot of Riley’s actions are coloured by what he’s going through. But there are a couple of times in the book where the theme of his mum’s terminal diagnosis comes right to the foreground. That was super hard to write. I felt it was good when I’m writing it and I’m crying. I wanted it to have that emotional impact at that point. 

“But it is a really hopeful book. Hope is always there and it certainly ends in a very helpful way.”

He has close personal experience too.

18 months before he started writing the book his friend Rich passed away.

Rich’s wife and three children are managing “amazingly”, Tom said.

“That inspired the theme of Riley's mum becoming terminally ill and how he has to deal with that, how he finds that his love of sport and his teammates, gives him that kind of hook to keep going and find the strength to carry on,” said Tom.

“That's what resonated with me really. In my life, I felt sport was the thing that gave me a hook, and gave me confidence and friendships and so much that I've been able to develop across my life, and I think everybody needs something like that. So it might not be sports, it might be music, or art, a real passion to share with other people.”

The book was published on 28 February and the response has been “fantastic”.

It has also forced Tom back onto social media to help with promotion, but that has led to reconnecting with a lot of people he has known over the years.

“It's a massive learning curve for me in terms of trying to get my book promoted and marketed. So that's the challenge. There's been a great reaction, but it's mostly at the moment been people I know, or it's people who know people I know. So the challenge for me is, well, how do I get more people to know that this book is out there, and then they can decide whether it's a book for them or somebody they know.

“I've got lots of school visits lined up. Which is another way that I'm really just hoping to build awareness of the book and of me. Starting in the Bristol area, and in Wales, I can go and talk about the book, and its themes, and also run book writing workshops. 

“I would love to spend a week in Guernsey visiting various schools, ideally before the end of this school year.”

Any teachers that are interested are encouraged to get in touch.

For Tom, the joy of writing comes where there is a freedom to write about anything, something that isn’t always possible within the confines of a school curriculum.

“A theme of the school visits I have planned is that  the joy of writing fiction is you can make your characters whoever you want, do whatever you want, go wherever you want. It's amazingly endless. And I really, really love that. 

“Sometimes when I was writing my book, I had to remind myself, ‘right, it's fiction’. I was thinking, ‘oh, that wouldn't really happen, that's a bit far fetched.” But it's got to be entertaining. Go for it. If you can imagine it, it can happen.”

The second book is already written, concentrating on the period where Riley is in Year Six and about to leave Primary School, and due to be published in August.

Work is ongoing on the third, which will encompass his first year at secondary school.

“I did want him to write about that transition, because I've worked so much in Year Six with children going into Seven. My son has just gone into Year Seven this year, it’s such a difficult change.”

That will be the last in the series.

“Then I'll put my thinking cap on in terms of trying to think of other ideas where I can write books about sports, but that just have that emotional theme going on.”