I was born in High Wycombe, England and lived there until I was four when I moved with my parents to South Africa. Our time in South Africa was adventurous; also, sometimes scary and sometimes sad but despite leaving more than thirty years ago, somewhere deep in my heart, it will always feel like home.

My first daughter Calico was born in South Africa when I was very young and by the time she was five we had moved back from South Africa to England where we lived for a couple of years in Taunton. I had always ridden horses attending dressage and show-jumping events pretty much every weekend of my early life and, when we returned to the UK, although I could no longer afford to own a horse I went to work for Riding for the Disabled and loved every minute of my time there. It didn’t take me long though to move again and this time Calico and I found ourselves living at a livery yard in Chorleywood in a mobile home with a leaky shower and a cold wind that blew beneath the home and froze you to the bone at night. We moved again, and again, and again. Eventually, I settled into a new job, one where I didn’t have to work outside in the rain and the cold and the sun and the wind. I became a customer services executive (a nineties job title if ever there was one) and my second daughter Hero was born. I met my husband Ben, moved to another job, climbed the customer services ladder, owned my own horse, had a couple of dogs and a cat, and everything seemed perfect.  And, to be fair, it has been.

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We moved to Somerset, Hardy, my son was born, we started our own business and I genuinely thought I had it all.

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But then in 2015 my younger sister passed away, and it hit me pretty hard, harder than I think I let on to be honest. I had signed up to do an archaeology course online just before she died and I threw myself into it, using the distraction to deal with the emotions that I couldn’t quite find a place for: sadness, anger, frustration, dismay. You know what I mean.

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Well, once I finished that first course, I realised that I wanted to study. I’d left school at 16 because I never quite felt that I fitted in in the academic environment, I still don’t if I’m entirely honest, but I really did love learning again. I signed up to take a certificate in archaeology online with Oxford University’s continuing education. It took me three years to complete and was one of my proudest achievements. During that time though, I had taken a minor in Creative Writing. I had always – ALWAYS – written. Writing had seen me through some crazy times in my life, literally keeping me sane. It had become my solace, my escape, and a means to feel better about myself, because, despite leaving school so young, despite demonstrating no academic promise, I knew that I was quite good at it. Not ‘next great American novel’ good, but good enough to dream about being published one day.

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And so it was that after two terms of creative writing I realised that writing was what I wanted to do. I was in my early fifties, and I had finally worked out what I was going to do when I grew up.

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Then my mum called me up one day. We were driving back from Dartmoor where we wild camp as often as possible. I was grubby and hungry and tired and probably not as enthusiastic as I should have been when my mum suggested that I should enter this competition that she had seen in the Daily Mail - the winner would not only be published by Penguin Random House, but would also have an agent, Luigi Bonomi from LBA Associates.

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I mean . . . what are the chances?

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Good as it turned out. It took us three hours to drive home that day and, during that journey, I bored poor Ben half to death with story lines, characters and ideas.

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I was going to do it, what did I have to lose?

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That was 2018. And I did win. I didn’t believe it when the call came in. I thought someone was playing a terrible trick on me, but they weren’t, it really was Luigi Bonomi, and he really was calling to tell me that I had won. My life really was about to change – again.

It’s taken an awful lot of hard work: managing my emotions, writing whilst working for our family business, looking after a family, becoming a grandma and learning some of the many, many publishing ropes, but here we are.

 

My first book The Fifth Girl is available to buy from: Amazon, Blackwells,  Foyles, WH Smith and Waterstones to name a few.