I grew up in the Home Counties and lived briefly in the South West and North West.  I enjoy visiting new places and meeting new people and research for my novels has taken me to various parts of the country and brought me into contact with many kind and helpful people. 

 

I’ve had a variety of jobs in my time, ranging from cleaning and table clearing, office work, retail work and even a day’s shoot as an extra in a national newspaper’s magazine advert!   I’ve wanted to be a writer as far back as I can remember but let the need to find a more regular income stream intrude into my dream.  My family endured the humble compositions of a small child and when I was ten my father typed up (in the days before electric typewriters let alone personal computers!) an adventure story I wrote but which I have never published.  By sixteen I had a story set in the seventeenth century English Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration periods whizzing around my head but I let reality, putting food on the table and getting on with life generally take precedence.  

 

A few years ago I realised that no one was getting any younger and I sat down with my mother on a series of Sunday afternoon visits recording her recollections of her wartime experiences including evacuation and living through the London bombing, which I wrote up as a narrative and which she approved for publication.  Following her death I originally thought to write a novelised memoir based on these recollections in her honour but soon realised that the character I invented for the story was not my mother but was rather a person with a life of her own and her own story to tell.  So I set about writing a novel instead, taking the storyline and the characters in it where I felt they would go, my parents’ and grandparents’ recollections being my inspiration rather than my text.

 

I am fascinated by the concept of consequences, by the butterfly wings effect.  One small decision can have far reaching and untold consequences.  The Keeping of Secrets has given me the opportunity to explore this theme, one I hope to take further in my next novel. 

 

One day I will also finish and publish my seventeenth century trilogy, but meanwhile I am enjoying the twentieth and twenty-first century characters and their stories and I hope you are too.