WHY WRITE? BECAUSE I'M A READER

I have always been a writer.  Even before I knew what a writer was, I wrote stories. I loved stories. My mum read to me at bedtime and during the school summer holidays she would choose a whopper book like Wind in the Willows or Watership Down and read some of it each day to my brother and I, putting on all the voices and filling it with expression making us scared and excited as the story unfolded.

We didn’t own books, but our house was full of books from the library.  I was allowed four at a time.  I recall the hush of the library made it feel a reverential place where amazing things were brewing. It was one of the first places I was allowed on my own, my mum letting me go upstairs to the children’s section by myself while she made her own selections from the adult fiction downstairs.  It had wooden floors and I was always conscious of the clacking of my shoes on the floorboards as I walked up and down the shelves agonising over the perfect four book choices.  Noel Streatfield, E Nesbitt, Geoffrey Trease, I would find a book I enjoyed and then scour the shelves for every book that the author had written, mentally ticking them off from the list of previously published in the front matter. 

I can’t remember a time I didn’t have a book on the go and I continued that childhood tradition of finding an author I liked and avidly reading everything they’d written. C J Sansome, Patricia Cornwall, Ann Cleeves, Julie Wassamer, John Irving, Annie Proulx and of course the classics Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, from historical fiction to serial killers my reading tastes over the years have taken me to all sorts of places.

From being a big reader it felt natural to me to write stories. I’ve always had voices whispering in my head, playing out scenarios, imagining scenes. I’d hear a story on the news and let myself imagine what it must be like for the people involved, often more interested in the minor characters and those on the periphery whose lives would be changed.  My first job was as a journalist on the local newspaper in the New Forest and I loved being part of the fabric of the community letting people know what was going on in their town, keeping them updated on dramas unfolding in the area from front page crime to more sedate local government decisions.  It all mattered.

My heart is in the New Forest and I am loyal to the power of local journalism so writing about Hep Anderssen has meant I can immerse myself in that world again.