About me …
Although I now live and work in a village in the Yorkshire Dales, I was born and brought up in Morley, just to the south of Leeds. In those days, it was a typical West Riding mill town, with the clatter of looms never far away. The houses on the street where I grew up were built in the 1890s for the workers at a new mill on the edge of town and my great-grandfather and his wife were the first people to live there.

A writer’s childhood
When I was a child, there were still fields to the back and one side of our house, but sadly they’re all built over now. There was also a farm nearby, and some of my earliest memories are of the hens from there who seemed to think that being Free Range meant they could leave the farmyard and come into our gardens – or even our houses, if they found an open door! Beyond the fields and the mill was a wood and so there was always plenty of wild life around in the way of foxes, rabbits and field mice, plus frogs, toads and newts, and a great variety of birds, including owls and kestrels. My Dad, a true countryman from a very rural part of South Wales, taught me the names of the trees and flowers, as well as of the birds and animals, as soon as I was old enough to know what they were.

Mum and Dad also both read to me – I can remember Dad reading The Children of Willow Tree Farm and The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, both by Enid Blyton, and Mum reading the story of Little Grey Rabbit by Alison Uttley. Mum also saved the stories of the Robin Family every week from the Woman’s Weekly and stuck them in a book, along with a comic-strip version of Muffin the Mule, so that we could read them again and again.

That way I learnt to read and write before I went to school, which was a great advantage as I started in the nursery class where we were supposed to go to sleep in the afternoon. All the others could manage it, but I’d not done it at home and I couldn’t see why anyone else should want to when they were at school. So, although I’d lie down on my little canvas bed like everyone else, I’d be wide awake and very bored – and, after I’d made a few of my class-mates cry by poking them awake to talk to me, the teacher decided it would be better all round if I took a book along to entertain myself in the afternoons. I was also allowed to take a doll to play with – anything to keep me quiet! - and, used to my own company as I was an only one, I started making up stories for the two of us.

Then, when I was seven, we got our first car and my horizons widened. As well as our twice-yearly visits to Wales, there were now Sundays out in the country and occasional trips to the seaside. There were also visits to castles and abbeys, museums and stately homes, giving me an interest in history and in all sorts of people from the past.

Trying to get published
Without anyone realizing, all the ingredients had been put in place for me to be a writer and in my first year at grammar school I started making up stories to entertain the other girls in my class. But, though I knew at the age of twelve what I wanted to do when I left school, no one knew how I could do it. Degrees in creative writing were unheard of then and the only careers advice I was given was to be a journalist, which wasn’t what I wanted, and so all I could do was keep writing short stories and sending them to magazines in the hope that I’d eventually get published.

In the autumn after A-levels I started work in the public library in Batley and a year later I went on to library school to train to be a librarian. The course lasted two years and all the time I kept writing and trying to get published, but with no success.

In print at last!
In January 1970, however, while I was looking for my first job as a librarian, I finally got my name in print – with a letter to The People, for which I received a cheque for £5, a premium bond (they could be bought singly then, but 37 years later its number still hasn’t come up among the prize-winners!) and a beautiful bouquet of flowers. I also received two proposals of marriage from two young men who’d read my letter and decided on the strength of it that I was just what they were looking for…

A month later, I started work as a librarian at Ramsbottom in Lancashire and decided to do a correspondence course in short story writing. It was aimed at more literary markets than I wanted to write for, but, for my final lesson I wrote a short story which sold at my first attempt to an Irish magazine called Woman’s Choice. At last I was a published story writer and it was great!

My next success was with the teenage magazine Jackie to which I sold two short stories in 1972, but I felt as if I still needed some help and so, when I saw another correspondence course – this time specifically for writing short stories for women’s magazines and run by a well-published story writer, Angela Noel – I decided to invest what I’d earned so far from writing in that. I can’t remember now if it cost £15 or £20, but it was the best investment I’ve ever made and by 1974 I was able to leave full-time work and live by my writing, plus occasional temporary or part-time jobs.

My first novel, Cloughfold, appeared in 1977, followed by The Romany in 1978 and The Bradleys of Brookroyd in 1979. They were all published by Arlington Books and you can read more about them on the My Novels page.

An unexpected change of direction
Disaster came in the early 1980s, when what I was writing went out of fashion and most of the magazines – for which I’d written around 300 short stories by that time - folded. For the best part of three years I alternated between “signing on” (but not getting a penny because I’d been self-employed for so long) and a variety of low-paid, temporary jobs, including a weekly paper round and knitting for a couple of shops. I also worked for a while in the office of a wholesale fish merchants and was paid in cash and haddock for my efforts at keeping their books in order.

Then in the mid-1980s someone suggested that, because I knew a lot about the Vikings, I should write a children’s book about them. Not knowing where to start, I opened the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook at random and wrote to the first children’s non-fiction publisher that I came to – and this time my luck was in. The publisher was Kingfisher and they were producing a series of books called History As Evidence. They’d already done the Greeks, the Romans and the Egyptians – and the Vikings were next on the list!

That was the start of an unexpected new career and over the next sixteen years or so I’d around 40 children’s information books published, either in my own name or as a joint author. They were mostly on history and archaeology and, although my favourites were on the Vikings and the Celts, I wrote about everything from the first people through to the end of the 20th century. As well as being published in the UK, many of these books were also sold overseas and were translated into over three dozen languages, ranging from Albanian to Welsh and including Russian, Chinese and Japanese, as well as most European languages.

A novelist again
Although most of the time I enjoyed writing children’s information books, in my heart I was still a novelist and I knew there was a market for what I wanted to write, if only I could get it published. So, after The Dreamchasers was rejected by a mainstream publisher in London (who said it was written to publication standard, but he didn’t want to publish it!), I decided to set up Thorn Tree Publishing and publish it myself. (You can read more about this at www.thorntreepublishing.co.uk) It’s selling well locally and so I’m now planning to launch my second Yorkshire Romance – Where Two Worlds Meet – in the late autumn 2011.

When I’m not writing
Writing children’s non-fiction inspired me to start studying again as well and in the late 1980s I gained my first degree from the Open University, followed by an MA in Local and Regional History from the University of Leeds. I also used my love of history to research my own family tree and have traced one Yorkshire root back to the mid-15th century. These particular ancestors were tenants of Richard, Duke of York, father of Richard III and husband of Cecily Neville, one of my favourite historical characters, and lived within ten miles of where I was born. But the rest of my roots are well-scattered and by the time I get back to my great-grandparents I’m looking for them in five counties.

I also love to travel to unusual places when I get the chance, but not for too long as I miss my lovely cats - Bradley and Homer – too much when I’m away from home for more than a week!