Linda M James' Biography

I don’t know exactly what makes someone a writer; perhaps it’s a combination of a thirst for knowledge, the desire to experience as much as life can offer and the compulsive need to create stories from what you’ve learned from life. I was nurtured into writing by growing up on the coast in Swansea, South Wales: listening to stories in the sounds of the sea while lying in bed at night, and listening to my grandmother’s predictions for the family's futures as she studied the tea-leaves in the day. It was years before I realised she was a simple spinner of tales and not clairvoyant at all. But the tales she told!

At 17, whilst still in school, I joined a singing group which toured some of the toughest working men’s clubs in the Welsh valleys at weekends. This taught me an important lesson - never bore miners - they throw things. However, if they like your singing, they join in with a perfect four-part harmony which is amazing.

After this baptism by fire, I went to Cardiff to study Physiotherapy, but went to nightly parties instead and failed my exams. (How was this possible, I thought?) My irate father gave me two weeks to find a new career or else. The ‘ or else’ terrified me, so I quickly enrolled at a Welsh Training College full of eccentric lecturers; one of whom practiced black magic in the confines of his bedroom. However, I was only in College in the day; at night I modelled for a photographer who had picked me up in his sports car one day when I was hitching.

Later, I started singing with a Jazz band called Big Jim Colosimo’s Kings of Concussion. (Yes, I know. The leader had a strange sense of humour). It was formed by a motley collection of musicians who dressed like 1920s hoodlums and consisted of a deranged pianist who massacred pianos, a clarinet-playing plumber, an artist who could create life with three lines, a rebel of teachers and a tiny man with enormous lungs who blew a sousaphone in my ear as I sang.

My chequered life continued apace and within the blink of an eye, (it seems) I was married and living in a villa in Malta. This was an idyllic time; I learned to love the slow pace of Maltese life where people had time to talk to each other.

However, six years later, I was surrounded by barbed wire in a bleak army camp in Northern Germany. This was a definite low in my life. The camp was situated next to Belsen Concentration Camp. Once Belsen had been ‘liberated’, disease-ridden Jews had been billeted in the attics above the army quarters in which we lived. It was a place full of ghosts. I learned to switch off from the atmosphere by cycling with my sons, singing and studying with the Open University.

L.P. Harley wrote that ‘The past is a foreign country.’ It certainly has been so for me. A number of years after leaving Germany, I was living in Vienna, which for anyone who is musical is a magical place. Mozart’s house was only five minutes’ walk away from my apartment and I went there frequently to immerse myself in his music.

However, circumstances decreed that I must leave and I returned to England. I went back to University to take some more degrees and subsequently lectured in English. But soon my varied experiences in life started to surface and wouldn’t be ignored so I left my job to write. I've never regretted it.