`Words are wasted,
like writing under water,
there’s no sense in syllables
refracted by a closed mind'

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 nutured into writing by growing up in Wales: listening to stories in the sounds of the sea at night, and in the day to my grandmother’s imaginative tales told whilst looking into the future. i.e. reading the tea-leaves for the entire neighbourhood.

Being incarcerated in a convent school in Wales breeds two sorts of adults: the conformist and the rebel. I became the latter when I discovered the opposite sex: God fell out of the window of my life. At 17 I joined a singing group which toured the toughest working men’s clubs in the Welsh valleys. 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 all my exams. (How was it possible to fail all of them, 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 lingerie for a photographer who had picked me up in his sports car one day when I was hitching. This ‘moonlighting’ lasted until the moment he asked me to pose naked in a corn-field on a freezing day. I thought of my father’s face if he saw me on a calendar. The horror of that thought, coupled with the lechery of the photographer, knocked modelling on the head forever.

Later, I started singing with a Jazz band called Big Jim Colosimo’s Kings of Concussion (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 living with my family 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 (whom nobody wanted) had been billeted in the attics above the army quarters in which we lived. It was a place full of haunted ghosts. I learned to switch off from the atmosphere by cycling with my sons, playing my guitar and studying with the Open University. (Sometimes separately.)

L.P. Harley wrote that ‘The past is a foreign country.’ It certainly has been so for me. Eight years ago, I was living in Vienna, which for anyone who is musical is a magical place. I played Mozart’s piano in his house which was a mere five minute walk away from my apartment. I couldn’t resist it, in spite of the guards who came running up the stairs to handcuff me. I frantically explained I didn’t understand the signs… I was British…

Unfortunately, circumstances decreed that I must leave and I returned to England. I went back to University to take another M.A. and subsequently lectured in English. But soon my varied experiences in life started to surface and wouldn’t be ignored. Ten years ago I left my job to write. I’ve never regretted it.