I was born in Leicester and grew up in five different towns and villages in the north of England.
I went to three primary schools and two grammar schools, where I was bad at Maths, terrible at PE and RE and good at languages. My stories made the English teacher laugh - I wish I could write humour as well now as I did at fifteen!
After school I studied German at Newcastle University, then spent four years at Erlangen University in Bavaria, researching the local dialect and attempting to teach English to unruly teenagers.
On returning to the UK I trained as a bilingual secretary. Within a year I met my husband, and spent fifteen years as a stay-at-home mum before getting a job in university administration at Royal Holloway, University of London.
After my husband took early retirement we moved to an old farmhouse in Cumbria and I finally found more time for writing. I returned to the book I had started for my daughter when she was one, and finally finished it when she was thirty-one. She still liked it.
Nowadays we live in Salisbury, with a garden full of trees and other people's cats. If you stand in just the right spot you can see the famous Cathedral spire.
