This is a selfie I took quite a few years ago on Szabadsag Bridge, Budapest, Hungary. I like it because I look athletic in it.
When I was five I went to have my tonsils out — this was an operation nobody bothers with any more, but back then, when the Beatles were young, it was quite normal for children with lots of cold and coughs and bad ear-aches to go into hospital, have their tonsils and sometimes their adenoids out and go home a few days later.
(Tonsils are lymph nodes in the throat.)
I must say, after the operation I stopped having the awful ear-aches that sent me crying onto the landing at 2 am and got me in trouble with my parents. I still remember the feeling of an invisible steel spike being hammered into my ear until I didn’t know what to do with myself.
But while I was in hospital I discovered something strange. I was happily telling myself a story while lying in bed, waiting to go to sleep, when a nurse put her head round the door and asked grumpily what I was doing.
“I’m telling myself a story,” I explained to the poor creature, “It’s about a naughty hamster.”
“Well, stop it and be quiet. You’ll wake the other children.”
I was astonished. Whyever couldn’t I tell myself stories? What else was there to do at night?
Before, when I was sharing a bedroom with my new little brother I had threatened him with horrible things if he dared to interrupt my constant stories. That settled him.
But for some reason, grown-ups didn’t like me telling stories.
I ignored them of course, or whispered into the bedclothes. Imagine my happiness when a couple of years later I discovered there was actually a way of telling stories silently, by writing them down. Amazing!
After that, there was no holding me. When I was 11 I demanded a typewriter for my birthday. I got a toy typewriter and was furious. I knew what a proper typewriter looked like — my mother had one — and I knew what it could do. That’s what I wanted.
My Hungarian grandmother understood. She was a psychoanalyst and Hungarian novelist and I got her old Olympia Splendid 66 (which I still have). She got a new electric typewriter and I started typing my stories. Science fiction, which I was reading a lot of at the time. Stories about cats — which my grandmother said were twee. We always called her "Anyuka" which meant "mummy", which was what my mother called her.
Anyuka gave me a literary apprenticeship. I would go and visit her on Tuesdays in the holidays and we'd talk about anything and everything, Greek legends, psycho-analysis, sex, Hungary in the war, how she and my grandfather escaped in 1949, how a character might behave. It was fascinating and exciting, despite my grandmother's heavy accent. We ate patisserie from Grodzinski and she made me strong coffee in her alchemical coffee maker. We had a similar nerdy sense of humour and although there were times when I upset her without understanding why, we got on really well.
I would write her a story a week and she would give it a (sometimes withering) critique, always totally honest. I'm still cross about the cat stories being called twee, even though I suspect they were.
I finished my first book when I was 16. It was a rather sexy epic fantasy and it was utterly crap despite the beauty of the map I drew for it. However the English teacher read it, gave me an A- and when I asked her (arrogantly) why so low, she took the time to explain what was wrong with it. I read it again and realised she was right.
I decided to write a historical novel based on the Ulster cycle of Irish legends because I loved them and because I realised I didn’t know anything about real life. I needed a world I could research and so I spent two years pursuing obscure tomes through the library system, instead of going out and getting drunk with some lads in a band called the Pogues, like my friend Wendy. I went to Ireland and my lovely Irish cousin drove me round, though we couldn’t go near Dundalk because the Irish Troubles were in full swing.
I came home and wrote two drafts and a final manuscript. My grandmother read the first draft and liked it, though she had had two strokes by then. She made some suggestions but soon she had another stroke which put her in a care home.
My mother sent the MS to a friend of hers who was a literary agent and… At the third try A SHADOW OF GULLS got picked up by William Collins & Co. The second one, THE CROW GODDESS, followed a year later.
I was 19 and honestly had no concept of how lucky I was.
I went to Oxford and in my first year, my parents got a message to me via the porter. The porter wasn't sure what it was about. Something about "Anooka's dead?"
I was walking blindly out of the lodge when another first year student stopped me, and asked if I was upset. I tried to be brave but when I finally managed to explain that my grandmother was dead, he was utterly lovely. He came and drank awful coffee in my room and listened to me for hours, out of the kindness of his heart. Jonathan Warner was his name and I think he saved my sanity - although I didn't manage to write any more fiction for eight years. I was heavily pregnant with my first child when I wrote FIREDRAKE'S EYE, about Elizabethan spies and madness.
I’m still a writer. I’ve done a lot of other things, including marrying and having three children; living in Spain and Hungary; working in various suitable and unsuitable jobs (journalism, legal secretary, teacher of English as a 2nd language, office cleaner, coffee shop proprieter…)
But when I get right down to it, all I want to do is write. And I procrastinate and fuss and go in the wrong directions and get depressed about digital publishing but still…
I’m happiest when I’m writing. Everything else seems a terrible waste of time. Even when I’m crying because I’m writing something sad, I’m happy, totally in flow.
I’m incredibly lucky because always, no matter how dissatisfied or outright disgruntled I may be about my life, deep down inside me is a bedrock of joy that I can always find if I just sit down and write.
***
To start with, read the first of my historical mystery series, published in the USA, starring the swashbuckling 16th century courtier Sir Robert Carey: A FAMINE OF HORSES.
There are ten of them.
If you live in the UK, you’ll have to get the books from publishers Head of Zeus, except for the last one which is published wide.
The Irish legends book that was published when I was 18 was A SHADOW OF GULLS. It’s not available at the moment because I wanted to reissue it and got distracted.
Here’s what I call the Elizabethan Noir Trilogy, which starts with FIREDRAKE’S EYE, set in the 16th century.
Here’s a contemporaryish and funny romance: LUCKY WOMAN
Here’s my first attempt at an eco-fantasy: A LADY OF EARTH & SUNSHINE
Find my Terrible Daily Poems on Substack, occasional journalism (and poems) on Medium.
Here’s the landing page for my email list. You get two free stories about Robert Carey when he was a boy which are available nowhere else.
