About Me
About Me
Hello Everyone.
Welcome to my website. I started making this when some of you were still crawling so you can see it’s taken me a very long time.
This is the piece that’s all about me
I was born in the South Island of New Zealand in 1943 in a small town called Kaikoura. Lots of people visit it now to go whale watching but when I first lived there with my mum and my grandparents, the whales had moved away. My Dad was overseas in the Airforce because of the Second World War so I didn’t see him until I was three. The first thing I did when I met him was to bite him on the hand. Don’t do what I did. My Dad didn’t like it.
When I was seven, my parents and younger sister Tessa and I moved to the North Island to a new farm in Manawahe. I had always lived nearby to my Granny and Grandad so I really missed them. I went to a tiny school with only one teacher for about 30 children aged five years to 13 years. Quite often the oldest children would help teach the little ones. We had a fantastic playground with trees to climb and lots of bracken where we built dens. We weren’t supposed to but our teacher went home for lunch so he didn’t see what we were doing. At home after school there were no children living nearby to play with so I read and read. My friends were in books. When our cousins stayed during the holidays we rode horses and built tree houses, damned up streams (or creeks as they’re called in New Zealand) and racketed down hills in homemade go-karts. It was great fun.
And then when I was twelve we moved again, to a farm that was really in the ‘backblocks’, called Port Charles on the Coromandel Peninsula. The farm was close to the sea so I stopped damning streams and started riding waves and messing about in boats. I lived there only in the holidays and went to boarding school in Auckland during the term. When I finished my schooling I went to teachers’ college and university and became a teacher.
In 1966 I came by ship to England. David was also travelling on the ship from Tasmania where he was born.
We were married in England and then after travelling for a while, including through the USSR in February, we went back to New Zealand for seven years. We returned to England in 1974 with our children Joss and Kate. We meant to go back to New Zealand after two years but we just went on staying. So here we are, thirty five years later, living in a house in the country near East Hoathly in East Sussex, with a garden that runs down into wonderful woodland. I have a lovely kitchen but, unlike Mrs.Grinling, I do not like cooking so David does most of it.
Although I started publishing books in 1977, until 2003 I always had another job. As well as a teacher I’ve been a school librarian, a Family Centre worker, a family therapist and helped to run a children’s magazine called Aquila. Now I look after my grandson one day a week, garden, walk with friends, go to the theatre, read and read and of course, write lots of stories.
