I won’t reveal exactly how old I was when my first novel, Work For Four Hands, came out, but I will say that many of my contemporaries would be musing about their retirement plans, if not already away on those trips they haven’t had time for until now. (I’m not averse to trips, but this isn’t a cruise liner, only a cross-Channel ferry. Enjoy the glimpse of Calais on the right.)
I didn’t come to fiction writing until my late forties. When I was younger – at the age when your life is a grand project in the making – writing was nowhere on the agenda. I’d all but forgotten that I’d written as a child, that making up stories was actually what my childhood was about. When I reached my teens, science took me over and put me on course to read physics at Oxford. (I went there from a Cardiff council estate in the late sixties, a time and place not particularly auspicious for bumping into girl physicists. But I’ve always found it intriguing to be a bit of an oddball. Straddling classes and cultures has had its interests and challenges over the years.)
A post-graduate degree came next, and then research posts, first in Cambridge, then back in Oxford. But rumour had it that there was a world outside Oxbridge, and I decided to join it. I went into the Whitehall Civil Service. All this meant that I was leaving creative writing farther and farther behind.
For years, watching Ministers’ backs meant I was too busy to think, but the need to write must have been simmering. When my daughter was ten, and discovering how you can bring imaginary worlds into being through words, I said to myself, ‘Hang on, I used to do that.’ Work was slack because a Government initiative was running into the sand, and I started writing a novel ‘under the desk’. Straightaway I was hooked. It was like coming home. When work picked up again, fitting in the novel made for some exhausting juggling, but within a year a severance deal came in – with the aim of trimming staff numbers – and I was one of the first out through the door. ‘Yes, Minister’ became ‘Goodbye, Minister’ and I got stuck in to my novel in earnest.
That novel and a number of successors, I won’t say how many, are still in box files in the attic, and there those novice efforts will probably stay. Do I regret the decades spent not writing? Not really. I don’t think there’s any harm in living a little real life before you start writing about fictional lives. All the years which passed before I was reading from Work For Four Hands at its launch in the Picture Gallery, Christ Church, Oxford, weren’t years wasted.
I live in Oxford, and as a post-graduate student met Chris Pelling, the classicist who was to become my husband. He’s now the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, and he divides his time among the Classics Centre, the Bodleian Library, and Quod, the High Street wine bar. Our daughter Sally is a student anthropologist, and plays drums with up-and-coming Oxford band The Half Rabbits. Our son Charlie is writing his doctoral thesis on Philosophy of Mind.
