How I got into print

When I give talks I am often asked how I first got published. I tell this story:

Many years ago, just before Christmas, I found an advertisement on the back page of The New Statesman. "Writers Make More Money!" it proclaimed. Well, I'm a writer, I thought (a handful of short stories sold to the BBC) and I'm hardly making any money. There was a P.O. Box to send for information. My husband thought it would prove to be a writing school and that I would have to part with some money before there was any chance of making any.

He was wrong. The material that arrived was from D.C. Thomson. They needed new writers for their girls' picture story papers such as Mandy, Judy and Debbie. There were a couple of sample scripts and photo copies of how they translated to the page of the story paper. The scripts were fascinating. The instruction was to have a go at writing one and even though there was no guarantee of it being accepted - in fact they said it probably wouldn't be - if they thought you had promise they were prepared to train you. I had a go.

I found out later that about 30,000 impecunious writers had responded to the advertisement but most of them dropped out when they discovered what was required. Nevertheless about 3,000 people did have a go and my editor told me later that the whole staff up in Dundee put in extra hours until they'd decided on twelve possibles. I was one of them. And the script I had submitted was, in fact, accepted and became the first episode of the serial "Cathy's Friend From Yesterday"(a time-slip tale)

which ran in Mandy. What fun I had for the next fourteen years. I wrote for the Christmas Annuals as well as the weekly papers.

Fourteen years was far too long, I should have put my hockey stick away and tackled grown-up novels long before that. By the time I most regretfully said goodbye to Mandy and co. I was the only one of that batch of writers left.

And now Mandy and her friends are no more but they taught me much about writing. I'll tell you what another time or should I say: Story to be continued?

Memories of You

My mother, the youngest of thirteen children, was a scholarship girl. At the age of fourteen her parents told her they could no longer afford to keep her at school and that she had to leave and work for a living. She ran away from home - all the way to London where she got a job in a big house. After a while she left domestic service and found work as a 'Nippy' in a Lyon's Corner House. Helen, the heroine of my new book, 'Memories of You', finds work in a cafe in Soho and discovers a new and exciting world. She not only falls in love she makes an entirely new life for herself. So did my mother, make a new life that is. For the difference is that mother came home to Newcastle for a holiday, met my father, and never went back to London. Helen stays and I'm pretty sure my mother would have approved of the way the story ends.