About Sarah:

Writing’s been my ambition since I was eight years old (apart from a brief quixotic urge to be a barrister, and a not-unconnected love of performing). As a child I filled exercise books with stories about anthropomorphic animal heroes, and rather less believable human ones. The longest of these juvenilia was called ‘Peter Clove, Handyman and Guardian’ and was the tale of an eccentric old lady and her male paid companion. Written when I was nine, I thought it was screamingly funny and so did my parents – though not, I suspect, for the same reasons. I still regret that in a fit of teenage self-consciousness I threw Peter Clove away. When I think of the hours of amusement he would have afforded my children and grandchildren now…

My mother was a gifted actress who gave up a promising career to go out to Palestine and marry my father, an officer in the Royal West Kent Regiment. She was beautiful and vivacious, he was handsome and reserved, and fell in love with her photograph outside the theatre. I’m sure my parents’ long and loving marriage was a factor in my liking for romantic fiction.

The acting/performing bug I inherited from my mother, but several people in my family – my grandmother, my great uncle (also an actor), his daughter (the novelist Celia Dale), my parents – were talented writers, so I’m grateful for their genes, too.

My older brother was born in a hospital corridor during the siege of Malta. Six years later in 1946 I made my appearance in rather calmer circumstances in Exeter. I spent much of my babyhood in Berlin – photographs show me looking like a well-muffled turnip in the notoriously icy winter of 1946. Then we were back in England, before my father was posted to Singapore and Malaya during the Emergency of the early 50s. Following another spell in England we returned to Germany, during which time my younger brother arrived, and I came back to boarding school in the UK.

This was when my amateur writing career really took off. For one thing, I had a captive audience, and – even more valuable - instant feedback. I wrote no end of stories, notably a saga set in Roman Britain, which made up in chutzpah for what it lacked in authenticity. It was during my boarding-school years that I realised this was what I wanted to do.

When I left school I read English at London University – those were the bad old days when you did one subject only, rather than today’s colourful combinations of Media, Sanskrit and Sports Administration – and after my degree I was lucky enough to be taken on as a trainee by IPC Magazines, where I worked for four years on Woman’s Own. I enjoyed journalism, but my heart was in fiction, and once I’d begun to sell short stories to Woman’s Own and other magazines, I took the plunge and went freelance to concentrate on fiction full-time. I was fortunate to be taken on by a stellar young agent, Carol Smith, then part of the august A P Watt agency. Married by then, and with a baby on the way, I was continuing to write and sell short stories and might have got too comfortable. But Carol encouraged me to write a novel, and I produced two – ‘A Dangerous Thing’ and ‘The Divided Heart’ - which were turned down by everyone in town at the time but which have, amazingly, been published now (check them out under ‘Writing’). Following a meeting with Rosie de Courcy of Futura – the paperback publishing house of the moment – it was third time lucky when they commissioned me to write ‘The Flowers of the Field’. My brief, to produce a First World War novel with a women’s angle, based on my synopsis..

No-one could have prepared me for the sheer high of writing that, the first book that someone actually said they wanted. It was like being in love – I could think of nothing else, I lost weight, I was in a permanent state of excitement. And to crown it all, a lot of other people liked it too. ‘The Flowers of the Field’ sold in the States when only half-finished, and went on to become a huge bestseller.

These days if the writing’s not going well, when the supermarket, or hoovering – even ironing for God’s sake! – seem more attractive than the unforgiving page, I remind myself how incredibly lucky I am to be doing something which I enjoy so much, and to be paid a living wage for doing it.

Including those first two novels, written when I was in my early twenties, I’ve now been a published writer for well over thirty years, with twenty three titles to my name, mostly adult fiction, but also including children’s books and ‘How to Write a Blockbuster’. I still write short stories and articles, and get enormous pleasure from a secondary ‘amateur’ career, writing sketches and pantos for the local drama group, and poems and songs to vary my repertoire as a speaker. It’s hugely enjoyable to talk, and listen, to audiences of all kinds – literary events, luncheon clubs, charity dos, reading groups or other writers.

I’ve also been lucky enough to do quite a bit of broadcasting over the years, mostly on radio – Woman’s Hour, Any Questions, Quote Unquote, Stop the Week with Robert Robinson and most recently the book panel on Radio Five’s Simon Mayo programme. But by far my scariest on-air experience was appearing on Question Time when it was still chaired by the formidable Sir Robin Day. I was there in the woman-on- the Clapham-omnibus role, but on the screen I looked more like the victim of one of Alton Towers’ more stomach-churning white-knuckle rides.

I can’t say writing becomes any easier. The usual problems remain – it’s a job that requires kick-starting every day, and a high degree of self-motivation. Every writer faces personal temptations, whether it’s walking the dog, answering the phone or lying in the sun. Mine include all of the above, and my family - I married for the second time in 2003, and have three grown-up children and two grandchildren.

Like most of us of a certain age I’m hellbent in self-improvement so I run, swim, go to the gym and play tennis. I’m president of the Morden and District Writers Circle, and a member of my local drama group, the Morden Players.

But apart from Patrick and my family, writing is my raison d’etre, and I’d be lost without it.