How I became 'the chap from the Gazette.'

I had two goals as I was growing up: to be a journalist and to write a book. It took me fifty years to become an  'overnight success' but not long to gain a sense of humour. If only I'd been a boy...

I was born on Christmas Eve in a post-war maternity hospital on the tiny Channel Island of Guernsey. My father wanted to call me David –  until he set eyes on my new pink bonnet. That’s when his dream of having a son to follow in his footsteps as a football journalist came to an abrupt end. Growing up with my two sisters, the house was always full of books and newspapers which we were always encouraged to read. By now we were living in Leicester where Dad had started his own a football magazine.

Very early one Saturday morning, we drove to Middlesbrough Football Club where Dad left me in the middle of the deserted football stadium. ‘Get me three stories – from the fans – from anywhere,’ he said, ‘but just get them!’  Somehow I did it.  I finally had a goal.

I left  school  one cold Friday afternoon and started work the following Monday as a cub reporter on the Blackpool  Evening Gazette and Lytham St Annes Express.  This was the 1960s when female journalists were supposed to look good, say little and write about cookery and fashion.  None of these applied to me!

My first big assignment was at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens when the Labour Party Conference came to town.  Joining the crowds outside the main entrance, I searched for the party’s PR man. ‘Mr Griffin,’ I yelled, spotting him at last. ‘Can I have a word?’

‘Not now,’ he barked. ‘I’m waiting for the chap from the Gazette.’

‘I am the chap from the Gazette,’ I replied.

After two years as a general reporter I  began writing  women's features. I was fanatical about equality in the workplace, interviewing women solicitors, scientists magistrates – and even the first local female bus driver – to champion women’s rights. Cookery and fashion  were banished to the bottom of the page.

By now married with two daughters I set my sights on the women's glossy magazines. My breakthrough came with  a humorous piece about travelling salesmen The men I’ve had on my Doorstep in the (now defunct )Woman's World. Other work  followed. After my father retired he asked me to write the  story of  his life in football, on and off the pitch.  A labour of love, The Perfect Match  became my first unpublished novel. A few years later I joined a newly formed writers group in Lancashire. Eight of us met to critique each other’s work-in-progress, sometimes with brutally honest feedback. A second novel was  rejected but I carried on writing.

My next project, a time slip romance about a cub reporter’s search for her GI father, was shortlisted for the Festival of Romance New Talent Award in 2013. As I’d passed the big 6-0, the irony of ‘new talent’ was not lost on me. Though I didn’t win the award, my debut novel Baggy Pants and Bootees was born. A publishing contract with a small independent company followed. 

My second historical romance, Occupying Love, set in the German Occupation of the Channel Islands during World War Two, was inspired by my paternal grandparents, whose  Guernsey home was requisitioned by the Nazis in 1940.  Seeing it featured in the Guernsey Press made the long years of waiting worthwhile.  I live with my husband in the North of England but I'll always be a Guernsey girl at heart.

Success at last!