I drew, coloured in, painted and collaged throughout school, gradually leaving endless horses behind and eventually specialising in life drawing. Having disappointed my A-level teacher by choosing against art college, I moved towards mixed media and stitch, and when my own children reached school age I went to college part time and gained the Diploma in Stitched Textiles, which led to exhibiting, public speaking and workshops, magazine articles and becoming an accredited quilt judge.
The stories I wrote at primary school were hopelessly ambitious, generally intended to be epics of animal adventures or abandoned children’s daring, and despite being given exemption from PE occasionally to go on writing, I never finished one. I carried on through secondary school, filling pages of close-ruled A4 pads, always hiding what I had written for a few days and then burning it. Years later I came across Jane Gardam’s novel “A Long Way from Verona” and did so sympathise with her heroine’s belief that paper should be free!
I was still writing (and destroying) through my twenties and thirties, although I did manage to knock off a pony story, hooves firmly in the 1960s, I’m afraid, and even in my forties the fiction kept pouring out alongside the textile magazine articles and newsletter bits and pieces. I married and brought up two sons, and am now the only member of the family who has not read engineering at Oxford, and we moved to the USA and back again, and holidayed in Scotland and Cornwall.
And then, as I hit fifty (how did that happen?) two lightning flashes jolted me into my second half-century. One – I wasn’t likely to be curing problem horses in my eighties and even sewing would be difficult if I had poor eyesight and arthritic hands, so I needed to focus on something purely cerebral. Two – writing a story is like painting a picture: you neither make it up as you go along nor have every sentence from the outset. Instead you can begin with underpainting, then block in the main shapes and shadows, add colour, place detail, balance the blue in the bottom left with a touch in the top right, review it, come back and make adjustments, and only then add your signature.
I bought a red hardbacked notebook and began underpainting, and “A World Invisible” is the result. I haven’t given up the day job – I still make textile art, give talks, judge quilts, and I still teach owners how to solve their horses’ problems, but having published the second book of the trilogy I expect to publish the final book in 2011 and am currently working on my fourth book.
If you had caught me aged ten, wrapped your arms round me and trapped me for a moment to ask me what I would be when I grew up – a writer, an artist or a horseman – I’d have said, “All of them”. At that age I’m sure I could not have decided between them, and the truth is I can’t now, either.
I never owned a pony, but I helped at many stables in return for lessons, and only stopped riding while pregnant. To my own surprise I found I learned more, and gained wider experience, through perpetually borrowing whatever horse presented itself than I would have done with one or two of my own, and over the years I handled foals, brood mares and stallions, exercised professional polo ponies, learned to ride sidesaddle (even over fences), taught children and adults, and am now a practising horse whisperer (which isn’t magic at all, but feels just like it).
