Biography

To the many people who have asked for a sequel to ‘Buttercup Jill’, here it is! After my adventures in the Women’s Land Army, I did not, as expected, marry a countryman but an aspiring actor who had just served six years in His Majesty’s Forces. However, it did not deter me from my chosen way of life, rather it provided a challenge gently to persuade my new husband into my way of thinking. This did not prove easy, for although as a young boy he had stayed on his uncle’s farm in Gloucestershire (strangely enough, not far from where my Great Uncle Henry dwelt) he was not enamoured with the idea of giving up acting to work much harder on the land and without an appreciative audience!We had a lot of laughs over the years and I hope my readers will join in the merriment.

A Door to All My Rooms is an affectionate and nostalgic tour of a much-loved childhood home, rekindling memories of the characters who peopled it, some sad, some very funny. Invaluable as a piece of social history, this is a fascinating step back into the past, providing an amusing insight into family life in the Berkshire countryside of the 20’s and 30’s.Accustomed as we are nowadays to the machinery of modern living it seems incredible that people lived civilised lives without telephones, refrigeration, TV or central heating. How did people fill their time and cope? Read this and find out. The author, who has been writing since childhood, is an International Championship Judge of dogs and ponies and contributes a highly popular weekly column to the dog press as well as writing extensively for other journals.

A Key to All My Houses is the story of a quite exceptional childhood spent in a bewildering succession of country cottages and furnished rooms across the length and breadth of Southern England in the 1920s and 30s.It is a humorous, poignant and enormously readable account of a childhood, peppered with grown up secrets, moonlight flits and imaginative enterprises to keep food in the pantry. Constantly moving from county to county, village to village, what the author missed in consistent schooling and long-term friendships, she gained in experience of life and encounters and escapades ranging from the tragic to the hilarious. The great joy of the book is that, extraordinary though the story is, its pages will evoke memories galore for the older readers while those too young to remember the pre-plastic age will be delighted by a glimpse behind the doors of that era between the wars. The author is a well-known judge of dogs (at international level) and of native ponies. A canine and equine journalist of many years standing, she also has a growing list of books to her name.