Difficult Husbands
Everyone seemed to be writing a ‘Christmas’ book so I jumped on the bandwagon too with Difficult Husbands.
Christmas can be such an emotive time, the media, shops, adverts etc. all portraying a jolly family time when in truth it can – and often does – throw up all sorts of complications and upsets between families, lovers and friends, which is made worse by the expectations the holiday evokes.
My novels are character driven and on a good day people and plots come out of my subconscious on to the page and react with each other. Once I’d got Lorna, newly divorced and dreading Christmas when she once used to love it the plot began to unfold. Her two great friends appeared, also dreading Christmas with their difficult husbands and then came the house, Ravenscourt, which turned out to be another character that held the whole story together.
Please tell us about the characters of Lorna, Gloria and Rosalind.
Lorna is the main character and having just gone through a devastating divorce with Stephen, her older husband, is facing her first Christmas as a fractured family. She finds her children’s’ pain at their father’s betrayal difficult to bear and is terrified that they might in their anguish avoid Christmas by taking a holiday job, go to friends or even to their father or worse still, expect him to come to them for Christmas, which would be torture to her remembering the happy Christmas’s they used to spend together and yet he is their children’s father, and badly as Stephen has behaved she feels the children should still be able to see him, but not with her.
Lorna has two close women friends who married friends of Stephen. Gloria’s once amusing, loving husband, Adrian is now an alcoholic and Gloria, who still loves him, wears herself out by ‘rescuing ‘ him from various drunken disasters. She suffered many miscarriages and has one adored son, Justin, who cannot stand his father’s increasingly difficult behaviour. He has a new girl friend and would rather spend Christmas with her family than risk losing her through experiencing his father’s embarrassing behaviour.
Gloria is a loyal, supportive friend but apt to ‘volunteer’ her own ideas without thinking them through, causing Lorna added complications.
Rosalind is slightly younger than Gloria and Lorna and also married to a difficult husband, Ivan, who having been married before with a now adult daughter finds fatherhood to adolescents hard to cope with and now he is retired he prefers to do voluntary work with troubled young people he can leave behind, also he is attracted to their social workers, whom he likes to bring home for Christmas which upsets Rosalind as she suspects he might be having an affair with some of them as she feels insecure being the second wife and having to put up with his snooty grown up daughter. Like Gloria and Lorna, she hates the way his behaviour upsets their children.
Gloria and Rosalind are determined that Ravenscourt, the house Lorna has unexpectantly inherited will solve their Christmas problems.
You have been compared to Trisha Ashley, Carole Matthews and Katie Fforde, so how does this make you feel?
I think it is amazing and am very flattered! Trisha and I share an agent, Judith Murdoch and are great friends and I love her books and know how hard she works. I enjoy Katie and Carole’s books too.
Your two great passions are fashion and writing, so at what point did you being to pursue these together?
Fashion and writing were my passions when I left school and I thought it would be great to combine the two as a career. I worked in London and Paris in the fashion department of 2 magazines but never wrote about it apart from in letters home and to friends.
I married in my early twenties and had a baby and although interested in fashion did little more than read about it and try and dress fashionably. Writing then took over and house bound with babies I did a correspondence course – writing everything from articles to novels and realised that fiction was what I wanted to do. I had quite a few short stories published and broadcast and my first novel Breaking the Rules was published in 1995.
You write both short stories and novels so do you have a preference between the two?
I enjoy writing both but sadly the short story market has shrunk dramatically over the years, so I haven’t written many recently. A novel is quite a marathon – at times quite daunting - with all the plots and characters, especially the last re-write getting everything to gel together. I like to get the first draft written then I feel I have something to work on.
Short stories are usually just one episode in a life and the word count is usually very tight so the story and mood has to be conveyed by each word doing its bit, while you can ramble on a little more in a novel. But writing a short story is a good exercise and can take a long time to get right but is sometimes a welcome change from a novel.
Please tell us about your highlights of being a fashion journalist.
I was a ‘Dog’s body’ (probably not PC to have that as a job title today!) working on Queen Magazine in London. My first shoot – carrying the bags was at St Pancreas Station with Celia Hammond who stood high up in one of those windows in a wedding dress – I doubt that would happen today with health and safety.
I was hovering in the background with so many wonderful models and photographers and met so many designers but of course I didn’t know then how special it all was.
My boss was small and terrifying and I drove her round London to her appointments in her little green Mini, meeting the designers, Mary Quant and all. My boss taught me so much and to never make do with second best.
I left Queen and went to Paris and got my job on Jardins des Modes just because I mentioned my old boss’s name and here I was more of a journalist and worked on the Paris collections which lasted about a week with all the fashion journalists attending the shows and shooting the fashions their magazines wanted half the night. It was very exhausting but there was a special buzz about it and however late we went to bed we had to be in the office by 9 the following morning.
I did my first feature on hand bags, going round all the glamorous shops and choosing the bags I wanted for the shot and taking them back to the office – wish I could do that again!
Please tell us about being knocked back when you applied for job back in the UK after you got married.
I met my husband in Paris and came home to get married. I contacted Vogue to see if perhaps there was a job going and they sounded interested and asked me to come in for an interview the following week. But when I said I’d be on my honeymoon they said they were sorry but they didn’t employ married women as ‘they had babies’. Of course you can’t say that today but you could then and you accepted it. We had to find somewhere to live and other things so I was busy and then I did have a baby and started to write at home, but I would have liked to have worked for Vogue for a year or so.
Given that you worked in fashion when things were different, how do you feel about the size zero culture and massive salaries now?
I met Joanna Lumley a few years ago at a charity event and told her that I worked on a shoot she was on in Paris. She said what fun those days were, the models usually did their own hair and make up and there was little money but it was far more laid back.
When we worked on shoots in Paris wonderful French bread sandwiches and fruit tarts were sent in and the models ate them too. As far as I know there was no size zero, the models were beautiful women with naturally slim figures – as we all seemed to have in those days when we were young – few of us dieted. (I often wonder what is in the food we eat today) we ate when we could and rushed about a lot so maybe we burnt it all off.
There was not much money around, perhaps the top models and photographers were well paid but there were not all those agents, stylists, personal assistants etc. who had to be paid, so I don’t think there was so much pressure on the models. We all had such fun – money went further in those days too and I feel very sorry for those in the limelight today with so much media attention peering into every nook and cranny of their lives.
What is next for you?
I have recently handed in my next book to my agent. A novel about a ‘reluctant granny’ – a woman in her forties whose daughters react to their father’s death by acquiring children with people she disapproves of and how her memory of her ‘perfect ‘ marriage is shattered by the return of her late husband’s old friend.
I am thinking of writing another novel set in the last war – I am fascinated by the work women did at that time and having written Shadows in the Sky about women ferry pilots, published a couple of years ago, I’d like to write another one.