Most people know me as a crime novelist but I wrote television drama before finishing my first book and worked for Eastenders for almost twenty years. The show offered me a great learning curve in storytelling and how to hold the attention of viewers with a cliff-hanger – but growing up in the East End of London also helped. In the ‘50s and ‘60s our community was a small one from which people rarely ever moved away. Fifty years on, in Albert Square, all the fictional characters know one another and no-one ever commutes to work.
Julie Wassmer
I’ve never been very good in the mornings and once lost a job because I couldn’t find one of my shoes…I was a student at the time with a summer job at a local pub for which I had to wear smart clothes. No matter how early I get up, I’m disorganised until 11am, and that morning the smart shoe was nowhere to be found. I called the manager who promptly sacked me saying I would only lose my feet next….
From the first day I arrived in Whitstable I knew I would write about it. The little North Kent town has been my adopted home for almost twenty years. I love it here so much, it’s become almost another character in my novels, rather than just a backdrop. Whitstable has changed a lot in the last two decades but as a feisty little place with a smuggling history it’s still very much a small community trying to maintain its quirky identity in spite of its popularity with the DFLs (the Down From Londoners).
I was once an artist’s model – my boyfriend was at art school and we needed income to get him through his first year of study without a grant, while I had to save for university. During numerous hours of sitting absolutely still and silent for life modelling and sculpture classes, I used meditation to overcome the physical discomfort and to transport myself, mentally, elsewhere.
I once made a pop record under the name of Lola Payola. At the time I was working at the BBC as a secretary but my boyfriend was in a band that had gained some success before flopping. He was threatening to give up on music so I tried to encourage him but he said, “If you think it’s so easy, why don’t you try?” So I did – and ended up getting a recording contract with CBS/Epic. The single, The Schoolgirl Song, was played all the time on the radio but failed to chart – though it was popular in Finland….
I lived on a 50-foot ocean going yacht for 5 years – bobbing around in the Mediterranean might seem to be a dream lifestyle but after all that time it was just another boring day in paradise... When I returned to London at the end of the ‘80s, I couldn’t believe how London had changed – everyone was clutching Filofaxes and enormous mobile phones – there was even something you could buy called a Phoney Phone – an imitation mobile, made of rubber, for anyone who couldn’t afford the real thing but didn’t want to feel left out….
I’ve practiced yoga for over 50 years, having learned about it as a 12 year old. I’ve stuck with it over the years and, touch wood, at 64 years old, I have suffered a bad back only once in my life – when I left off my practice.I once chained myself to a tree to prevent it from being chopped down. Network Rail were intent on clearing a vast swathe of mature trees near my home during the bird breeding season but I, and two friends (both in their 60s) took some instruction from Greenpeace and chained ourselves to a tree on the railway embankment. It worked and the chainsaws wnet home. I continue to campaign for the environment – mainly against fracking – and sit on the Environment Committee for the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England in Kent.
A fortune teller once told me I would marry a man who lived in America by the sea and that he was someone I already knew. I told her I didn’t know anyone in America but she was insistent. Several years later, I met and married my husband who was living in Malibu, California. It was around that time that I realised my husband’s name and address had been written into an old address book of mine, years before, by a friend who had gone travelling but who wanted me to keep those details safe.
In 1990, I was reunited with the baby daughter I had given up for adoption. I had become pregnant at just 16. Unable to confide in my parents, I went through a concealed pregnancy – not telling them until the day I gave birth. Twenty years later, at a meeting with a literary agent, a young secretary handed me a cup of coffee without either of us knowing who we were to each other, until she happened to see my name on the film script I had left behind. It was the same name as that of her birth mother on the original birth certificate she had recently gained access to. Another twenty years on, I wrote the story of our reunion (More Than Just Coincidence pub’d by Harper True). And almost 50 years on, I’m now a grandmother - known as Nanna Wassmer-by-the-Sea. Truth is stranger than fiction…
