I was born in Oswaldtwistle, a small mill town surrounded by beautiful countryside in North-East Lancashire. It was made famous by James Hargreaves and his spinning jenny.

My father was a shoe repairer and retailer and I was brought up behind the shop. I still remember my first pair of clogs he made for me. They were green leather with a picture of Mickey Mouse picked out in brass nails on the wooden soles. I remember once, when I was at primary school not being allowed to dance around the maypole because I’d forgotten to bring my plimsoles and was only in my clogs - by then they were going out of fashion.

My mother was a weaver before she married, as was her mother before her. They could lip-read and would    "mee-maw" silently to each other as they had learned to do in the mill above the clatter of the looms. Most of my family have been weavers for generations on both sides of the Pennines.

Weary of the freezing cold hillside we eventually moved to Cornwall where I ran a gift shop. I again dug out my old portable typewriter and indulged my long-held ambition to write, often scribbling by hand behind the counter. Selling short stories was a good thing but I still hadn’t achieved novel fiction. I started taking courses, reading everything I could about the art of writing and wrote two more romances for Mills & Boon, this time historicals.

Both were rejected but returned with sufficient editorial help to encourage me to keep trying. Then to my excitement they accepted the third: Madeiran Legacy. I felt utterly jubilant and went on to sell them four more historical romances. I’d served a long apprenticeship but during it I’d learned how to build strongly motivated characters, how to structure a story, put emotion on the page and make every word count. But then my romances became longer and more complex and I knew it was time to move on.