I was born in Canada in the small town of Grimsby during the Second World War.

When I was two my Ukrainian father died so my mother brought us (two brothers, me and a baby sister) out to her home in New Zealand. We travelled on a war boat. I cried a lot and only wanted to eat oranges, which were hard to get during the war and especially on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

Growing up, because we weren’t exactly rich, my mother made most of our clothes, plus Christmas and birthday presents. Luckily my mother couldn’t make books so I used to get these bought from shops.

My report cards from both primary and secondary school mostly seemed to say: `she needs to try harder,’ but that ‘I did have a pleasant nature.’

During the delicate years when I was learning how to be a teenager my mother married again, had a baby boy and decided we need to become vegetarians. This latter decision caused me to develop deep friendships with meat dishes instead of boys.

At Secondary School I learnt how to become a shorthand typist, (there were no computers in those days). My typing and accounting were exceptional, whereas my English, biology, chemistry and shorthand dismal. When I started work I gave away the shorthand. I did this because I could never read back what I had written and so made up a lot of stuff, which often led to trouble.

At nineteen I packed my bags and left Dunedin with a girl friend to travel the world and make my fortune.

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I never did make the fortune, but I did travel. England, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Greece, Switzerland and other places as well.

Some of the more interesting jobs I landed while travelling was working for The Save-the-Children Fund in the head office in London; Sotheby’s, the famous auction house; and an American couple involved in underwater archaeology in Greece and Italy, where I learnt the handy sport of diving for treasure.

Eventually I married a Rhodesian in London and returned home to New Zealand approximately eight years after I had first left.

Soon we settled down with a daughter and a son, a house and a garden. While all this was going on I made rag dolls and toys and sold them at craft fairs and in shops around the country.

After ten years I stopped that business and changed to the business of writing.

Deep down I think I knew I wanted to be a writer, but lacking the confidence I simply chose to avoid it. However, on turning forty a light pinged in my head. It showed me to get on with my 'real' passion, no excuses. So with great trepidation I went to a creative writing class once a week on a Monday evening for eight weeks.

It was the catalyst that I needed.

And so I began to write. Slowly, so slowly in the beginning, gathering confidence. Snatching an hour here and there between working full-time, two teen-age children, keeping up a healthy garden, plus also caring and maintaining our cottage by the sea.

By now with dogged persistence I’d had articles and adult short stories published, some stories winning competitions, always doubting myself but never giving up.

During this time the children left home. Daughter, Fiona, to Australia. Son, Stephen to marry Tanya. The family home was sold and my husband, myself, and our three cats spread our souls and bought a grand old homestead in need of much tender care and expensive renovations set on three quarters of a acre of ground, further up the coast in the town of Oamaru.

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It was here that I began writing for children (along with three other women) and realised how much I really enjoyed it. And so another page was found in my 'writing career.'

We lived in Oamaru for ten years with our homestead renovating, my writing, and resurrecting the overgrown and abandoned grounds. It was here for the first time I grew and flourished in a creative way like the gardens we made.

Then three years ago we moved to the small seaside settlement of Waikouaiti. Close enough to Dunedin to have the occasional fix of shops, grandchildren, café food and good coffee.

So now I feel I have the best of all worlds.

Here I can see the hills, the sky and the weather.

I can hear the birds, the trains and the horses’ hooves thundering through the silence.

I can taste the frost in the winter; smell the turning leaves in the autumn and feel the moon on the grass in summer.

Here is where I now write and garden.

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