Jackie Marchant

Here is a photo of me, when I was five years old.  That peculiar thing I’m holding is called a receiver and is part of a telephone.  The rest of the telephone is too big for the photo and contained the dials (today you would have a keypad).  Telephones have changed a lot since that photo was taken, but my mastery of them remains about the same.

Until the age of five I lived in Long Eaton, which was a small town near Nottingham - it is now just another part of Nottingham.  But it is still in Derbyshire as far as I know, which brings me to the first awareness I have of who I am:

 

Derbyshire born, Derbyshire Bred, strong in the arm, weak in the head

I can assure you that this rhyme is wrong - I am not strong in the arm.  This could be because I was born on the edge of Derbyshire.

When I was five, we moved to Scotland.  What I remember from Scotland is going on holiday in the Highlands and standing in the drizzle being eaten alive by midges.  But Scotland isn’t always like that - my husband and I spent our honeymoon there and it was blue-skied and beautiful.  I didn’t remember it from my childhood until the last day, when the weather changed, it went all gry and drizzly, the mountain tops disappeared, the midges came out and it all came flooding back to me.  But we have been to Scotland since and it really is beautiful.

When I was ten, we went to live in Africa and spent three years in Zambia.  I went to a posh boarding school in South Africa called Roedean School for Girls.  They loved my Scottish accent, but I soon lost it for a South African one.  After Africa we moved to Wales and I swapped the South African Accent for a Welsh one.

I left home, went to university and all that, worked in the City - that’s the bit in London where the money is made, but not by me I’m afraid.  One day I bumped into a very angry commuter (he wasn’t angry before I bumped into him).  That encounter was the start of my writing career.

To find out how, click on About Me - The Writer.