However, I never lost sight of my goal and when Simon was four years old I began to make enquiries about going back to college as a mature student. Firstly, I had to take further qualifications at a technical college, but eventually I began teacher training in 1973, emerging as a fully-fledged teacher in 1976. Despite having two further children Bethany in 1981 and Tamsin in 1985 I taught happily for some years before an injury at work caused damage to my spine in the spring of 1990.

Our home in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham was no longer suitable for us and so we moved to North Wales in July 1993 with our two youngest children. I began to write, something else I’d always yearned to do, but a dream I thought I never would achieve.

I wrote first for children, before beginning an adult novel in 1996. placing it in the city I’d been born and brought up in. Many of the characters and situations were drawn from the culture in which I’d been reared and the stories my parents told me and the neighbours around the doors, everyone, they say, has a story to tell

Headline gave me a two book contract and I was astounded that it had happened to me so easily. I had four books published with them: A Little Learning-Love Me Tender- A Strong Hand to Hold and Pack up Your Troubles.

I passed to Hodge Hill Girls Grammar School, but though I longed to teach, I knew that my parents could not afford to keep me at school after the age of sixteen. Instead, I left school and went to work, married young, becoming Anne Bennett, and had two children quickly, Nikki in 1967 and Simon in 1968.