knitting, dressmaking, sewing rag dolls to sell in craft shops, or whatever else was offered that helped make ends meet. And the rest of the time she wrote, often late into the night after the children were in bed ... in long-hand, in jumbo pads, that afterwards had to be typed out.

Being a single mother, it would have been easier to have taken a ‘proper’ job for regular wages, but Louise loved writing too much to give it up. Years passed. Book followed book. Her children grew to be adults and left home. Then, in 1987, she married again ... a new husband, Graham, and a new start in life.

Restoring a derelict house in the Forest of Dean put paid to her writing career for almost three years and, when she began again, she found she no longer loved it but hated it. She hated being shut in an office for months on end when her real life was waiting to be enjoyed. A computer made things somewhat easier but, in truth, she only continued writing to pay the mortgage and that, after a while, became more and more of a burden and finally impossible on an author’s wages.

The house was sold in1998. Along with her husband, Louise moved to County Mayo in Ireland and abandoned writing yet again to renovate an Irish cottage. There was no mortgage to pay now, no pressure on her to pick up the pen or switch on the computer. When the cottage was finished her husband went out to work and she spent her days creating a garden from the wilderness, growing vegetables and hauling peat from the bog. Books happened slowly, bits at a time, as Louise became more and more adept at procrastinating in favour of doing other things.

Another move followed four years later to save Graham the daily commuting distance and, yet again, it was to a bungalow that needed restoration. Once that was done, and with yet another vegetable garden established, Louise suffered a heart attack and began to realise she was growing old. She decided she could not go on working like a navvy, living in isolation among the Irish bogs four miles from the nearest shop and unable to drive. Nor did she want to spend the rest of her life being dependent on her husband for transport and the means to live. She wanted to do what she wanted, instead of all the thousand and one things that needed to be done. She wanted to go where she pleased, have access to a few amenities and be financially independent. And above all ... she wanted to write again.

Now her health has recovered and, during the past year, Louise has become a pensioner with a free travel pass ... been on a trip to Egypt, her first holiday in over two decades ... is parting, amicably, from her present husband and looking to buy a small modern house, that does not need renovating, in a small Irish town where there are shops and a doctor’s surgery as well as buses to airports and train stations. And during the same past year she has learned to love writing again ... but not the rather grim science-fiction books she used to write. Lined up and waiting for publication are three fantasy novels full of humour and fun ... her own personal take on the age-old battle between good and evil. Hopefully, on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, Louise Lawrence will soon be back.

Louise Lawrence was born on June 5th 1943 in Leatherhead in Surrey. Baptised Elizabeth Holden, she was older by three years than her sister, Catherine. Her father was Fred Holden, a bricklayer ... her mother, Rhoda, who had once been employed as a cook by wealthy households, was by then simply a housewife (a wife usually stayed at home to look after her husband and children in those days. To have a non-working mother was approved of by society and considered normal). They were a lower-class couple in a time when the ‘class system’ still mattered, with aspirations of eventually becoming ‘middle-class.’ They owned a pre-war semi-detached house in a suburban street and for reasons known only to them decided not to send Louise to a private school. Instead, she attended Poplar Road Primary School in Leatherhead and hated it.

She was a sickly, asthmatic child and absent much of the time ... which was probably her way of escaping the general angst and constant bullying she had to contend with at school. There were no breathing-inhalers in those days ... no recognition of psycho-somatic or stress-related illness ... no investigations as to reasons why a child might be prone to recurring attacks of asthma ... no sympathetic teachers or adults willing to listen to, or help tackle, the sources of childhood fears. Those were the days when children were raised to be seen and not heard, when ‘big girls’ didn’t cry but were encouraged from the age of five to stand up for themselves in the wider world and fight their own battles. Louise, however, was far too timorous to apply those kinds of directives to her own life. She was a born coward and her childhood use of avoidance tactics for unpleasant situations eventually grew to become a philosophy. “Those who don’t like the game can leave the court.”

Being ill in bed offered Louise safety and security and a taste of childhood bliss. There she was allowed access to her mother’ books ... an old encyclopaedia which she read from cover to cover, a section of which introduced her to stars, planets, galaxies and all the wonders of the universe ... the Complete works of Tennyson and the Oxford Book of Verse that fostered an early love of poetry ... world myths and legends ... and a battered old medical directory. This infused her with the desire to become a doctor when she grew up, but the ambition floundered in her teenage years when she realised some of the responsibilities involved, in particular the onorous expectation of having to do night duty.

The best days of Louise’s childhood were spent in Gloucestershire, at her grandfather’s house in the Forest of Dean where her mother had been born. There summers were real summers, endless sunny days with no memories of rain, school holidays when children were free to run wild and unsupervised over the hills and through the woods, when they were expected to be gone all day with a lunch of sandwiches and not to return until twilight. And Louise was one of them along with her sister and cousins ... and the grandad, of course. With his one-toothed grin, grandad made the whole world magic ... peopled the landscape with gnomes and giants, trolls and fairies ... cheated at impromptu cricket matches, hid among the bracken and made monster noises, taught the names of trees and butterflies, flowers and stars. Grandad kept his trousers up with a length of string, told wicked stories and loved Louise in a way no other adult ever did.

Louise, as a child, was called a shrinking violet. She was a constant disappointment to both her parents, even

more so when she failed her eleven plus exam. Those six months she spent at Leatherhead Comprehensive seemed like a punishment for a crime and were even more hellish than being at primary school. It was a huge relief for her when her father bought a shop and the family moved to Ayleburton in Gloucestershire.

Here, on the edge of the Forest of Dean, she was given the chance for a new beginning. She was allowed to re-sit the eleven-plus exam and this time she passed. And being a stranger in the area, she was no longer castigated for being a whimp or a failure. The teachers were kind and Louise enjoyed learning, gained the respect of her peers and ten ‘o’ level passes. She spent five wonderful years at Lydney Grammar School, then blew all chances of further academic achievement and parental approval by finding a boyfriend, leaving school at seventeen and entering the university of life.

The few years Louise spent working in a local library surrounded by books were generally happy. She read extensively ... books on the paranormal and supernatural ... books on astronomy and astronautics ... on archeology and and anthropology ... ancient history and teenage fiction. It was during those years she discovered authors such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, J.R.R. Tolkien and Alan Garner whose works she admired and eventually influenced her own.

By the age of twenty one, Louise was married, living in an isolated farmhouse with her first child, missing her work in the library, cut off from human contact and afraid that lack of stimulating company would cause her to mentally vegetate. For that reason among others, and because marriage was not a happy experience, she began to write books.

She never intended to write books ... having tried once a few years before, got as far as page eight, realised it wasn’t easy and dropped the idea. It was simply something that happened to her ... like finding a sixpence or catching measels. All of a sudden, while washing nappies in the kitchen sink, on a film screen inside her head, a story unfolded. She watched the events being acted-out ... saw the characters, landscapes, faces, places ... heard names and conversations ... shared thoughts and feelings. All she had to do to when the experience ended was write it all down.

But Louise, in those days, was not a writer. She had to learn. It took seven years, five books and two more children, before she wrote one that was good enough to be published. ANDRA, and THE POWER OF STARS that followed, marked the start of her career as a professional writer, the end of her first marriage and the disapproval of everyone who knew her for not taking a ‘proper’ job. Writing for a living was seen as a state close to hippie-dom ... or just another way of dropping-out.

It was quite the opposite as far as Louise was concerned. Now she was no longer writing fantasy books as a form of escape from an unhappy reality but to financially support herself and her three children. Nor was it easy. It involved working twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for paltry rewards. Even with her books being published in America as well as in the United Kingdom, money was always tight. She was often obliged to take on other work beside ... slaving in a restaurant kitchen throughout the tourist season ... gardening and interior decorating for old people ...