About Me

I grew up in Cambridge where my father ran a bookshop. My big sister and I used to go there after school, and read until my father had finished work and could take us back home. By the time I was eleven, I had several brothers and sisters. Our house wasn’t big enough and we were squeezed for space. Most people buy a bigger house when that happens (if they can afford it), but my parents chose to buy a boat instead. So we all squeezed into a converted Admiral’s Pinnace called DIMCYL. She was fifty two feet long and twelve feet wide, and had three double cabins and one single one; and we were more squashed together than ever.

My school friends thought that living on a boat was highly romantic. What they didn’t realise until they came to visit, was just how squeezed up we were. I had to share a double cabin with bunk beds and two square yards of floor with my sister. Personal space was virtually nil. Nor did we have neighbours, as the boat was moored at the end of an orchard on the outskirts of Cambridge. Every day I had to get past three bad-tempered geese that were supposed to be cheap mowing machines, and cycle three miles across Cambridge to school. I am still very nervous of geese!

In the school holidays, when my father could spare time from work, we untied the mooring ropes and off we went, exploring rivers and canals and even crossing the Channel. In Hull, we had to evacuate ship in the middle of the night because the ship was hanging on to the quay by its mooring ropes. We had underestimated the tidal drop! Somewhere in the North Sea we got beached on a sandbank, and a Royal Navy Lifeboat hovered nearby to check that we floated off safely. In Belgium we ended up in dry dock for necessary repairs, and as a result, we couldn’t get back for the start of term. We children learned useful skills like whipping ropes, pumping bilges, and tying knots that don’t fall apart.

On the boat or on shore I was always reading. Reading was an escape into another world from a home in which the cramped conditions were taking their toll. Rats in a confined space fight, and my mother and father were no exception. Divorce was an inevitable outcome. The boat was sold, and it was back to the shore again. Eventually my mother and all five children moved to Oxford, where we shared a big house with an uncle and aunt and their three children. This unusually large household was often a source of envy to teenage friends.

In between these adventures and changes of environment, I was picking up an education. I resisted going to university because it was something that was expected of me, and I wasn’t sure that I was up to it. I had the qualifications but I didn’t have the confidence. It never occurred to me that I could be a writer. Then, in an Oxfam bookshop, I happened to get talking to a local councillor, and was recruited to work in a children’s home.

In that children’s home, I came across kids who had led very troubled lives. It wasn’t hard to see how hurt they were. What had hurt them, and why? I began to realise that putting sticky plaster and bandages on gaping wounds wasn’t enough: you have to try and do something about the causes of the damage. But when you begin to see that poverty, racism and discrimination have all played a part, your heart sinks. How can you possibly do anything about things like that?

That was the start of a rich career working with troubled children in therapeutic education. And now I had a reason for studying. Eventually I took a degree in psychology, then in social policy. I became involved in training social workers, and I wrote articles which were published. For someone who had resisted going to university, the wheel had turned full cycle!

But academic articles reach a very limited audience. They don’t seem to me an effective way of reaching people’s minds and hearts, so I decided to turn to another audience and another sort of fiction. I decided to write for children, and I did some part-time interpreting to earn some money whilst I was writing. Interpreting brought me into contact with asylum-seekers and the dark world of their stories.

The threads that have run through my life run through my writing. Why is life so unfair? How can we learn to live with what is going on, and can anything be done about it? People have said to me, “Do you feel okay about writing about people from another culture?” I do and I don’t. I have a postcard which I treasure, which bears the message, “Poverty exists where there are people who can’t write; and other people write about them.” On balance I think it’s best that these stories are told, even if the story teller is someone like me.

Nicki Cornwell