Becoming a writer was beyond Lesley Pearse's wildest dreams, despite her love of books and libraries from early childhood. She tells us her journey to becoming the successful author she is today, and how the likes of Tom Sawyer and Daphne Du Maurier broadened her imagination as a child.
As a child and in my early teens libraries were escape, from a dragon stepmother who was impossible to please, to a wonderful safe land of fantasy. I was lucky that my local library was a lovely old manor house, and so on Saturdays and school holidays I would curl up on a window seat and read all day. I gulped books down and often chose another one to take home with me for the evening. Today I doubt many parents would believe a child if she said she'd been in the library all day!
I worked my way along the shelves trying everything, first Enid Blyton, then Noel Streatfield and so many books set in boarding schools, or fantastic adventure tales like Jack London and Call of the Wild. I was thrilled when the kindly librarian suggested I was old enough for adult books, but perhaps my first choice on adult shelves wasn't quite appropriate for someone of thirteen, as it was a risqué book by Emile Zola!
My narrow little life in London’s Lee Green was widened to the whole world. I knew what the Mississippi River was like from Tom Sawyer, the craggy coast line of Cornwall from Daphne Du Maurier, authors who's names I can no longer remember informed me about Canada, Australia, the tenements of New York, jungles, prairies and war too.
I never once imagined myself becoming a writer. That was even more unreachable than becoming a ballet dancer, an ice skater or an astronaut.
I was always being accused of day dreaming back then, yet I never once imagined myself becoming a writer. That was even more unreachable than becoming a ballet dancer, an ice skater or an astronaut. I chose to be a nursery nurse because I liked children, and I got plenty of chances to read to the ones I took care of, and borrowed their parent's books for myself.
Yet it was reading a library book that finally made me wish to put my own ideas into a book. That book was The Thornbirds. I began it one night while feeding my youngest who was a few weeks old. I came to find it was morning, sun coming through the window, baby fast asleep at empty breast and I'd been reading all night. I thought if I could just write something that would affect other people in such a way I would feel utterly fulfilled.
Success didn't come quickly, it took years of persistence until my first book Georgia was published, but one thing I can say is that it was all those early years in libraries that made it happen. I had so many images of places, battles, tragedies and triumphs stuck in my head. I only had to tap into them for inspiration.
Lesley Pearse's new novel, Survivor, is published by Michael Joseph on the 13 February 2014, RRP £18.99 in hardback from all good bookshops and Amazon.
Lesley is the first Ambassador for National Libraries Day which takes place on the 8 February.
