Jennifer Johnson, Jennifer Westoby, Jennifer Chapman, Jennifer Hay. I'm a bit excessive when it comes to surnames and if I'd been born not in 1950 but some time later I would probably have held on to the original, rather than change with each marriage.
My story-telling began when I was under ten and school term ended with anyone in the class being asked to come up with something entertaining. I'd make up a story as I went along and my classmates seemed to like what they heard, so that I was the only one who ever did the end of term stories. I can't say this dawned on me much at the time and it was not until I was in my early twenties that the festering obsession to write bubbled over.
I wrote some short stories and they were published in national magazines. The novels didn't go so well, the first two roundly rejected; but one of them led to me being asked to write a thriller under the pseudonym Lydia Hitchcock "Britain's new mistress of suspense". The publisher, Arlington, wanted several Lydias so that half-a-dozen of her works could be produced much faster than a single Lydia would have been able to manage.
Lydia did not take off as planned but the publisher invited me to write whatever I liked next, and that was The Long Weekend - which they rejected.
I was advised to find an agent and compiled a list of six. The first one sent back The Long Weekend with a quite horrid rejection note along the lines of how could I have had the audacity …
'Do you think you can go on taking this sort of thing?' my then husband asked. I sent the manuscript straight off to the next agent on my list, and ten days after I had met her over a smoked salmon lunch in her Mayfair office, she sold my book for a not bad sum. This just goes to show how subjective a trade this is.
After publishing several more novels I was offered a go at non-fiction and wrote three books, one of them about the work of Barnardo's. Soon after publication I was at a literary event and fell into conversation with an elderly Cambridge academic who asked me about my book. After several minutes of chit chat he paused and then said: "Tell me, have you written the history of any other fruits?"
Which was better than being asked, as I frequently was, whether the sex scenes in my novels were from personal experience. I once responded with my own question - did they ask the authors of murder mysteries if they had ever killed anyone?
Nobody gets killed in any of my books, not that I can remember.