The stuff of popular fiction

`Someone once told me you need three things to be a good writer: an Irish background, a convent education and a screwed-up childhood…

`Someone once told me you need three things to be a good writer: an Irish background, a convent education and a screwed-up childhood. Well, I've had all three."

Lesley Pearse rolls the details of her turbulent childhood off her tongue as if she is talking about a character from one of her best-selling novels. She was born in Rochester in Kent. Her mother died when she was three and her older brother, Michael, was five. They were swiftly put into separate orphanages because her father was at sea. A few years later, they returned to live with their father and stepmother, who was anything but kind to them.

Pearse left home at the tender age of 15 to become a nanny. "The years between 1945 and the end of the 1950s were bad years for anyone who slipped between two stools. Like the stories in Frank McCourt's book, Angela's Ashes" (which she greatly admires), "it's hard to imagine. The situation has changed so dramatically, younger people like you can't imagine what it was like," she explains dispassionately. This hugely successful popular fiction writer can - if you'll pardon the expression - talk the hind leg off a donkey and if her Dublin agent wasn't keen to take her to lunch after chatting with me for an hour and a half, I'd be still there, notebook in hand, charting her life history.

"I have always been aware of my Irish side - the chatterbox bit and being able to spin the words. And I always have that Irish wild streak in me," she says.

READ MORE

This is perhaps the key to the rest of her life, the writing, the lot. Her mother was the Irish connection and to this day Pearse doesn't know the full story around her death. At the age of 17, Pearse left one of her nanny jobs and travelled back to Ballydooly, Co Roscommon to meet her Irish relatives. "I was met on the platform by the whole family. My Auntie Ann had just adopted a baby and we both arrived on the same day. She was a midwife and my uncle Bob was an inspector of roads - which always struck me as a daft job. "They were all so lovely and warm and funny. They used to lace me up with sherry. They brought me to a dancehall called Fairyland where the Irish showbands played and every night ended with rousing rebel songs and Forty Shades of Green. I stayed about a month. "It was only afterwards that I realised I didn't find out anything more about my mum. You are fairly gauche at that age."

It seems, although the family kept in touch for some time, Pearse never returned to Co Roscommon. The mysterious details of her mother's death are - along with the regret she still feels from leaving her third husband, and the arrival of her first grandchild - the things that mean the most to her. "I only found out some things about my mother the year before my father died, 18 years ago. As children we were told that she died of a brain haemorrhage after falling on some toys. Imagine the effect of being told that?" In fact, it seems Pearse's mother died of septicaemia after a miscarriage. At this point, Pearse shows me a beautiful, faded black-and-white photograph of her mother with her brother and herself as a five-month old baby. Later, she pulls out some happy shots of herself with her three grown-up children and her former husband, Nigel, who she still sees. This is the stuff of popular fiction all right.

So when did she begin writing? "I couldn't read until I was 10. My stepmother made me so scared that I never read aloud. Then, suddenly, I learned how to read and I devoured books. I spent all my time in libraries, escaping from the world. I lived in a bit of a fantasy life." However, not reading early doesn't seem to have prevented her from writing. She tells a story about how, when she was seven, she wrote all about the family's life in Africa in the school news-book. Although charmed by her own imagination, she explains the act brought on a scolding from her stepmother. So, has writing been a therapeutic exercise for her?

"I have worked through most of what has happened in my life so I don't agonise over things. In fact, I find it interesting. I have written about the harrowing things that happened to me. For example, in Georgia, I describe the orphanage I spent time in. I'd recommend writing to anyone. When you write something down, it ceases to have any power." Having been a good letter-writer (most people keep her letters, she says) and attempted a book in her 20s, she returned to her pen and paper 18 years ago when her youngest daughter, Jo, was a baby. Getting the star-letter prize of £25 in a woman's magazine was an incentive to continue. A writing course followed and she won £60 for the short story she wrote as part of the course.

Following that promising start, three books were scrapped and Georgia (1993), which was written in six months, took six years to get published. The first (and for many of her fans still the best), this was followed by six others, the most recent of which, Charlie, reached the top of the best-seller's list in Ireland last month.

However, back then not everything was tea and roses. Pearse was running a card and gift shop in Bristol, where she has lived for years. This failed and so did her marriage when she turned 50. "I had all this debt and had the feeling of being trapped. I had to get out. I suspect I had a breakdown without realising it. Eventually when I left home" (taking only her word processer and clothes), "Georgia came out."

Only when she got an advance for her third book, Charity, did things start to turn for the better again. "Now I have a nice house and I've just bought a new car. Having had to start from scratch again at 50, I am wealthy beyond my dreams - but my dreams were humble."

Her next book changes tack a bit, focusing on the early settlers in America. While researching this, she travelled across the US in an open-topped car with Jo reclining in the sunshine, wearing a lime-green bikini. "We stayed in a lot of dodgy hotels in places like Nebraska."

Look out for them in Pearse's next pageturner, which she promises won't be titled after a girl's name.

Charlie by Lesley Pearse is published by Penguin, price £5.99 in UK