'I had a very unhappy childhood'

IT'S a beautiful day when I arrive in Harrogate to interview Julia Clarke. She lives on a farm on the outskirts of town and in the dazzling sunshine it glimmers white - a bright pearl amid a sea of green. When she comes to greet me, Julia seems to suit her setting. Warm and relaxed, she guides me straight to the kitchen where she offers me tea or coffee, but can only tempt me with a glass of water.

She seems put out - am I sure I don't want tea or coffee? Perhaps a hot chocolate? - and I'm reminded of my mum. In fact she is rather motherly, and in the nicest of ways.

Her 13th novel, The Other Alice, has proved a lucky one for 55-year-old Julia. After being nominated by a library group, it made the longlist for the Carnegie Medal, a prize that celebrates writing for children.

Alongside Julia in the race were JK Rowling and other luminaries and though she didn't make the shortlist, out this month, just being among such famous names was a "huge honour". Yet for all her success, life has not been easy for the Surrey-born writer.

"I had a very unhappy childhood," explains Julia. "My parents were divorced and my sister and I were brought up just by my mother. My father first left my mother when we were six weeks old then he came back when we were three and persuaded mother to live with him again. The years that we lived with him were terrible because my parents had a very violent marriage - to the point that it was touch and go whether they killed each other."

Julia and her twin sister Janis spent time in Germany and Canada, returning to Britain when their parents parted for good. As a single parent, the girls' mother had a torrid time.

"My father gave no support to my mother so we were actually very poor," says Julia. "There was absolutely no help for women on their own in those days. We lived on my mother's wage - she worked in a shop - and we lived with my grandparents until we were 13. Then the council gave my mother a flat and but we had literally no furniture."

Julia went to a secondary modern school whose sole purpose concerning girls was training them as homemakers. With her lofty ambitions, she found this frustrating. "What I really wanted to do was get a job in publishing but we didn't do any academic subjects," she says.

"We didn't even have a sixth form. We did what was called house craft, which was ironing, washing, cooking and literally house management. When I left school at 16 I didn't really have a lot to offer to get a job in publishing."

A love of books led to Julia finding work in a library. When this didn't suit her - "I thought at one point I would be asked to read the books, which shows just how stupid I was," she says wryly - she set her sights on being a journalist. But this didn't work out either. "I couldn't get a job in newspapers," says Julia. "They were very reluctant to take girls on in those days. I went to a job interview and was told I would leave and have children. I went to another and I was asked if I was on the Pill.

The guy said 'you're the best I've seen but I'm sick of girls. You're too pretty. You'll go off and get married and have children. It will be a waste of time training you'."

Her next project - a course in teaching, at London's Goldsmith's College - led Julia to suspect she was dyslexic. She taught for a while but found she struggled with the paperwork, so once again, tried a new career. "I did a post graduate drama course at Guildford School of Acting because apart from books, my other great love is the theatre," she says.

"Then I worked in educational theatre. That was lovely because I was working with children but I used to go into school as a kind of honoured guest."

TTThe acting profession brought Julia to the North-East, where she joined a group called Wear About. It makes her laugh to recall its tone. "The other people in the group were with the Workers' Revolutionary Party and we were going to start a revolution in Sunderland," she says. "We were working in schools, workingmen's clubs and doing street theatre and community theatre.

It was in a more conventional setting, on stage in Harrogate, that Julia met her husband. "I was doing a show at the theatre and my husband Mike, who's a journalist, came to review it," she says. "We met and fell in love and went off to Afghanistan and India together."

To pay their way, Mike wrote on a freelance basis - while Julia just relaxed. In those days Mike was the aspiring author. "He was the one who was going to be the novelist," says Julia. "I always wanted to be a journalist so we've had kind of a role reversal."

Only after she'd had her children - Matthew, now 24, and Bethany, 22 - and keen to stay at home with them, did she write her first book, a Scottish romance.

"I researched the market a bit and I realised that unless you could write something that was either a thriller or a romance, there was no chance of breaking into publishing," explains Julia. "I thought I could either write a book with a body and a policeman or I could write a book with a love story, and I just thought a love story would be more cheerful."

Her theory proved right, and the book was published straight away. Subsequent novels had the same success and as the stories flowed, Julia was on a roll.

Her only hindrance was her spelling. "I'm terribly self-conscious about my spelling and I still make Mike read everything," she admits. "But when I'm writing, I'm not thinking about my spelling and grammar - I'm just trying to tell the story."

Then around the time that her son fell ill, the market dried up. "My son was diagnosed with a very rare form of muscle cancer when he was 14," says Julia. "I didn't write for two years - I simply looked after him. I didn't actually think I would go back to writing."

Throughout his illness, she helped Matthew with his school work, reading every book on the English syllabus. This re-ignited her dormant passion - and when she did resume writing, informed her words. "I think I'd read such a lot and thought so much about being a teenager, that's what I wanted to write," says Julia. "I felt it was my natural home."

Julia's first teenage book, The Starling Tree, was followed by Summertime Blues, now being made into a film. Further works have included You Lose Some, You Win Some, about foot-and-mouth, and her biggest success to date, The Other Alice. Common to all of Julia's books is their local setting.

"They're all set in the North," she says. "I draw a lot on local places and I'm very inspired by cities. I use various villages around Harrogate, which I tend to fictionalise, and I use Harrogate itself, though I never actually call it Harrogate."

In her stories for teens, Julia writes first person in the present tense to give them maximum impact. A major theme is family life. "I'm very interested in the dynamics and relationships in families," she says.

Recent ill health has meant a break in writing but while she admits it's been a struggle, she's now back at the PC. Her latest novel, The Kissing Club, sounds intriguing. "A 14-year-old girl signs up to a chastity club and at 17, she has a baby. I'm trying to work out how she gets to that point," says Julia.

Though she's far from complacent, it's clear that writing's in her blood, and now she's seen success, she'll carry on - unless writing has enough of her. "I don't think I'll ever give writing up but writing might give me up," she says, smiling.

"I've had 13 books published in all but I never think I'll be doing this for the rest of my life because I might not be able to. It depends whether your publisher or your agent likes what you're doing." On current form, I'm sure they will.