The greatest piece of good fortune in my life was to be born the daughter of the writer Joan Aiken. As a child I took it for granted that there would always be another story to cheer me along on a rainy walk, or an imaginative solution to a thorny problem, or a wonderful companion to share (and sometimes steal!) my own stories and adventures, and finally someone who would give me the best job in the world, for life. Writing had been the family trade for more than three generations, from Unitarian minister William James Potter down to Joan’s father, poet Conrad Aiken, but I never thought it would be mine.
I was a reader, a listener and had my own ideas about telling stories; I went off to train as a mime in Amsterdam and Paris, perhaps the equivalent of running away to join the circus, and spent many years working in theatre and travelling between International Drama Festivals, where language was not a barrier. But my mother’s world caught up with me in the end, as one day she warned me: “Someone will have to look after the books when I go, and you know it has to be you!” My mother attempted to prepare me, and gave me a tour of her study at the top of her old house in Sussex—”Don’t call it the attic!” she used to say furiously..
.With her help I had drawn up a map of where everything was filed, although much of it was in parcels and boxes, old suitcases under the eaves, and stacks of manuscripts jammed in between the rafters—the accumulation of fifty years and.
