Lesley Mathias

I was born in Midlands Brum to parents of mixed descent – Welsh, Irish and English with a tiny bit of Scot. I don’t remember Brum at all. When I was two, Mum and I escaped the city and moved to Corfe Mullen, in Dorset where we lived with my grandad until my father got a job which stayed in one place. This happened to be Tilbury so Mum and I moved to Kent to be with Dad and I was brought up surrounded by fields and orchards – at least, until I was twelve when Dad moved to Cambridge. I spent the rest of my teenage years surrounded by fields and chalk quarries, right on the edge of the Cam valley. By now I had realised how fascinated I was by the idea of very small people who lived in the undergrowth. I think I must have been writing about them at least by the time I was ten.

I left home to go to college. I suppose I must then have grown up but it was a very slow process and is not yet complete, even three quarters of a century later. I spent the interim years teaching in various schools, with pupils of varying ability from the ages of about 8 to 16, then moving into Further and Adult Education in Peterborough where my students’ ages ranged from 16 to, well, somewhat older. I taught Liberal Studies across the college and Local History and Religious Studies. At least, the idea was that I was the teacher but I was not always sure who was doing most of the learning. Teaching Religious Studies led me into working voluntarily for some years in interfaith relations. When I was made redundant in my mid forties I was ordained and served in several churches in very different sorts of parishes (very posh to quite un-posh, urban, suburban and rural) and was hospital chaplain in two hospitals for a short while.

Upon retirement, I tried to make up for lost time and took up fiddle playing for dance (after giving up on the Northumbrian Pipes). Much later in retirement, one day I ran out of reading matter and so started to write. It was such fun that I have not stopped since.