'Adversity can be your friend'

After a tough six months Sarah, Duchess of York talks to Juliet Rieden about courage, loneliness, her compassionate daughters and the childhood dreaming that inspired her magical new children’s books.

- Juliet Rieden

Sarah, Duchess of York confesses that as a child growing up in rural England she was “a dreamer” with “an incredibly active imagination”. When the going got tough – which it did when her mother, Susan, left the marital home for Argentina to live with her polo player lover, Héctor Barrantes – Sarah, age 12, would escape into the surrounding countryside and conjure fantastical worlds in her head.

“From a young age I figured out that the only way I was going to survive was to retreat into other places and stories,” she explains. “I loved nature – especially oak trees and flowers and ponies. I’m so lucky that I was able to go into a world of make believe. The extraordinary sense of loss and loneliness that I felt when my mother left, which I can never really describe properly to anyone, was so petrifying that I made up my own world to compensate, and that’s how I got through it.”

Looking back, it was a pretty shocking day in the Ferguson household, and one that still haunts Sarah. Her mum literally turned her back on her family and walked out of the front door, leaving her two girls to cope with the fallout and soothe their devastated father, Major Ronald Ferguson. But while pivotal and painful, the one positive to come out of those dark times was the private world of creativity that was sparked in young Sarah.

“My father told me I was always reading and loved making up stories,” she recalls. And it is with this self-made and rather charming universe in mind that as an adult Sarah turned to writing children’s books, with notable success. “Because I have such a sense of childlike joy, it comes easily to me to write and be descriptive. I only wish I could illustrate,” she quips.