In Conversation With...Dinah Jefferies

The bestselling author talks to us about experiences that inspired her writing, having her first book published at 60, and her new novel Before the Rains

- Fanny Blake

Dinah, 68, was born in Malaysia, but moved to England when she was nine. She has a daughter, Laurel, and two grandchildren. Her son died in a tragic accident. Dinah lives with her second husband, Richard, and their Norfolk terrier, Teddy. I had a happy childhood in Malaysia, where my father restored postal systems destroyed during the Second World War. My younger sister and I would run around in our underwear and flip flops at home. I found it very difficult when we moved to England. It was as if a curtain had come down and Malaysia was gone. I was nine and expected to be English, but I felt very alien. It can’t be an accident that being an outsider is part of what I write about. They say those early years are the key to what people write and, in my case, I think it’s true.

While I was at university, I fell pregnant.

Jamie was born one year before my finals. Although I was living with his father, it was difficult as there was no such thing as a crèche back then. I remember the bucket of nappies in the backyard and no washing machine– yet somehow I managed to pass!

But by the time I graduated, Jamie’s father and I had split up. It was all too much. Without a job, I ended up living in a commune with a band, which actually suited me as a single parent, in that there was constant company and the children always had somebody to play with. At the same time, it was quite old-fashioned. The men were mostly on the road with the band, and the women were the ones doing the gardening and looking after the goats and baking bread. I was never a real hippy. For me that was simply a period when I did something different. In some ways I’m unconventional, but in others I’m very conventional.