I've always been an addict for learning how different people live, and the best way to find out has seemed to be to work alongside them.
I've had such a bizarre array of jobs that, at one point, I had separate CV's for office work, theatre directing, teaching, and also theatrical management — as well as a CV that made it look as though I hadn't set foot outside a microbiology lab for the past eight years.
I started my first Saturday job when I was 14, on the local vegetable barrow, breaking ice off leeks with frozen fingers at six in the morning and “shouting” produce all day in my best South London cockney: “Cyam on, getcha termaders 'ere; lavely ripe termarders, faw pahnd a pahnd!”. Before I was sixteen I was working a full 8-show week backstage in West End theatres as a dresser — on Oklahoma!, Annie, Barnum; whatever show came up — a secret life that I managed to fit in around days at a comprehensive school near Brixton (luckily no-one noticed that I bunked off every Wednesday afternoon to do my mid-week matinees).
Both my parents are theatre people so my childhood was pretty bohemian. Family holidays for us three kids were often wherever a parent was on location filming or working in the theatre. When I left school I studied biology at the University of London and then did some post-grad research at the University of Kent, in mushroom farming.
What then…? I spent a year or two in France. I worked for Pfizer as a microbiologist, worked for the Society of Genealogists, worked as a hat-check girl in a disco, as an assistant in a deli, a wine waitress in a theatre café, manager of a van-hire firm, as a lorry driver, on the top floor of a City bank, on the phones in a courier company, on the QE2, in a betting office, in a pub, at Ticketmaster, as a cleaner, a secretary, a receptionist, teaching English to foreign students, training computer-users at the BBC, castle caretaking in Tuscany — having a whale of a time working days, evenings and weekends, combining as many jobs as I could. And each job lasted until I stopped learning anything new (or the company went bankrupt, which occasionally happened). I even worked in a Mayfair nightclub — the type where girls dance with rich businessmen in nothing but slinky undies and stockings and high-heels. That one only lasted 4 nights; if I had stayed any longer I would have learned a good deal more than I wanted to.
Most of my work has been in the theatre. I worked, on and off, for more than a decade for a West End producer as a script supervisor and assistant producer. I also had a separate career as a director and drama coach, directing plays including Agatha Christie's The Unexpected Guest, Peter Shaffer's Equus, Alan Bleasedale's Having a Ball, an outdoor production of Twelfth Night, Mikhail Bulgakov's Molière, and operas including Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers, Verdi's La Forza del Destino and Britten's Turn of the Screw.
I consider myself incredibly lucky: I've had an enormous number of wonderful opportunities and experiences, and I'm also hugely lucky to be published by Random House in the UK and Ballantine in the US.
What else can I tell you? I've been married for the past fifteen years to the funniest, wisest and most gorgeous man in the world, I'm absolutely crap at housework, I can't cook except for pasta, all my friends call me Chalkie (long story), and Doug and I live in the Lincolnshire Wolds.
I'm sure that's quite enough.
With best wishes,
Rebecca