About Helen

England

I was born in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in 1974. When my mum was pregnant with me, she worked in the Tetley Tea factory but the pregnancy made her go right off tea! It's funny because as an adult I drink gallons of tea. Maybe going to a tea factory before I was born influenced me.

Africa

When I was sixteen months old, we moved to Tanzania in East Africa, where my dad had found a job as a marine pilot. One of my earliest memories is waking up from an afternoon sleep and seeing a red and black snake creeping into my room through the window. I watched the snake without fear then my dad tiptoed in and killed it. Most of my memories of Africa are about animals and insects. I remember once our living room filled up with thousands of flies then they died, all at the same time.

I learnt to speak Swahili in Tanzania although I've forgotten how to now. My mum made the doll in the picture. You couldn't buy toys in Tanzania so my mum sewed this doll from whatever bits of material she could lay her hands on. The doll's hair was made of fishing twine and felt so strange and amazing when you ran your fingers through it. My teddy stole her black and red waistcoat. He is probably still wearing it today. My favourite doll at that time was called Jonquil, and I had a special "best doll", Scottish Doll. She wore a smart green kilt and velvet hat, and was given to me by my Great Gran. I was terrified of Scottish Doll. Once, when nobody else was looking, her left eye closed by itself as if she was winking at me. She was alive! This seemed to me like some awful secret only Scottish Doll and I shared.

When I was three, my mum took out our suitcases and said we were packing Scottish Doll. We were moving again.

Bahrain

My dad had found a new job in Manama, Bahrain. This place was dusty and urban, very different to anywhere we had lived in before. When we drove beyond the city, sand dunes filled the landscape and occasionally you could see pumps painted like animals. At the time I thought these pumps were for water, but now I wonder if they were for oil.

When I was three, I started telling stories to myself. I would have a constant story on the go and I was always the main character! Usually the stories involved me, honey sandwiches, and what I was doing minute by minute, so no bestseller material there. I learnt to read at this age too, and I had lots of little favourite dolls, all of them called Jason.

My favourite game was to cut people out of catalogues and make families. I would snip them out lots of clothes and furniture too. In those days, washing powder came in big cardboard boxes and I turned an empty one into a house for my cut-out family. One afternoon, a friend and I made a huge mess in my bedroom. My mum and my friend's mother came in and told us to clear up, but they ended up doing most of the tidying.

"Is this rubbish?" my friend's mother said, holding up the washing powder box.

"Oh yes," my mum said. "That can go out."

A family lives in that box! I wanted to shout but I couldn't put my anguish into words at five years old. Poor catalogue dolls! I'll never forget their demise.

Shetland

We returned to England when I was five, but after six months we were on the move again, this time to the Shetland Islands, the most northerly isles of Great Britain. They say that five years old is an impressionable age for a child, and this was certainly true for me. Moving to Shetland had a huge impact on me. We travelled to Lerwick by ferry from Aberdeen in Scotland, a fourteen hour journey. Then we drove from Lerwick to Firth, the remote area where we would be living. I still have strong clear memories of that car ride, seeing the strange landscape around me, the browns and greens in shades I'd never imagined. An adult would have described Shetland as bleak and treeless but then I didn't notice there were no trees. I saw the hills as complicated, as though, if I stared at the patterns of the scrubby grass for long enough, I would see something new there.

I learnt to write in Shetland and, at the age of six, started trying to put my stories down on paper. I found this difficult and frustrating. I was making up a story in my head about a secret space base at the end of our road. Children lived there and flew through the sky on translucent wings but nobody could see them or the base because everything was a secret, right? But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't express my ideas in written words. I practised and practised. I must have made some progress because that original story formed the basis of The Sky Pharaohs.

The other main idea for The Sky Pharaohs also came to me in Shetland. This was later, in 1987, when I was thirteen and I had an English teacher who didn't like me. Mostly, all I wanted to do in this teacher's class was to stare out of the window but one day she made a remark that pulled my attention back inside the room. I can't say what that remark was because it will ruin the story of The Sky Pharaohs. I will say, though, that she was encouraging the class to "think outside the box" and her strategy worked with me. Her comment went around in my head, sparking one idea after the next. It was another eleven years before I wrote down my story notes, and another three years and several false starts before I began writing chapter one. Five years later, in 2006, the eighth draft of The Sky Pharaohs won The Children's Book Council of Australia NSW's Frustrated Writers' Mentoring Competition.

That English teacher did me another favour. I was furious at her for writing a sarcastic comment at the end of one my short stories and decided my ideas must be far too profound for her! For my next short story I decided to write "something really dumb, to see if she gets it". I wrote the simplest story I could, from the perspective of a confused little boy. The name of this story was "Duncan" and my mum entered it into a competition called the National Young Writer for Scotland. I won!

In retrospect, I can see I must have been a trial to teach. I didn't like that English teacher and she didn't like me. She deliberately discouraged me from writing, yet in doing so, she fired up my ideas more than any other teacher has done. I wonder what she would say if she knew the effect she had on her least favourite student?

Scotland

I moved to mainland Scotland at fifteen. This was a difficult time, although I had numerous unpleasant experiences that I have since been able to use in my writing. The mainland seemed unbelievably sophisticated to someone who had spent a decade living in on a remote island. I had been an outsider all my life but never so much so until this time. I didn't even know you had to get a ticket on the bus. I felt if I'd stepped into Scotland from a different dimension. What kind of teenager doesn't know how to catch a bus? Asking myself this question sparked an idea for my current Young Adult manuscript, Surviving Kelly Tracey. This story is about a wealthy girl who is unaware of the realities of ordinary life.

When I finished school, I studied English at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. I was there for four years and during that time I wrote two "books". Neither was written for publication and I don't plan on either of them seeing the light of day, but they were important because they helped me learn how to write at length. The first was called "Keeva Joy" and was about a teenage girl who lives in a huge nameless city and has a tough punk for an older brother. A character from this book, Michael Christopher, somehow managed to live beyond the story and gatecrash his way into Surviving Kelly Tracey as the hero. How did that happen? I swear these characters have a life of their own.

The second "book" from this time was called "The Corridor" and, in 1993, the first chapter won The Keith Wright Memorial Literary Competition at Strathclyde University. "The Corridor" is about a girl who suffers amnesia in a car crash. The story centres around the years when she doesn't know her true name or background. Some villains enter her life and take advantage of her ignorance. This is no cheery, feelgood epic but she does regain her memory at the end. That tricky Michael Christopher managed to sneak into this story too.

Japan

The best part of being an adult is having control over your own destiny. As a child, I hated always being the new girl at school and feeling like an outsider wherever we lived. But somehow, being an outsider became part of my identity and as soon as I graduated from Strathclyde, I was desperate to see more of the world. My aim was to emigrate to Australia but first I wanted to live in Japan. Ever since reading Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden as a child I had planned to visit this country. In fact, I used the money I won from The Keith Wright Memorial Literary Competition to enrol in night classes and learn how to speak Japanese. I took a Certificate of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and then my dream became reality. I found a job as an English language teacher in Shizuoka prefecture, Japan.

I lived in Japan for almost four years, with a break in between to return to UK to do an MSc in Applied Linguistics. During the time I was back in Scotland and studying at Edinburgh University, I wrote another "book", "The Language of Little Girls". This was about a strange boy genius who, while on the run after being accused of murdering a rival prodigy, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a feckless teenager whose schizophrenic twin brother has recently jumped off a cliff. You guessed it. This story is never going to see the light of day either. It has eleven major plots going on at the same time and is insane. I have, however, put two extracts on my blog, here, and here, to give myself a laugh. I particularly like the mad Glaswegian grandmother, whose war-cry is: "Mind you scrub behind your taps when you're cleaning, hen!" At least TLOLG was the first manuscript I had the courage to send to publishers. How I cringe to think of this crazy story landing on someone's desk!

When I returned to Japan I lived in Nagoya and worked as an English language teacher at a further education college, Nunoike Gaigo Senmon Gakko. I had plans to find a job in a university, study for a PhD, write books, and possibly live in Japan forever. Then, three weeks after I arrived in Nagoya, I met my future husband, who is from the Philippines. Life changed... Due to our different nationalities, we had to overcome enormous obstacles in order to be together. The British government suspected us of being a marriage of convenience and told us we would not be allowed to live in UK as a couple. For this reason, we applied for Permanent Skilled Migration to Australia, a place we knew we could be together under fair circumstances.

While this process was underway, we were forced to spend a year, three months and eleven days apart. This was a heartbreaking time - but a brilliant one from a writing perspective. During the year that we were apart, as I continued to work in Japan, I started writing Surviving Kelly Tracey and plotting out The Sky Pharaohs. Without the loneliness I experienced in Japan, these stories would not exist in the form they are today.

Australia

I emigrated to Australia with my husband in 2001 and we became Australian citizens in 2008. The Sky Pharaohs is being considered by a publisher and, at the beginning of 2008, I finally finished writing Surviving Kelly Tracey. I am in the process of rewriting this manuscript, which has turned out to be tricky, maddening, incredibly time-consuming, so all in all it's a good job I'm in love with the story!

One mission is better than a thousand options.

Helen Parocha