About the Author

I spent a quiet childhood in the England of the 1960s and 70s writing stories and poems, roaming the fields, picking wild blackberries, baking cakes and licking the spoon. As a teenager, I had a Saturday job in an exclusive continental bakery, serving exquisite gâteaux at the front of the shop and doing the washing up in the bakehouse round the back.

Moving to Germany in the 1980s brought upheavals and challenges. By the early 2000s, I realised it was high time to reconnect with my own roots. But changes in the world around me — shrinking space for creativity in schools, rising anxieties about nature and food safety, the steady advance of technology — made my own version of childhood feel increasingly endangered. It was as if I were trying to return, after a long journey, to a forest that was being chopped down.

I needed another way back — and it opened up unexpectedly one day in my kitchen. I was baking a cake when I picked up a lemon. As it lay in my hand, it struck me as something magical — fragrant, beautiful and full of zing. It was a moment of revelation — life is good. I reached for a pencil and a scrap of paper and watched what I was feeling unfurl itself in my own handwriting. After that, writing became for me a secret place of homecoming, where simple childhood experiences — countryside wanderings, baking, storybooks — unleashed comfort, enchantment and adventure.

Many years later, those first lemony scribblings became chapter 14 of The Hidden Stories of Crumbly Thickets. Writing this book helped me realise that returning to the best of the past can keep it alive in the present — and give hope for the future. Its sequel, The Lost Jewel of Crumbly Thickets, continues the story of a ten‑year‑old girl and her friends striving to protect their hometown from the shadow side of technology and modernisation.