Charlotte Milne

ALLi Author Member

I've always written stories, but there have been gaps (sometimes a decade or so) while I've been gardening, mothering and grand-mothering. My first novel, Dolphin Days, was published in December 2017, a contemporary story - and romance, of course.
I grew up in lots of places, being a naval daughter, but home was always a fabulous house buried in the woods above the Tweed valley in the Borders of Scotland. My grandparents lived in the same house which I thought was wonderful, but now I wonder if my mother thought the same! It seemed to be a childhood of summer sun and winter snow and ice, of rough ponies, cats, dogs, the river and huge amounts of risk. One of the best naval postings was in Malta when I was a young teenager. We lived in Fort St Angelo, in the middle of Valetta harbour, and there is a fantastic novel to be set there. I just haven’t written it yet. I have three elder brothers who I just love to bits, along with my sisters-in-law. How many people are lucky enough to have that sort of family! I trained as a secretary at The House of Citizenship and worked for a software house—early days of computers—before going, in 1966, to live in Kampala, Uganda, working as a secretary first for Caltex Oil and then for the Dean of Makerere University. Forty years later my daughter went to Uganda with her husband Mark and on his death from cancer, ‘An African Dream’ was born. Any royalties from the sale of Dolphin Days are going to that charity. After marriage, we lived in South Kensington for twelve years and the subsequent thirty years in an Elizabethan farmhouse in Hampshire. I have never, so far as I can remember, been bored. The world inside my head is a seething mass of characters and conversations. I see people passing by and give them much more exciting lives than they could possibly have. I’ve always written stories (mounds of loose manuscripts and all the pages are muddled up) and as I’m now 76, there are lots of them, those that haven’t been burnt or shredded. I am involved in various community based organisations and have to be quite strict with myself in order to get the writing time in. I now live with my patient, supportive husband in a retirement village near Southampton, about half way between our son and daughter and seven grandchildren. We divide our time between Scotland and Southampton and sadly our travel days to far flung destinations around the globe are over. To my relief, I no longer have to garden two acres or try to keep the Elizabethan farmhouse from disintegrating around our ears. I don’t miss the spiders who inhabited it, but I do miss digging my own potatoes and picking my own beans.