K M Peyton with her horse
I have written, and had published, a book each year ever since I was fifteen and that now makes over sixty (so work out how old I am).
I wrote my first book as soon as I could write well enough, aged nine. It was called ‘Grey Star’, the Story of a Race-Horse. I sent it off to a publisher and it came back (of course). I wrote about ten more and sent each one off to a publisher. They were all rejected but I got very nice letters back with the rejections. Then, when I was fifteen, my first one was accepted. I was offered £75 by Mr Archie Black of A and C.Black, my red letter day. The letter came through the post. I opened it and burst into tears, my mother had hysterics and my father, who was shaving upstairs, stopped singing and shouted down to know what all the fuss was about.
I lived in Surbiton, a suburb of London and went to school in Wimbledon. I longed to live in the country and own a pony. I was obsessed with horses and have been all my life but I don’t know why as I come from a family of engineers.
I had an imaginary stable of over 2000 horses, their descriptions, skills, characters, etc. all noted in a large exercise book and I rode a different one every day, going down to the station to go to school at a collected trot and putting in a buck or two if the weather was sharp.
Because I couldn’t have the real thing, I wrote out my fantasies in books, all about race-horses or girls who owned ponies and did all the things I longed to do but couldn’t.
When I left school I went to art school and taught art for a living as I never considered that writing was any more than a hobby, although by this time I had had three books published and I had three more published whilst I was teaching. However it became a career, seriously, when I married and had children, as then I could work at home and still look after the children.
K M Peyton with her horse - 2
I married a fellow art-student, one of the many ex-servicemen who flooded the colleges at that time. As a prisoner of war he had escaped three times, he had a penchant for excitement and led me into many adventures that frightened me to death, very good experiences for a writer. We climbed in the Alps, always living out rough, we canoed through the lakes and forests of Ontario, got lost in the Rockies when we were down to one cup of rice and a tin of cocoa (chocolate rice pudding?).
Mike and I walked across Corsica from south to north carrying food for seventeen days, got shipwrecked in the North Sea and taken off by a car ferry in a Force 8 gale (with two babies), run down when becalmed off Cherbourg by a Dutch ship with no one on the bridge on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, etc, etc. Mike’s life is sailing, which he has made into his career. He is a yachting journalist and cartoonist and has to sail all the time (his words) to get his ideas. I stay at home and indulge myself with horses.
With the money from my books I was able to buy into my dreams at last and the day I rode my own race-horse at exercise in the Wiltshire downs was one of the best days of my life.