Susan Hill

Biography

I was born in Scarborough, the seaside resort on the North East coast of Yorkshire, in 1942. Scarborough is a beautiful place, with dramatic cliffs, two sweeping bays, amazing views, a Castle, a Harbour with fishing boats…. And when I was growing up there, it was a very genteel resort, full of retired and older people. Of course there were young people and I plenty of school friends, but I still remember it as a place full of the old. I have written about the Scarborough of those days, only slightly disguised, principally in the novel A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER (1969) and also in one or two of the short stories in the collection A BIT OF SINGING AND DANCING, most notably, the story COCKLES AND MUSSELS. I also wrote about the house which is called Wood End and in which the Sitwell family grew up. These three poets and artists of the early part of the 20th century, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, made a great impact on me, I loved visiting their house, now in part a Sitwell museum and in part a Natural History Museum. It features in the story IN THE CONSERVATORY in the same collection. (Much later in life I met Sacheverell Sitwell, and we shared many memories of childhoods – albeit 50 years apart – spent in Scarborough) 

Susan Hill with Declan and Nancy Morrison April 26th 2001

I attended Scarborough Convent School, from the age of 3, until we left the town when I was 16, and I still have some friends from those days who live in Scarborough. I became interested in the theatre very early on. The Scarborough Repertory Theatre was twinned with the Repertory in York, and alternated productions. My mother took me to almost every one, even though I was very young and probably could not understand a great deal of what was going on ! But I loved the sight and sound and smells of the theatre from then. The Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round then opened, in a large room above the Scarborough Library, and I went to it as often as I could as a young teenager. We left Scarborough in 1958, the year that the playwright Alan Ayckbourn first arrived in the town, to take charge of the Stephen Joseph Theatre. 

I have written a good deal about my early years in Scarborough in the book FAMILY. This is an account of the birth and death of my premature daughter and the completion of my family with the arrival of my third child, but there is much about my own early years, my parents, Scarborough and the people I knew then.

We left Scarborough and moved to the city of Coventry in the Midlands, where my father had a job first in the aircraft and later in the car industry. There I attended a girls’ grammar school, Barr`s Hill – (fellow pupils included Sarah Parkin, the Green Party campaigner, and Jennifer Page , the first Chief Executive of the Millennium Dome!)

From Barr`s Hill, after taking A levels in English, French, History and Latin, I went to London, and King`s College, London University, to read English. But by then, I had written my first novel, in the evenings and at weekends, and it was accepted by Hutchinson the publisher, while I was in the 6th Form, and published just as I arrived at King`s. I received a great deal of, mainly unwelcome, publicity for this along the lines of ‘Schoolgirl Susan writes sex novel’ It shocked both my school teachers and my parents and caused me much embarassment. It took me a very long time to get over the sudden exposure to fame, and to live down the notoriety.

The Border Terrier, Beano, sitting on the step outside my writing room, June 14th 2001

I had written to the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, for advice, and both she and her husband, the novelist C.P. Snow were extremely kind to me while I was a student, inviting me to many of their celebrated literary parties at which I met literary stars such as W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot – a remarkable opportunity for an 18 or 19 year old !

I took my degree, having published another novel, (which was not well received ) and returned to Coventry, to write and edit and books pages for the local newspaper, and to move into my own flat. I wrote for the paper for 5 years, after which I was sacked, when a new editor was appointed, and I the had time to write another novel. GENTLEMAN AND LADIES was published in 1968 and was what I like to think of as the start of my real writing career – previously, I had been an apprentice. This was followed in quick succession by A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER, and then I`M THE KING OF THE CASTLE, THE ALBATROSS, STRANGE MEETING, THE BIRD OF NIGHT, A BIT OF SINGING AND DANCING and IN THE SPRINGTIME OF THE YEAR, all written and published between 1968 and 1974. I had moved into a house in Leamington Spa, fifteen miles from Stratford on Avon, in 1968. As I was heavily influenced by and hugely admiring of the work and personality and whole imaginative world of the composer Benjamin Britten, I visited his town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, in which I subsequently spent many winter months, writing. I also spent time for three consecutive summers in a rented cottage deep in the countryside on the Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire border, where I wrote I`M THE KING OF THE CASTLE – it is set in the same village and countryside.

I was married in 1975 to the Shakespeare Scholar Dr, later Professor, Stanley Wells and we lived in Stratford upon Avon, where he belonged to the Shakespeare Institute. Our first daughter, Jessica, was born in 1977 and the following year we moved to Oxford, when my husband took up his post as General Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare and a Fellow of Balliol College. We lived in Oxford itself for 2 years before moving to a wonderful cottage in a village 5 miles outside the city – still, then, a village with three working farms, cattle down the lanes, and many old inhabitants from very early Oxfordshire rural days. I wrote a book about our family country life there, in village, garden, kitchen, and about some of our neighbours – though many of the characters in THE MAGIC APPLE TREE were those I had known in other places such as Dorset, and transported to my home village. THE MAGIC APPLE TREE has become a firm favourite of English Country writing, and still sells a great many copies every year.

Our premature daughter Imogen was born in 1984, and died 5 weeks later. She is buried in the old graveyard behind the church of St Nicholas, Old Marston. My youngest daughter, Clemency, was born in 1985.

In 1990, we moved to a farmhouse set in 50 acres of the North Cotswold countryside.