About Jenny

Jenny has written stories all her life. By the time she finished her teens she’d completed three novels. The last one became the basis for three published novels: Circle of Shadows, Circle of Fire and Branded!

1st defining moment in Jenny’s life:

With bombs dropping all around, Jenny was born in a nursing home not far from Windsor Castle. She came into the world six weeks early. The reason was there was another baby on the way. The twins were so small it was touch and go if they would live. When one of their aunties saw them, she went home and weighed the cat.

Being a twin is very important to Jenny.

The girls grew up with stories, poems and songs – but also with discrimination. They were brought up in an English pub. Some children’s mothers felt pub kids were not suitable friends for their own children to play with. But the twins had one another, their little boy cousin, a rambling house, a big garden and fields and woods to play in.

2nd defining moment: Crossing the Border.

Jenny and her twin moved to Glasgow to live with their parents, their Grandmother and an elderly, unmarried aunt who sewed the girls’ dresses and stuck scratchy pins in them during the fittings. More discrimination: English accents in Scotland. Jenny and Margaret are only half Scottish, although their grandfather had always spoken Scots. Their granny was Orcadian and proud of it. Pictures of her farm in the Orkneys have pride of place in Jenny’s house in Edinburgh.

Crossing borders became an important theme for Jenny. In her teens she started to write to a Polish lady in a displaced person’s camp in Northern Germany. Jenny’s first published writings were newspaper articles about people from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania who could never return to their own countries, but had no passport or citizen’s rights in the West.

3rd defining moment:

1961. Jenny worked in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein as a student volunteer helping families and single people in the camps. Her Mum sent a letter saying that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. This progressive illness overshadowed Jenny’s life for the next nineteen years. In Germany Jenny visited her Polish pen-friend and learnt her first words of Polish. She left Germany on a small cargo boat on 14th August – the day after the authorities had sealed off the Berlin Wall, cutting Germany in two and dividing families.

With the Iron Curtain firmly in place it seemed as if countries “Beyond the Border” (the title of Jenny’s first book of poems) were cut off for ever. But back in Glasgow Jenny met Stuart who had just spent the summer in Russia and Poland. “You’ve been to Poland? Jenny gasped. “Tell me all about Poland!” Stuart looked puzzled and pleased. “Would you like to learn Polish?” he asked.

Those words have defined the rest of Jenny’s life. They started a romance which became a marriage of 43 years and a life spent caring for people oppressed by totalitarian regimes, plus work and travels in Russia, Poland, Ukraine. Books, books, many books…

Two more defining moments: one for sorrow, one for joy.

Jenny’s lovely daughter whose life was full of talent and promise, developed a severe illness of the mind called schizophrenia. But she has had a daughter, Jenny’s grand-daughter, now a young teenager and as much a joy and delight to her grandparents as she was that day when, inside the gloomy ward of a mental hospital, Jenny saw the crumpled print-out of her pre-birth scan.