A journalist once asked me when I began writing and I told him it was during Canada's centennial year (1967) but really it all started during World War 11 when I was an evacuee and wrote long letters home from Derbyshire. An avid reader long before that, I now found myself searching for just the right word to describe a wild flower, or to convey the texture, the smell, the feel of something.

It continued when I moved to Canada in l950, and wrote not only to my mother but to my sisters and friends. Most of my letters went un-mailed because I couldn't afford postage. Instead I kept them in a cardboard box, and read them from time to time. They became my journal of sorts.

I did write for publication back then - neat little articles about Toronto events and landmarks. Almost all returned as regularly as homing pigeons, but once in a while something was printed: a scrappy piece, half the size of my submission, my carefully chosen words altered or deleted.

A firm believer that perseverence pays off, I kept on writing in my spare time: novels, memoirs, essays. Somewhere in there was an attempt or two about my years as an evacuee. Then came Canada's l00th birthday and all over the country, communities, businesses and individuals were doing something to commemorate the occasion. By now I was married to Michael ( a former Londoner) who, like me, knew very little of this country we called home. And so, with a view to learning about it first hand, our personal centennial project was to explore Canada coast to coast with our three small daughters in a Volkswagen Campmobile with an attached tent. We had never camped before, didn't even own a barbecue, yet on only one occasion during our six weeks adventure (after an attack by black bears in the Rocky Mountains) did we resort to sleeping in a motel.

At last I had something worthwhile to write about. That trip spawned twenty or so travel articles, snapped up by Toronto newspapers. When, on the same day, two appeared on the front pages of travel sections in our leading Toronto newspapers, I was asked to write exclusively for the Globe and Mail. The contract, which lasted for 17 years, allowed me to travel to world-wide destinations.

In l99l my first book was published. A collection of Globe and Mail articles about Canada, it included material from that first cross-country trip. Next came regular guide books on Canada, a selection of Globe stories on Britain, and a how-to book giving travel tips to retirees.

Occasionally I wrote newspaper articles related to world war ll. I visited Hiroshima, and Jerusalem's holocaust museum, as well as battle sites and war museums around the world. For the fiftieth anniversary of the war's conclusion in 1995, I returned to places where I had lived as an evacuee, talking with people who were there in the l940s. Around this time it occurred to me that life on the home-front was a little known aspect of the war. Whenever travel assignments took me to Europe, or to countries I could reach via England, I stopped off at Leigh for a few days with my sister Violet and her husband Lionel, and conversations inevitably turned to our war years. Often, Lionel would give me a book or two he had found at boot sales, and these contributed further to my knowledge of the war. Finally, the time seemed right. I was approaching 80, and with the war's 70th anniversary looming I decided it was now or never. The result is Don't Forget To Write.

Although I travel less these days, I do write three or four magazine articles a year. Currently I am gathering material for a sequel about my family's post war years, when we continued to laugh and cry and muddle through the good times and bad.