Five Fun Facts - Lynn Bushell

I started writing in the days when you graduated from a pencil and notepad to an Olivetti. Mine was a sixteenth birthday present and from then on we were a couple. Like the subject of my book - the artist Stanley Spencer, whose second wife took her lesbian lover on the honeymoon - I took the Olivetti on mine. My new husband and I were boating on Lake Coniston when the inevitable happened and the Olivetti fell over the side. I managed to rescue it and dry it out, but from then on until I finally ditched it twenty years later, every time I pressed the 'w' a tiny splash of water appeared on the page.

We all have fantasies. Might is that I might one day be so famous that I'll be invited onto 'Desert Island Discs.' Since, like most writers, I've been living on an island all my life, I think it might well suit me. I've already got my records lined up. I don't need company, I'm used to talking to myself and if I do feel lonely, well, I'll have the trees to talk to. 

I have a phobia about having my photograph taken. Anyone looking through our family albums in the future will assume that my children were brought up by my husband and the dog, which isn't too far from the truth.

When I was eighteen I spent a summer vacation as a night nurse in a home for retired nuns. I realised then that the experience called for a novel and I don't know why I haven't written it.

Thanks to my grandfather, who was a veteran of the trenches, I learnt to play gin rummy long before I could put a sentence together. I could have made a living as a croupier by the time I was eight. I still hold this in reserve as a job.