Elizabeth Lindsay

Childhood

I was born in Leicester in 1947 and grew up in Southampton. As a child I loved animals, especially horses and used to ride the Corporation carthorses bareback in their field. Although big, the horses were gentle and I never fell off. I once tried riding bullocks but they hated me on their backs and bucked me off.

Aged eight I went exploring down a hole in the road. When I climbed out I ran my leg over a flint split by a workman's pneumatic drill and sharp as a razor. The cut went from below my knee to my foot. It took fourteen stitches to sew it up. I ignored holes in the road after that and took to climbing trees instead. I liked swimming and racing on my bike but best of all I enjoyed riding horses.

Although very much an outdoor girl I did a lot of reading. Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" and Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" were my favourite books and I would love to have been able to fly like Peter Pan.

Grown Up

When I left school I went to The Central School of Speech and Drama where I trained as a teacher. I worked with the Flying Phoenix, Theatre in Education team and the Ipswich Arts Theatre in Education team and I wrote, devised and acted in drama programmes taken into schools.

I learnt to operate puppets with the Playboard Puppet Theatre Company and was a puppeteer in the long running A.T.V. series Pipkins. I played Topov the Monkey and Octavia the zany French Ostrich. I wrote several Radio Drama plays and many B.B.C. School Radio scripts and stories for Radio 5.

I scripted two series of HEGGERTY HAGGERTY for Yorkshire Television, which were read by George Cole, and eight of the stories were turned into picture books. Altogether I have written over thirty books.

Recently I have written scripts for THE HOOBS, a pre-school television series for Channel 4, and a Children's Opera Libretto for the Music Box Company in Bristol, which I also directed. I live in Gloucestershire, write in an attic with a view stretching to the Severn Estuary, and have given up climbing trees and riding horses but still read lots and lots of books. First thing every morning I go for a walk with my dog and a notebook so I can think and write down my ideas.