I was born in Liverpool in September 1943 and was the only child of Joseph and Monica Ormesher. Joseph was a talented commercial artist but was engaged on Active Service and killed on D-Day, 6 June 1944, when I was just nine months old.

My mother married again when I was three and Frank Moore was, as I have always fondly maintained, ‘my Dad’. Monica, my mother, was a hairdresser and Frank a policeman so I did not have what could be called ‘a literary background’ – more working class.

I was educated at the Convent of Notre Dame, Everton Valley, going on to commercial college at seventeen and becoming a secretary.

In 1967 I married Robert Andrews, who was, like Dad, a policeman, and in 1970 I had triplets, two sons and a daughter.

It wasn’t until the children went to school that I began my writing career and I was astounded and thrilled at having my first novel accepted and published, never having written anything other than letters to friends and relations before.

In the intervening years, as well as writing several historical novels, I have written forty successful sagas, set in my native city of Liverpool, as well as in Southern Ireland where I lived for eleven years, and the Isle of Man, where I live now.