"I think there's a creative gene in my family, and it's from my father's side. Her father, Keith Thomson, a failed playwright, walked out on the family when she was 10, losing contact with Rose and her older sister Joanna for many years. Tremain's grandparents were well off, and her own childhood was split between a "rather ordinary" London home and holidays in the country house where they kept servants. "All her life had to fight against the notion of her own unlovability," Tremain wrote in a recent newspaper article. Her mother Viola, known as Jane, was the least favourite child of parents who lost two sons (one to illness, one in the second world war).
But invention is really the clue to everything." "There's this old adage which I used to try to get my students to ignore - write about what you know, because then your characters and stories will be inhabited. "A lot of writers start from the premise of their own lives," Tremain says, in the large sitting room of her home on the outskirts of Norwich. "It was so unlike most people's first novels, in the sense that it didn't seem to be in the least bit autobiographical." "I remember feeling utterly thrilled when I read it," says Penelope Hoare, who has been Tremain's editor ever since. The stories she wrote in her 20s were rejected by the literary magazines she sent them to, and her first novel, Sadler's Birthday (1976), which describes the reminiscences of a retired butler, had done the rounds as well by the time it landed on the desk of a young editor at Macdonald and Jane's. The author of three collections of short stories and nine novels, the latest of which, The Colour, is published this month, knew then that she was a writer, although she didn't publish any fiction until she was 33. and it seemed to me then that my life would be a life in which this process of describing and identifying feelings would play a part."
"I remember standing in the middle of a very beautiful hayfield with the sun going down and thinking that I didn't want just to describe how beautiful I thought that place was but I wanted to write down all my feelings about it, and then try to make some equation between that place and what I felt about it and what hopes I had for my own life. A t the age of 11, while at boarding school, Rose Tremain experienced an epiphany.
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