I attended QEHS as a sixth former from 1987-89. At that time the school didn't have performing arts status, but there was a very strong drama department that put on two productions a year, and trained their young performers to the highest standards. Before QEHS I hated school, and my parents only persuaded me to stay on and do A-levels by saying that this school was practically a drama school. For me, it was. It introduced me to Shakespeare, Chekhov (my choice), Dennis Potter (their choice), Dario Fo, countless other writers, musical theatre, and every aspect of the stage. It let me develop my love and obsession with the written and spoken word.

I had every intention of becoming an actress, but real life got in the way, and with two A-levels to my name (Theatre Studies and English) I embraced it hungrily: I became a psychiatric nurse. After three apprentice years of birthing babies, sitting with the dying, talking down the suicidal, and calming the violent, I heard myself telling my nurse-tutor: I'm going to be a poet. And he replied Well, I'm sure the tax payer would be delighted to hear that.

I DID work as a nurse, for three years, and loved it. At the same time I did a BA with the Open University and all the book-learning I'd shunned as a teenager bolted out of me and into me. I was a first class student (finally). I then went to South Dakota to live with friends who believed I really should 'be' a poet, and completed an MA as I wrote. By the end of that year I won some money from the 'Society of Authors' which enabled me, back in London and teaching English as a second language, to quit my job and chase my favourite student to Italy. He married me, and we now live in Rome.