Michael Lawrence's website

Picture this. Autumn 1943. England. The county of Huntingdonshire. A substantial ivy-covered house with willow-shrouded grounds sloping down to a quiet stretch of the River Ouse. A woman, between floors, gives birth to a son on the stairs. The kid dropped on the stair-carpet was me. Sadly, I’ve never known whether my mother was going up or down at the time. I feel it might have made quite a difference to my life to know which way I was heading from my first scream. 




A pair of old ruins in Rome: the Colosseum and me, 2007


The house was not owned by my family. My grandfather managed the local paper mill and the house went with the job. As well as my grandparents, it was home to my mother, my older brother, my cousin, and two aunts. We kept chickens, and had a beautiful white nanny goat called Flo. My earliest memory (or the memory I think of as my earliest) was of the river view from my bedroom in an upper corner of the house. That view, that room, that house, along with the village and neighbouring market town, can be read about in the three volumes of The Aldous Lexicon (The Withern Rise Trilogy in the US).

Before the end of the Forties my immediate branch of the family moved to the county of Middlesex, first to a ‘prefab’, then to a pebbledashed council house in Sudbury. My father was a rather flamboyant musician. A trombonist, his passion was big band music, though he earned most of his living contributing to the rather softer sounds of Mantovani’s Orchestra. In the 1950s, Mantovani had a regular Sunday afternoon television series. The family would gather round the TV to pick my dad out. He always sat next to the aisle because he didn’t like to feel cramped. Curiously, whenever I go to the cinema or a show I sit next to the aisle so I can fidget and stretch my legs…


 

I wasn’t brilliant at school, but I was quite good at Art and English. In my teens I spent a couple of years at Ealing School of Art before taking a job as a trainee graphic designer at the London HQ of Wiggins Teape, the papermakers. While there I was invited to join the new photographic unit as assistant to the photographer who’d just been hired. I went on to work as a freelance photographer, which I describe in my memoir of the period, Milking the Novelty. I pursued other careers and lines of work in the years that followed. While doing so, I wrote constantly – stories, novels, plays, TV sitcoms, poems – but it wasn't until1994 that I finally had a book accepted: a novel for children called When the Snow Falls. The book came out the following year, appeared in very few shops, sold just a few thousand copies, and quickly went out of print, but its publication suggested a direction that I hadn’t previously considered with any seriousness - writing for the young - so I followed that path to see where it might take me, and here I am, still strolling along it all these years later. People tempted to give The Aldous Lexicon a try might be interested to hear that the first book of the trilogy is a rewrite for older readers of When the Snow Falls, whose subject – alternative versions of single lives and situations – seemed to me one worth exploring in more detail.

I now live in Devon, England, with my partner of a great many years. We have a 23-year-old daughter. My 38-year-old son and daughter-in-law have three children, the eldest of whom is ten - which of course makes me a doddering old twit. 

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All written material and photographs on this website are by Michael Lawrence unless otherwise attributed.
Book illustrations copyright the artists credited, or their publishers.