Biography

If you've got enough time on your hands to read the whole long biography of my life before 'Jenny Strange' then this page is the place for you. Read on to find out how it all started...

*THIS PAGE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION*

Creativity

I guess my somewhat awful childhood has made me the person that I am today; it has made me solitary, broken...erm...disturbed...and more than a little bitter, but it has also, most importantly, made me creative. From the moment I picked up a pen I was hooked; it was my weapon, the only way I could fight back and possibly break free from the 'cage' to which I was subjected, or at least a means of escape from the reality of it all.

My mother was my first inspiration for my drawing, although she couldn't draw for sh*t (sorry mum). At the early age of two I would often ask her to draw a picture for me so that I might colour it in (mostly it was deformed looking animals and odd-shaped ballerina's, but to me they had been masterpieces).

I had tried hard to copy her so-called 'art' and throughout the years I had somehow superseded her workings; now I was at school, now I was winning awards for my childhood paintings and depictations. I would draw anything; from a simple leaf to the lay of the landscape of my town. It made me happy, if only for the attention that it bought in my otherwise dull world.

So what about the writing? Drawing had been my first love, but I felt somewhat limited by what I could do; I would never be the next Van Gogh. It was sometime after I had turned 5 that I had found my real talent. If drawing was my 'first love,' writing was my 'discovery of adultery,' that is to say that it felt naughty, it felt wrong, I was drawing upon all my fantasies and writing them into words, it was my dirty little secret and I was an addict.

"The first piece of fiction that I ever wrote was a letter saying that I was running away from home. I was six years old and I wanted it to be real"

How it came to be

You'd be mistaken however if you thought it were simply just some of my mum's drawings and the passing of time that made me the writer I am today, for it was a lot more complex than that. Below is the timeline of my life, in its most basic form, for if I were to write about all the horrors I bore witness to (ha-ha!) it would take an eternity.

1982

It was on a Saturday, early September 1982, (which I guess means I was conceived around New Years' Eve) in the grim shire of Derby that I was born. Created by two Protestant Northern-Irish parents I was the first in my known family to be born in England. Named after an 80's American fictional television/film character aka Jennifer Hart I was a problem child from the start. I cried and I hardly ever slept; distant memories of wearing hideous orange and brown hand-knitted sweaters under ugly floral dresses is probably enough to make any kid unhappy.

Blessed (or cursed) with the hugest capacity of long-term memory you have ever witnessed (I presume) I have always had the innate ability to withhold almost everything that has ever happened to me. One of my earliest memories falls back on 1982, the memory of my own childhood vaccinations. Yes, my very first memory is being jabbed in the arse with a sharp needle, and they wonder why I'm disturbed?

You may or may not find it strange that I can remember being less than one year old, indeed I can even recall the house I lived in right down to the vomit-inducing brown wallpaper and orange formica cupboards. I also remember the first time I nearly died (yep, shocking isn't it?). I was six months old and I remember being ill from food poisoning, I also remember my parents calling an ambulance and myself wondering what all the commotion was about whilst I puked down my front.

1984

In 1984 I was flown off to Belfast, my first trip on a plane. My dad had been working almost non-stop, saving for a mortgage so that we may escape our two-bed house on a council estate in Sinfin, Derby, he and my mum went to Belfast for the birth of my sister. It was a strange time for I never really understood why my dad flew his pregnant wife and his young daughter (me) off to their home country, leaving us there with relatives and flying back home again on his own to continue working. Indeed I had often pondered if my sister and I were adopted for there were never any photographs of my mum being pregnant and in my photographic memory I cannot recall her being so, but I guess with the existence of birth certificates that theory was later abandoned.

After my sister was born we all returned to our Sinfin home and life continued as normal. We were poor and our belongings were basic but in those days we got by and everyone else on the estate pretty much did the same. 

1985

I hadn't yet attended nursery as my mum had left her factory job and become a full-time housewife when I was born (thinking back this may have been where my lack of social skills came from!). I was almost three when I had my first interaction with another child; I met my first friend. This occurred, whilst playing as kids do, outside in the play area that lay on a green directly in front of our house. In those days people were naive and young children were often left to their own devices playing on the lawn or out on their street.

The girls' name was Becca, we'll call her Becca just incase she doesn't want to be mentioned on my website, and I often wondered later in my life if it were not the same Becca I met three more times and by coincidence (fate, if it exists, often has a way of bringing me to places and people).