Litnet

Veronica Cecil was born in British India, leaving at Independence when she was nine years old. After a miserable year in England her family emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1948. She was immediately sent to boarding school in Salisbury (Harare). Although the heat and light after gloomy England were wonderful, she had to come to terms with being a “pommie” and not really fitting in. It meant that she read the whole time and became the archetypical outsider. Boarding school in Johannesburg was unhappy, but the inception of apartheid forced her to think about race and human rights. Having worked in a shop for eight months after leaving school - a very important eye-opener - she accepted her parents’ offer of a one-way ticket to England in 1956 to train as a secretary. There, she started to go to drama classes and auditioned for drama schools. Having defied her parents and become an actress, she worked for a couple of years in weekly rep, where the play was changed every week! After that she got married and started having babies. Although her husband worked for a year in the Congo and another in Nigeria, they spent most of their married life in England and had four children. She started writing very early on in her marriage because it was something she could do at home. When her youngest child was four years old she managed to get regular commissions to write children’s plays for television. They were ironic spoofs on traditional fairy stories. She also wrote radio plays. After taking a degree in English and Drama as a mature student, she taught drama for a year or so and staged a couple of her own plays. Her husband died of a heart attack at the age of only 49. Having met and fallen in love with a radio presenter, she took up radio journalism. For several years she worked as a freelancer, recording, editing and presenting “packages” for programmes like Woman’s Hour, as well as scripted pieces for the radio. Eventually, however, after her partner’s death, she decided to try writing a book. Bongo Bongo Bongo is her first attempt. Veronica lives in London and has nine grandchildren.


Opgedateer/Updated: 2010-08-18
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