"Baroness James of Holland Park, better known as PD James, or the "Queen of Crime", whose novels crossed over into mainstream fiction, once said that success had come to her 30 years too late. The early years of her married life were an impoverished nightmare in which she scraped a living as a National HEALTH clerk while bringing up two daughters and caring for a mentally ill husband. Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford in 1920, the eldest of three children of an Inland Revenue officer, Sidney Victor James, and his wife, Dorothy. She had mixed memories of childhood; she wasn't close to her younger sister and brother, and her parents didn't get on. Her father was not affectionate – INDEED he sometimes frightened her, though later in life she admired his bravery and independence. "But they're not qualities that are important to a child," she said. "What a child wants is love and affection – oh, and approval and generosity. My father was a very mean man." She was an anxious child, who thought of herself in the third person – as a character in a novel – to help herself get to sleep at night. She did remember pleasant summer holidays when the family would camp in her father's First World War army tent on the cliffs outside the fishing village of Lowestoft in East Anglia and EXPLORE the area by bus and on foot. The area drew her for the rest of her life. Although she spent most of her time in London, she had a cottage in Southwold in Suffolk, and East Anglia inspired several of her novels: "My books hardly ever start with an ingenious method of murder. Almost always the idea for a BOOK comes to me as a reaction to a particular place and setting. In East Anglia I love the wide skies, the marshes, the estuaries, the little villages. Not pretty, but full of character." Her father was a restless man and the family moved from Oxford to Ludlow to Cambridge. She was educated at Cambridge Girls' HIGH SCHOOL. She did WELL in English – her teacher was a Miss Dalgliesh – and as a teenager decided she wanted to be a writer. She was, she admitted, "a terrible intellectual snob." But she was obliged to leave school at the age of 16. "My father was not well off, and not disposed to educate girls," she recalled. "In those days, parents had to pay school fees." Instead he got his daughter a job in the tax office. She was "dreadfully miserable" until she found more enjoyable work as an assistant stage manager at Cambridge Festival Theatre, a job she hoped might help her into a career as a playwright. She was 19 at the outbreak of the Second World War and started work as a Red Cross nurse. Two years later she married Connor Bantry White, a medical student. They had their first daughter, Clare, in 1942. She vividly recalled sleeping in a friend's basement near the hospital waiting for her second daughter to be born in the summer of 1944 at the height of the V-1 rocket attacks on London." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/pd-james-novelist-and-public-servant-who-began-as-a-crime-writer-but-whose-work-crossed-over-into-mainstream-fiction-9888650.html
