Festive Feature: Sue Moorcroft

Welcome to a very special Festive Feature on my blog, where every day up until Christmas some of my favourite authors will be sharing what they love most about the festive season, including their favourite films, food, music, presents, memories, books…Plus much more!

It is with huge excitement that I welcome to fantastic Sue Moorcroft to my blog today. Over to you, Sue..

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Although I’m not now a great Christmas fan (which makes me wonder how I ended up writing a Christmas novel and a Christmas serial this year), when I was a child it was a magical time, as it should be.

As I was part of an army family I was brought up in Germany, Cyprus and Malta as well as the UK. We left the last of these overseas postings, Malta, when I was eight-and-a-half. Of those years I’d spent nearly five of them in Malta so I thought it was home and left a chunk of my heart behind (which is what has led me to setting my latest book there, The Wedding Proposal).

We came ‘home’ the UK in mid-January and it must have been a challenge for our parents to find us all Christmas presents that could almost immediately be packed into ‘the boxes’. These were six packing crates that constituted the family entitlement whenever we moved countries. They left ahead of us and arrived after us and meantime we lived out of three big suitcases. It doesn’t sound much fun as I write it now but then it was just situation normal.

When I asked for a spacehopper for that final Christmas I should imagine the idea was fallen upon with joy. Yes! Something light that could be deflated and squashed down for packing. It wasn’t expensive and I’d wear myself out boinging around on it. (Always desirable. I think I was an annoying child.)

Christmas morning arrived and the spacehopper – the same pink as an enormous bubblegum bubble – was inflated and waiting for me. I bounced around the house, getting on everybody’s nerves, until Boxing Day, when I was allowed to take it out on the parade ground (no drill was taking place) and let rip. I loved that spacehopper. It dumped me on my behind a few times but gravel burns were all part of the fun.

Fast forward two months and we were living in barracks in north London. It was the coldest winter for years and I hated the UK. I wanted Malta back. Sleet, snow, frost, fog: I felt like my new school uniform looked when Mum brought it in from the washing line – frozen stiff. Then the boxes arrived and there was my spacehopper! A few minutes with my brother’s bicycle pump and me and Hoppy were back in business, boinging around a different parade ground like a cross between bubblegum and a grasshopper.

And it kept me warm!

A very big thank you to Sue for this lovely Festive post. ♥

Sue Moorcroft writes romantic novels of dauntless heroines and irresistible heroes. Is this Love? was nominated for the Readers’ Best Romantic Read Award. Love & Freedom won the Best Romantic Read Award 2011 and Dream a Little Dream was nominated for a RoNA in 2013. Sue received three nominations at the Festival of Romance 2012, and is a Katie Fforde Bursary Award winner. She’s a past vice chair of the RNA and editor of its two anthologies.