O NE OF the loveliest, but, at the same time, most difficult things about growing up is making and developing childhood friendships.

For Veronica Henry however, this was never an option because every couple of years young Veronica had to up sticks, say goodbye to her friends and move to pastures new.

Veronica's dad was an officer in the Army whose postings took his wife and young family to places around the UK and abroad. Veronica, however, quickly adapted to her peripatetic childhood and found solace in libraries in every town and city her father was stationed and her friends became the books she engrossed herself in.

Favourites authors such as Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables, and Laura Ingalls Wilder author of Little House On The Prairie, were some of the first writers to capture her imaginative, followed by the wonderful children's writer Joan Aiken who wrote Black Hearts In Battersea as part of her Wolves Of Willoughby Chase series.

When Veronica was 11 she began her formal education at a boarding school in Bath and although she doesn't have lots of happy memories of her time there it was here that she made some lifelong friends with whom she still keeps in touch.

Veronica was quite an academic student and although she really enjoyed English she decided it was not a subject she would take at A-level. "I loved reading novels and poetry but when I had to dissect and over-analyse a piece of literature it kind of lost the essence of what I enjoyed about it," she said.

Instead of English Veronica took A-level Latin, French and History at St Bartholomew's in Newbury and went on to study Classics at Bristol University. It was Bristol's Era Club however, where Veronica did most of her learning and believes her experiences there were the ones which taught her more about life than anything she learned at university.

One night a week Veronica would run the Era Club putting on painting exhibitions, music nights and fashion shows and describes this period of her life as "enjoying a great party one day every week". Partying put paid to her academic studies and when she was 19 she decided to pack it all in and move with her boyfriend, Peter, who she had met while he was playing in a band at the club, to his hometown, Bromsgove in Worcestershire.

Shortly after moving Peter "packed her off to secretarial college" where she embarked on a trilingual secretarial course and when she completed her course she applied for a job as a production secretary working on the BBC Radio 4 drama series, The Archers.

Prior to her interview Peter drove Veronica around Worcester, the area in which Ambridge is loosely based, visiting the Old Bull pub in Inkberrow, on which the Bull in Ambridge is also based. The research trip proved successful when Veronica was offered the job.

As an indie, post-punk girl, Peter had to buy Veronica some suitable attire to start her new career with the BBC working for William Smethurst who had a huge influence in shaping her future. "William was a real inspiration in my life. He was a fantastic storyteller who knew the importance of creating great characters and I learnt so much from him," she said. William was quick to realise Veronica's potential, giving her more responsibility and an opportunity to try her hand at script writing.

During the summer, members of the Archer's cast would attend local agricultural shows to promote the show and meet their fans. Visitors to the shows were able to record short scripts, which Veronica had written, with favourite cast members and these short scripts helped Veronica to develop her talent.

When William was "poached" by the TV soap, Crossroads, to revamp it to create a more compelling series he took Veronica along with him as his script editor. After a two-year stint at Crossroads Veronica and Peter decided it was time to start a family and so with the contacts she had made she started working as a freelance script writer for the TV series Boon, Heartbeat and a new soap, Family Affairs, which was commissioned for Channel 5.

When her first son, Jacob, arrived in 1990 followed by her second son, Sam, in 1996 Veronica had started writing proposal documents developing new ideas for TV.

The documents, which were narrative descriptions of various characters and a break down of how they would fit within the story, was something Veronica relished writing. When a producer told her that her narratives read like a novel Veronica decided to explore the possibility of writing her first novel.

After badgering her TV agent about the possibility of writing a novel and being told to "go for it", Veronica began writing her first novel, Honeycote, set in a fictional Cotswold village. With all the ingredients of a Dallas-style soap — jealousy, ambition and family rows with a great big dollop of raunchiness — her novel impressed her literary agent and in 2002 Honeycote was published. Veronica immediately set about writing her second novel, Making Hay, which she completed at a friend's flat in North Devon drawing inspiration from "the acres of golden sand and miles of shimmering sea" on full view from the room where she wrote.

Veronica was so enamoured with North Devon that she ended up buying her own sea-side retreat where she escaped to write for two years. The family then moved permanently to Woolacombe in 2002 when she was pregnant with third son, Paddy. The village gave her the inspiration and setting to write the hugely successful Love On The Rocks and her most recent book, the highly acclaimed The Beach Hut, published by Orion Books. This follows the stories of the people who own the beach huts, families who come to Everdene each year, people who fall in — or out of — love, remembering their pasts, or trying to forget them. With her fantastic style of writing, Veronica has brilliantly drawn together the comings and goings of life at the beach huts over one long, hot, lazy summer and readers will be hooked from page one.

Anyone who has not yet had a chance to lose themselves in a cracking Veronica Henry novel should put the Beach Hut on their book list because they will not be disappointed. Now aged 47, Veronica still has plenty of ideas for more books and having read the Beach Hut, I can't wait for the next.

For more information about Veronica Henry and her novels and to catch up her twitter updates log on to: www.veronicahenry.co.uk