Some of the former teachers at Lewes Priory in the early 1980s might be surprised to learn that one of the naughtiest girls in class has since made her mark as a highly-respected international journalist and novelist.
And the good news is that after spending several years in the United States before settling in Oxford, sometime in the not-too-distant future, Lucy Atkins will be returning to Lewes and making her home in the town she loves.
Lucy laughingly admits that as a pupil in secondary school, she was something of a disruptive element. But when she moved to sixth form college in Brighton, she developed her love of reading and thanks to excellent A-level grades, she gained a university place at Oxford.
“I wasn’t one of Lewes Priory’s most promising pupils,” she says with a wry smile. “I was kind of naughty and defiant.
“One day I brought home my school report and noticed the word belligerent. I didn’t know then what it meant so looked it up in the dictionary and realised it was actually a fairly accurate way of describing me!
“When I went to BHASVIC sixth form college, I found the more grown-up, independent learning environment suited me much better. There was nothing to kick against so I became more academic. I applied to Oxford and was surprised and thrilled to be accepted – it was a kind of turn around momet for me.
“I really did enjoy Oxford. I’d initially thought it would be posh and awful but in fact there were lots of people like me and it was a very creative time there for me. I had a really good professor and the curriculum was very traditional, reading massive amounts of the classic books and authors.”
Lucy did so well at Oxford that she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship which saw her head for the United States to study for a Masters degree at the University of Pennsylvania.
“When I came back I worked in the non-profit sector, for Amnesty International, which I very much enjoyed but found I was missing books and literature,” she says.
“I’d always wanted to write – I actually wrote my first novel when I was nine. That impulse was always there but I didn’t think it could be for me and learning the actual craft of writing took me years and years.
“I started to do some articles for the Times Literary Supplement and that’s when I took a chance and stepped away from ‘proper’ employment to become a freelance writer. I
was very lucky because that was a part-time job and in those days newspapers had more money and bigger budgets for freelances, so I got plenty of work.
“When I had my first baby, my husband John and I went to live in Seattle and that allowed me to build up my freelance career. I was writing articles for all the main UK newspapers like the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, and several magazines. I suppose my one regret is never going into a full-time editorial job, which wasn’t possible because we had moved abroad.”
Lucy had her second baby while she and John were living in Seattle and it was then she came across the concept of doulas – birth companions who support women before birth, during labour and after birth, providing emotional, informational and physical support. Meghan Markle is believed to have enlisted the services of a doula.
Julia Guderian became Lucy’s doula for her second pregnancy and she found it so helpful that she decided to write a book with her. The result was Blooming Birth, outlining how Julia and the process had helped Lucy achieve the pregnancy and birth she so wanted, and the book proved to be a great success.
Now back in the UK and living in Oxford with her husband and three children, although planning to make her home in Lewes again before too long, Lucy has established a well-deserved reputation
as a highly-regarded journalist specialising in parenting and health.
She also won acclaim for several award-winning non-fiction books, including First Time Parent and The Cancer Survivor’s Companion, but she always had a yearning to have a novel published.
“That was my dream but for a long time I didn’t think I had it in me,” she explains. “I didn’t have confidence in my creative abilities so I used to do it in secret. I did write a novel but it was the kind that gets pushed to the bottom of a drawer, as happens with a lot of budding authors.
“Then when I was approaching my 40th birthday, I was at a party with old friends and one said she had always thought I would become a novelist.
“I crumbled up inside. I realised I didn’t want to be lying on my deathbed regretting that I hadn’t at least tried. So I gave myself a present of doing a Masters in creative writing at Bath.
“It was a real transformation – I think non-fiction had always been inside me but the course gave me the skills you need if you are going to do it well. It’s where my first published novel came from.”
Success as a novelist didn’t come immediately for Lucy, however.
“While we were living in America I was commissioned by a magazine to do an article about a sex course at a luxury resort in Arizona and I even persuaded my husband to go along. As you can imagine, it was hilarious. So when I decided to write a novel, I based it on that.
“It turned out to be a comic novel and I showed it to the agent I had for my non-fiction books. Unfortunately she was completely crushing about it, wasn’t at all interested.
“I just crumbled but went away and carried on writing in secret. I realised I had to write a new one that was much darker, full of suspense, something which was much more my kind of thing.
“I approached a different agent, Judith, who looked at my work and took me on. She has been amazing and it was a great decision on my part.
“I was really lucky. My first two novels, The Missing One and The Other Child, were psychological suspense stories about family secrets and coincided with the big momentum created when Gone Girl written by Gillian Flynn first came out as they happened to be in a similar vein.”
Lucy’s third novel, The Night Visitor was published in 2017 and is broadly set in Sussex, capturing the essence of the local countryside and based around a house just like Iford Manor which she knew as a child and had lodged in her imagination. The main characters meet in a cafe that bears a strong resemblance to the Flint Bakery on Lewes High Street.
The novel Lucy is writing now is a psychodrama set in Oxford, where she lives with husband John and their three children – Izzie who is now 20, 18-year-old Sam and Ted who is now 15.
But as soon as Ted finishes school, their plan is to return to Lewes, where Lucy’s parents still live.
“We have a house on Chapel Hill and I visit Lewes regularly to see my parents, who are now in their 80s. In fact one of the windows in the house looks into the bedroom of my home in Lewes when I was a teenager.
“Although I’ve raised my family in Oxford, Lewes is still home to me and always will be.
“And I’d like to apologise to all my former teachers at Lewes Priory for all the trouble and embarrassment I caused!”
