Novelist whose life has been stranger than fiction

May 13, 2024

Novelist whose life has been stranger than fiction

One day in the early 1980s, Ann Evan's artist husband Alan drew a picture of a girl with swept-back hair and large, sad eyes. "I asked him who she was, and he said he didn't know - he'd been scribbling and it just came out of his head."

Ann loved the picture, so framed it and hung it on the wall on the landing of their home on the Cheshire/Welsh border near Wrexham. And then something strange happened.

"I woke in the night and thought I could hear one of my two daughters - who were then aged 12 and 14 - crying. I went into their rooms, but they were both fast asleep. The same thing happened the following night. On the third night, one of my daughters came in to me and said she thought she'd heard me crying!"

The next day, Ann was wiping over the picture and noticed wetness on the inside of the frame. "It was probably condensation, but it really looked as if the girl in the picture had been crying. After what had happened the previous nights, it really sent a chill through me."

Thoroughly spooked, Ann bundled up the picture, put it away in a drawer and tried to forget about it.

Thirty years later, in 2015, when she sat down to write her first novel, the drawing of the girl with the sad eyes pushed back into her memory - and Ann transposed that strange, long-ago experience into the opening pages of the book, titled The Legacy.

The setting, though, had switched to Aberdyfi - and to the large white house on the hillside above St Peter's Church where Ann lived as a teenager.

The Legacy revolves around the occupants of the house, spanning four decades from the 1960s. Part-thriller, part-romance, with a smattering of the supernatural, it's a compelling read. Self-published, it has sold some 100 copies and garnered good reviews. It's also been chosen by book clubs in the area.

"I decided to start writing after I retired from running a coffee shop in Ellesmere, Shropshire, where I lived for some time," explains Ann, who now lives in Bryncrug. "I thought about the drawing of the girl - I still had it then, although I don't any longer; I don't know what happened to it - and the novel formed around that."

The drawing of the girl with sad eyes

Almost as soon as she'd finished The Legacy, Ann wrote her second novel, The Foundling, a much darker story, set in a village on the Welsh/Cheshire border, but just as engrossing.

"I don't start writing with a plot in mind; I have a seed in my brain and then the rest just happens," says Ann who's two-thirds of the way through her third book, The Blindside.

"The characters just come to me as I write and, similarly, things just happen to them. Even I don't know what's coming next."

One thing Ann certainly didn't know would happen in real life was that she would reunite with her first love after exactly half a century apart.

'"I moved to Aberdyfi in May 1965 when I was 14 and my father became headmaster of the primary school, a post he held for 20 years, and not long afterwards I met Paul at school in Tywyn, where he was a boarder. It was an intense relationship, but after a year together he announced he was moving to Khartoum in Sudan; his father - a professor of agriculture at Aberystwyth University - had got a job at the university there. A week after telling me, he was gone, leaving me heartbroken."

Although they wrote to each other for months, they eventually lost touch due to a misunderstanding and, soon afterwards at Wrexham College, Ann met Alan.

Both Ann's novels feature an unplanned teenage pregnancy - something she herself experienced. "I was 18 when I became pregnant. This was the 1960s, and when my parents found out they sent me to live with an aunt in Plymouth so that I wouldn't 'bring shame' on the family. I was supposed to have the child there and give it up for adoption."

But Ann was determined to keep her baby, and she and Alan married a month before their daughter Alana was born. For several months they lived in a caravan in Plympton and Alan worked as a window cleaner. "We hardly had any money, so I quickly learned how to get bargains, such as going into the butcher's and asking for bones for the dog I didn't have, which I could boil up to make soup."

Later the couple moved to Farndon, near Wrexham, where Alan grew up, and there they stayed for more than 30 years. Two years after having Alana, Ann gave birth to her second daughter, Sadie. In the years that followed, Ann managed a children's nursery and then ran the coffee shop.

Although married tor Alan for 46 years, the relationship wasn't a happy one and the couple finally separated in 2016. All through the decades, Ann had never forgotten her first love, Paul - and in 1999, out of the blue, she heard from him again.

"One day a message pinged in from him on Friends Reunited. He was living in Berlin and was married for the second time with three children," remembers Ann. After that, they kept in touch sporadically as friends until in 2015 they started chatting on Facebook. In 2016, Paul's marriage ended and later that year he and Ann met up - on Aberystwyth promenade - 50 years to the day since Paul had left for Khartoum. "The years just melted away," she recalls fondly.

With her own marriage over, Ann moved back to Aberdyfi. She and Paul, who was still living in Germany, conducted a long-distance relationship for a while, until one day he rang her and asked: "What would you say if I came to live with you?" And so, seven years ago, they finally moved in together, living first in Aberdyfi and then moving to Bryncrug.

So how has the area changed since the 1960s?

"One of the big changes is the increase in the number of second homes and holiday lets," says Ann. "It's a contentious issue, I know, but these have created a huge reservoir of employment in the area. With the new regulations regarding second homes and the likely implementation of the Article 4 Direction later this year, the council is in danger of devouring the hand that feeds it. Times change, dynamics change, and we can't turn the clock back - nor should we try. Rather, we should embrace the community that Tywyn and its satellite villages have become, and which otherwise would no longer be sustainable. As writing novels doesn't really pay, I still clean one of the those holiday lets!"

For several years, Ann has been struggling to complete her third novel, which she describes as darker still than The Foundling, but feels that at last she's making progress. "I've managed to finish off some of the bits that had been bothering me - and I've also worked out who the killer is!"

One suspects The Blindside won't have a happy ending - but in real life, Ann finally achieved hers!

* The Legacy and The Foundling are available to buy for £7.99 at ArtWorks Aberdyfi or directly from Ann, who can be contacted at: annie27965@gmail.com. The Legacy can also be bought on Amazon (£9.99) and both are available on Kindle.