Sue Reed
Born in West Sussex but migrated north and wore many hats...
Sue Reed was born in the early sixties in Worthing, West Sussex with a childhood spent on pebble beaches, roaming the South Downs, camping and playing in her Nan and Grandads’ garden.
She loves modern foreign languages and was all set to study French and German at university when fate took a hand. Never being a fan of PE lessons, it was suggested by her sixth form college teachers that Wednesday afternoons were spent at a local special school to make better use of her time. There, she fell in love with a little lad on the Autistic Spectrum and decided on a change of course. In 1981 she moved to West London to begin her teaching degree. She graduated in 1984 with a B.Ed in ‘The Teaching of the Mentally Handicapped’ as it was known then.
Whilst at college, she had a best friend, Jane with whom she shared a flat and many adventures. Jane has now sadly passed away due to breast cancer, but her memory lives on, and Sue has named the protagonist in her first book, the Rewilding of Molly McFlynn, after Jane’s daughter, Molly.
From south to north, from town to country
It was in her final year at teacher training college that Sue met her future husband, Tim and when her course finished in 1984, Sue moved up to Toxteth in Liverpool to live with him.
Sue got her first teaching job in Liverpool. At the same time, they started a small business making batik clothes and were about to get a grant from The Prince’s Trust Tim got an offer of an accountancy training package with ICI on Teesside. They bought their first house in Norton on the outskirts of Stockton-on-Tees and Sue got her first job in Easington Colliery at the local special school.
They lived in Stockton-on-Tees for two years, growing vegetables on their allotment at weekends but they found their precious crops had all been slashed to the ground one day, they decided on a move to the countryside. After two years of searching, they found two derelict lead miner’s cottages, high in the North Pennines in Weardale. They spent the next year living in a caravan, renovating the houses, learning plumbing and wiring from the library. With a ‘sod the jobs’ mentality, they gave up their respectable teaching and accountancy positions and got jobs as Information Assistants at Killhope Lead Mining Centre. They both worked part-time and shared bringing up their three children.
Sue returned to supply teaching after a few years and then got a permanent position at Hexham Priory School where she worked for twelve years. She specialised in working with those pupils who had profound learning disabilities, writing curricula and sensory dramas for those who need the world brought alive to them.
However, ill health forced Sue to leave teaching. Never one to sit idle, she began to blog about growing food and sustainable living as the Bridge Cottage Way. It was through this that the idea for The Woolly Pedlar came, and in 2012 Sue registered as self-employed and ran her own, successful business upcycling waste wool knitwear.
In 2019, at the age of 58, she decided to realise a lifelong ambition and go to Newcastle University to do a Creative Writing MA. She had always harboured a secret ambition to ‘be a writer’ by the time she was 60. It was in the module, Writing for Children and Young Adults, led by author Ann Coburn, that the ideas for The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn were born. She wrote the first act, Hare Moon, for her final dissertation then employed the mentoring services of Ann Coburn to help her finish the novel.
Sue is looking forward to writing more. She has three more adventures planned for Molly, who is destined to become the Greta Thunberg of the northeast, each book with an environmental or climate change issue, a historical time flip and themes that will resonate with young and old alike.
A Bridge Cottage Way yearbook with seasonal eating, growing tips and anecdotes from family life has always been on the cards. In addition, Sue has plans for an adult novel, about a woman who walks away from everything she knows, and who knows, maybe one day, her memoir.
