Patricia Bernard
I grew up in Melbourne and Rosebud, Victoria and had a great life full of adventure and freedom. I had a dog called Pal and a bicycle called Tonto. With Pal in my bike basket I rode everywhere. Our family had Manx cats (that’s cats with no tails from the Isle of Man) and a horse.
When I was eighteen I travelled with my best friend Janet up the east coast of Australia picking fruit, getting lost in the Blue Mountains, learning how to be a waitress and working in Worth’s Circus.
When I was nineteen I went with my mother to England on THE BIG TRIP. I worked in London as a kindergarten teacher and a youth leader then I travelled all over Europe picking tomatoes in Spain, grapes in France, cooking on a boat from Barcelona to Mallorca, dating a bullfighter in Granada, eating Dutch pancakes in an attic whilst working in a Dutch lolly factory, taught English in Athens, ate 1 penny soup in Morocco, became a footpath artist in Paris and a nanny in Sweden for the Royal Family of Stucklebergs. During this time I met three lifelong friends, Jeannie a crazy English girl and Dina and Robyn two insane Australian Spanish dancers. I then went to Canada and the U.S.A. on my way to Brazil.
In Canada I met my Jamaican husband on a staircase, which is why I always thought he was taller. I didn’t reach Brazil until ten years later. We had 4 children, one in Jamaica, one in London, one in Geelong and one in Sydney, 3 girls and 1 boy.
On returning to Australia, and realising I had been insane to stay away from the sun and the lifestyle for so long, we settled in Paddington, Sydney.
Years later I sent my middle daughter to Jamaica for one year’s boarding school. She came back so much nicer having seen poverty and how hard Jamaican’s study to get ahead. She is now a well-known public speaker/motivation and conference organiser for Landmark Education travelling throughout Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A. and India. My eldest daughter is also a motivational speaker and Course Leader for Landmark Education and has spoken to over 400,000 students throughout the world. My third daughter is a school teacher in the Blue Mountains and my son is a personal trainer. I have five brilliant grandchildren who I put in my books–see ‘Legend of the Three Moons’.
I always sketched, painted, kept diaries and wrote letters when travelling, although my spelling was so bad no one could understand them. When I was thirty, a friend, Fiona, asked me to write a book for her television show. After I explained how badly I spelt, how I didn’t know where to put a comma or how to start a paragraph, I started writing RIDDLE OF THE TRUMPALAR. Thirty-eight books later I am still writing.
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