Being back in the playground led to first novel for Gill Hornby...eventually

Her debut novel

– a witty story about the rise and fall of a queen bee within a school fundraising committee, written from the perspectives of the women who put her there and who can put her back out, too – was published last month.
But the story really started for the young career woman, who never expected to give up work to run a home, when media mogul Rupert Murdoch made her redundant.
Talking to her at her home in Kintbury, she tells me: “I was a journalist, I had worked at

right at the beginning, I went to

, where I met my husband, then I was at

for a long time. I was working for BSB, the rival satellite channel to Sky, and was on maternity leave with my first child, when one Friday evening I switched on the television and they said Murdoch had taken over and everyone had got the sack – and I thought ‘whoopee’. He made the decision for me.
“I guess I’m an all or nothing sort of person... so I had another child, and another... and then another.”
The family moved to the West Berkshire village, and Gill threw herself into local life, and in particular the school community – and something that had been niggling her since childhood started to formulate.
“I always had this idea to do something about female cliques. I was conscious of it as a child, how there were all these girls that we would look up to and they would dominate us.
“And then when my eldest started primary school and I was back in the playground, I thought blimey, here we go again.
“There were all the these groups – the popular ones, the sporty group, the teacher’s pets and the rebels behind the bike shed having a cigarette. And I saw the comic potential, as anyone who has ever done fundraising and volunteering would agree.
“But I didn’t do anything about it...until I was given the boot again.”
Although she never went back to television, Gill did “keep her hand in” journalism, writing articles and book reviews, and later she landed herself a column in the

.
Her ‘sparkling style and solid common sense’ commentary ranged from the relationship between Robbie William’s drug-taking and weight to championing the contribution of the over-60s in an increasingly ageist society.
However, in 2010, stuck in Tenerife owing to the Icelandic ash cloud that grounded flights all over the world, Gill wrote a news item that, when turned down by her employers, she filed for the

newspaper instead. When she made it home finally, she was fired by the

.
“Some of the most influential decisions in my life have actually been made for me,” she laughs, “but I never would have written my book if they hadn’t.
“With journalism drying up, it was time to think afresh and I thought, I know, I’m going to have a go at my novel.”
It was about the same time that one of her daughters was “not having a very nice time at school”, and to help her through it, they watched teen comedy

, about high school cliques and how to survive them.
The message she wanted to get across to her daughter was that, in all areas of female life, the metaphor of the hive is played out; it’s often how we relate to each other as women.
“I told her, it’s exactly the same for me. It’s not just at school, or mother’s in the playground; it’s book groups, NCT groups, all-female offices.
In fact one person who has read it said, ‘I feel like you’ve been spying on my dog walking group’.”
Whether you recognise yourself or people you know in the characters or not, the book has a positive message about schoolgate mothers, an issue Gill thinks needs addressing.
“The characters all made compromises about their careers. Not everyone goes off at seven in the morning and comes home seven at night, most of us make some sort of deal domestically – so then there is some energy left over. And we do a lot in our communities.”
Without giving the ending away, she says: “In the end, they have built something. It shows that together we are stronger. And we look after one another. ‘The hive’ is hugely positive.”
She laughs off the terms MumLit and ‘Bridget Jones for the next generation’, and her look suggests that she’s not too fussed about labels, or what the critics think.
Not that much will stop a potential best-seller about to be published in 12 countries, with the film rights already snapped up.
Although clearly delighted with the success of the book so far – which sold for a six-figure sum after a seven-way bidding war last year – the reaction of her readers is, I think, what counts most to the “still quite nervous” author.
“I like to see my life reflected back at me in books and films, and I don’t think it happens very much now.
“The problem is the gatekeepers to all things cultural, the people who choose the books that are published and what programmes are made, are metropolitan people with a certain lifestyle, but it does not reflect us.”
By “us”, she is siding with the ordinary middle class, middle England stay-at-home mums who live in village or town communities.
“Somebody who came to interview me said it was very clever of me to write for the invisible. Who’s invisible? All these women are not invisible to me – I see them all day long, 30 to 50-year-old women living their lives.
“One person who didn’t like it said ‘it’s just about a load of middle class mothers’, like that was a bad thing.
“The best primary schools are the ones with fantastic parent associations, millions are raised by them. We get things done.
“I’ve been there – the quizzes, the car boot sales, the lunches and bake sales, I’ve done endless amounts of them. I still do.”
Even the Gourmet Gamble – where each mum takes a dish to be raffled off to the other parents? “Yes, I never could have made that up. I took something fabulous and got a vat of leek and potato soup in return.”
Gill, who used the book of American psychologist Rosalind Wiseman

as research, also spent time with the Newbury and District Beekeepers’ Association to see a real hive in action.
“It was more direct in a way. I spent a very happy morning in Inkpen, where the beekeepers opened a hive and I was blown away by the similarities between [them and] how we function – the segregation of the queen bee and the posse surrounding her and the way she does absolutely nothing. They do everything for her.”
Spurred on – and with similar effortless efficiency of character Melissa, the queen bee in the making – Gill took just five terms to finish

, writing around her busy home life.
So, is she a queen bee herself? An emphatic “no”.
As someone who is now a little worried that I might be a bit of a queen bee in some situations, I’m keen to find out if she has any sympathy for the character Bea, who may start the story as “tall, blonde and good-looking” with the other characters “one-big-happy-family-ing round” her, but is clearly shown to the readers as the villain of the piece, and eventually loses the love and protection of her ‘workers’ – and worse, gets fat.
“The thing about Bea is that she was jolly nice once... she had to be to get the adulation. It’s such hard work getting there. [In the hive], we all do our little bits, but we need a person in the middle to say ‘right, what we’re doing now is this’. We elect them to do the organising.
“But information is power in these positions, and power corrupts. We overindulge them and then they get into the habit of doing absolutely nothing at all, creating the monster.”
However, once at the top, it’s not all about sitting around and being fed royal jelly, and eventually, when her usefulness has dried up, the new queen bee, or perhaps the workers, will kill her. One method is the ‘cuddle death’, surrounding her until she over-heats and dies.
Eek.
Gill continues: “Some stay wonderful, I know plenty of benign queen bees.”
Phew!
However, it’s Georgie – who finds a “profound sense of existential contentment... walking around with a child tucked into her hip... and picking her own fruit and veg, on her own patch of land, for immediate cooking by her and consumption by her loved ones, in her very own farmhouse kitchen” – with whom Gill most identifies.
“I couldn’t do her chaos. I have a wonderful cleaner though, so left to my own devices... But it’s her ethos, being completely happy about having children and finding great creative satisfaction from running a home and family. I completely get that. I have lived that life to a point. I was lucky that I was able to do it.”
Although not your average homemaker, Gill admits that doing a book review here and there, she couldn’t “claim to have been earning the bacon”.
That was down to her husband, himself a former journalist and best-selling author of historic fiction such as

and

, Robert Harris.
If that wasn’t enough pressure on a novice novelist, her brother, in case you hadn’t guessed, is Nick Hornby, another best-selling author, of enduring hits

and

.
Talking about their success, Gill says: “Robert always said I should write a novel, but it certainly didn’t spur me on.
“I think I didn’t do it before because I didn’t have the confidence, or anything to say. But later, I could see it all about me, the story I wanted to write. And I thought I’ve got something to say, living here, living my life.”
She did let Robert read it as she was writing, but he didn’t ask for many changes, “just a bit more weather, he likes weather, and he was right.” She also got opinions from her eldest daughter and sister-in-law.
Once the job of raising a family nears its end, Gill feels mothers still have a lot to offer the world of work – what we jokingly called the women of the Conservatory Party during the interview.
It’s a theme she is keen to explore further in her next book – she has a two-book deal – which she says will focus on empty-nest syndrome and possibly community choirs.
It’s something that she has had a taste of, since her first child now has a job, and the other three are becoming more independent.
“Having swept so much aside for the children, you suddenly find that, in fact, on certain nights you can get to a choir [Gill sings with Newbury Rock Choir] because you don’t have to drive anybody else to a choir anymore. It’s suddenly getting your life back.
“You emerge from raising a family a bit wiser than you started out. And we still have a huge amount to give, in terms of experience and energy and understanding. We’re a powerful lot.”
Gill believes there is much to be learned from observing the interaction of the hive; whether that's about the group politics of female friendships, understanding our collective responsibility for each other is what binds us together, or just that the woman who brings the Malteser cake will, in the end, rise to the top.


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