A life on the marsh, and off it

Clemency Thorne was born above the bar of the Ship Inn at Fennick, a pub so remote that the brewery delivered by tractor in winter. She learned to read from the backs of beer mats and to listen from the regulars, who told the same stories every night and changed one small detail each time.

At eighteen she left for Canterbury to study history, and stayed. For eleven years she was a court reporter in Maidstone, sitting through burglaries, frauds and, twice, murders. She says it taught her two things: that nobody tells the whole truth in a witness box, and that the most important person in any courtroom is often the one in the public gallery who never says a word.

She wrote The Drowned Church on the train between Canterbury and Maidstone, a page a day in a reporter’s notebook. It won the Sandpiper Award for best debut, and Detective Sergeant Esme Lark has been asking her awkward questions ever since.

Clemency lives in a narrow house in Canterbury with her partner, a retired lifeboat mechanic, and a lurcher called Shingle who is afraid of the sea. She swims at Whitstable all year round, badly.