Forty Two Years a Secret Mistress

Jan Prebble was for 42 years the mistress of John Prebble, the writer acclaimed in Scotland for his histories of Glencoe, Culloden and The Highland Clearance, while elsewhere his best known work is the block buster film, Zulu for which he wrote the script. This is not an autobiography written in chronological order but a series of snapshots of a great hot-fired love affair, portraying with humour and feeling some of the difficulties of being a mistress in the days when unmarried couples were not acceptable, the ruses they had to adopt and the extraordinary situations they found themselves in. More than that it takes in not only Jan's own celebrity-interviewing life as a Fleet Street journalist, DJ-protecting days as PRO to Capital Radio and finally her time working for the Prince of Wales, but also fascinating examples of John's unpublished letters, serious and flippant, historical and romantic. It includes untold stories behind his many books and a vivid description of how an author feels when he finishes writing one. The whole story is enhanced by tales of John's sense of fun unexpected perhaps in a man who wrote so eruditely about history.