Harrogate author Julia Clarke lived at the heart of foot and mouth country. She took the experience and turned it into a novel for teenagers, as she tells STEPHEN LEWIS.

AT the height of the foot and mouth crisis, Julia Clarke remembers looking out from the windows of her farmhouse near Harrogate, filled with dread. She feared that the sheep grazing in the fields all around would have to be slaughtered.

She's a writer, not a farmer, and her husband Mike is a journalist. They rent out their land, only keeping a few animals themselves. So their livelihood didn't depend on their hens and sheep; but the long months of the foot and mouth outbreak were not any easier to bear.

"I got to the point where I could not bear to look out of the windows," she says. "There are fields all around our house full of sheep, and I was terrified the whole time that they would get foot and mouth and the farmer would have to burn them."

The outbreak left a lasting impression on Julia and Mike, and their two children Matthew, now 22, and Bethany, 19 - as it did on anybody who lived in the countryside and saw it transformed into a silent, deserted place marked only by the funeral pyres on the horizon.

So when she began to cast around for ideas for her fifth novel aimed at teenagers, it wasn't hard to find a subject. "I couldn't really write about anything else," she says.

The result is You Lose Some, You Win Some, a gritty teen novel set in the aftermath of foot and mouth on a Pennine farm somewhere between Skipton and Keighley.

The heroine is Cesca, a teenage girl who is grappling to cope with the separation of her parents, partly due to the stress caused by foot and mouth. When the outbreak begins, Cesca starts to keep a diary. Later, she burns it, in an image that brings to mind the burning pyres of sheep and cattle. It is her voice the reader hears throughout.

As well as being a gripping teenage novel dealing with all the usual themes - first love, growing up, feelings of betrayal and loss and alienation - the book brings home, in a way perhaps nothing else could for those who didn't experience it first hand, just what the outbreak was like.

"I was so dumb," as Cesca, the heroine, writes. "I thought Dad was superman; he'd always sorted everything, so I assumed he would sort this. Of course we wouldn't get the disease - not with all the disinfectant mats and stuff that Dad was using - not with all the precautions he was taking. He'd even moved his family out, for heaven's sake, so Mum could go to work and Gerry and I could get to school, without the risk of bringing infection back with us. Our farm wouldn't get it. It was other farmers, sloppy ones that weren't as careful as Dad; they were the ones who copped it.

"In one way it worked. Our animals didn't actually get foot and mouth disease. But we were too close to a farm that did. Someone, somewhere - a boffin in a white coat, an official in a dark suit, or maybe an army chief in camouflage gear - drew a red circle on a map and Fountains Earth Farm was just inside it. And that was the end."

Teen novels tend to be tough urban affairs. So how has Julia's rural tale gone down? She has been pleased with the response since it was published in the summer. There is, she believes, a sharp divide between country and city people - but urban teenagers seem to have taken to the book.

"I suppose it is a glimpse into someone else's life," she says. "I have had a good response from kids, a lot of whom said 'I didn't really think about foot and mouth, or what it is really like to live in the country'."

Family hardships of a more personal nature inspired Julia to start as a teen novelist, eight years or so ago. Brought up in Surrey, she trained as a teacher, then went on to work in Theatre In Education. She met her husband Mike while performing at Harrogate Theatre, and they married and had Matthew and Bethany.

Julia began writing adult romance novels - great for a mum of two who wanted to be at home with her children.

Then, when he was 14, Matthew became ill with cancer. He was at home for nearly two years while Julia looked after him. She stopped writing completely and, together with Matthew, starting reading all the teenage fiction he enjoyed. She dreamt the plot for her first teenage novel - and once she started to write it, her daughter Bethany wouldn't let her stop. "She was completely hooked, and said 'I need to find out what happens, Mum!'" Julia recalls.

Matthew, thankfully, recovered and Julia's career as a teen novelist took off. It is difficult writing for teenagers, she admits - getting the language and attitudes right, without sounding dated. But her two fiercest critics, Matthew and Bethany, help keep her on the right track.

They read all her books, she says. "And they keep me up to date!"

You Lose Some, You Win Some by Julia Clarke is published by Oxford, price £4.99.

Updated: 09:37 Wednesday, September 24, 2003