Actress and author Carol Drinkwater tells STEPHEN LEWIS about life, loss, James Herriot and the Kingdom of Tonga

CAROL Drinkwater is terrified of book signings. She is haunted by the thought that she might speak for an hour and no one will be interested enough afterwards to buy a copy of her book. "That would be a complete horror," she says with a laugh. "It hasn't happened yet. But it doesn't mean it won't."

There is little danger of that with her latest book, The Olive Season, which has shot straight to No 5 in the non-fiction bestseller list. And given the actress and writer's connections with North Yorkshire, the prospects of it happening when she comes to Waterstones in York on Monday seem even more remote.

For years, Carol was best remembered as the TV wife of Christopher Timothy in All Creatures Great And Small, the dramatisation of the novels of Thirsk vet James Herriot, whose real name was Alf Wight.

As Helen Herriot, she starred in 42 episodes of the popular series - even at one point meeting Alf Wight's wife Joan, the "original" of the character she was portraying. "She drew a photo of herself at 26 out of her handbag and placed it on the table between us and said, 'This is what I was like'," Helen recalls. "I was a bit daunted."

Despite numerous other film and TV roles - including A Clockwork Orange and a Critics Circle Award-winning performance opposite Max Von Sydow in Father - she became forever identified with the role of Helen.

Until her best-selling memoir The Olive Farm came out in 2001, that is. The book, according to the blurb, told the "lyrical tale of her real-life romance with partner Michel and an abandoned Provencal olive farm which they fell in love with". It was a top ten bestseller for six weeks in 2001. "And it is the first thing that has really stopped people saying 'I remember you as Helen,'" she says.

The Olive Season is the follow-up: the second of a promised three volumes. It begins with a light-hearted account of Carol's impromptu wedding to her film and television producer partner, Michel. Although passionately in love, she was, she admits, a bit of a commitment-phobe. So when Michel popped the question, she said the first thing that came into her head as a way of stalling him: "Only if the King of Tonga marries us."

She had underestimated his determination. Before she knew it she had been whisked off to the Cook Islands in the Pacific. Then began a series of comic mishaps which ended with a minister on the Pacific island of Aitutaki, who had been happy to marry them when he thought both Carol and Michel were women, refusing to go through with the ceremony once they admitted they weren't regular church-goers.

Eventually, a Maori chief was found who was willing to perform the ceremony. It was a wonderful wedding, Carol says - but for years she still wasn't sure whether they were legally married. "Until one day we had a row and I went and checked it out," she says. "And we are."

The second book, like the first, revolves around the rhythms of life in the stunning Provencal countryside. But what makes it stand out is the searing honesty of the miscarriage in her late thirties which left her childless. Her naked pain screams from the pages of the book. It was, she admits, difficult to write. What made it even more painful was that, just four weeks before the book was due to be delivered to her publisher, she crashed her computer and lost the lot.

This left her effectively re-writing the whole book in four weeks, working 17 or 18 hours a day. That's partly why the emotion of the awful experience of losing a longed-for child is so raw in the book, she says.

"There was no censorship. I had to get it out and it came out like Niagara Falls," she says. "It just poured out of me."

She says she can't answer the question whether writing about it helped her come to terms with her loss. "I don't know that such pain ever goes away, but I think that it becomes chewed over, digested in a way." But pain can be faced up to, she says: and she remains a person for whom the glass is always half full, not half empty.

The rest of her book, with its accounts of the beautiful Provencal countryside, the cycle of the seasons and her love for Michel, is a "journey through grief to joy".

"There is much to celebrate in the fact that one is alive," she says. Reading this book, you get the sense that she means it.

Updated: 09:33 Wednesday, March 19, 2003