Full circle with The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry in Chichester

It was in Chichester in 1998 that, back in her acting days, she met her husband Paul Venables when they appeared together in Racing Demon on the main-house stage.

“I did a few more plays after that but I was already writing, mainly for Radio 4. I was doing the afternoon play and I think I had done a few by then, and by then I was beginning to realise a number of things. I was beginning to realise that I was more comfortable writing than acting. I realised that something was a little bit up for me on stage when I realised that what I really loved was rehearsing but when the audiences came in it was not really what I wanted to be doing any more. So really writing was a very natural and happy progression for me.

“But I did and I do absolutely love the stage. I love what happens when you walk into a theatre. It still moves me when you walk into the building and there's a great sense of what you're walking into. But I do also think that writing and acting, you're using the same muscles. To do both requires that you stand in one place of knowledge and then you use your imagination to take yourself to another place of knowledge. In both writing and acting you are using the power of imagination to take yourself beyond where you actually are.”

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry started out as a radio play: “I don't know how many years ago. It's not quite 20 years but it's certainly coming up for 20 years now. I wrote it as a three-hander and I wrote it for Anton Rogers who worked with my husband, and I can remember Anton Rogers saying to me that this story had something and that it should become something else.

“The play came about because my dad who had had cancer for about four years had been told that he didn't have very long to live. He must have asked the question but the doctors said that there wasn't anything else that could be done, not surgically. And you're just so devastated. And that’s when I did what I probably do when I can't cope with something in life. I try to write my way through it, and I just got this idea of this man who walks to save someone from dying. I didn't tell my dad this but I also knew that I wanted to write something that would make him laugh. Sadly he died before it was aired and before it was even made.

“But I had always wanted to write a book ever since I was a child. I had tried a number of times. I'd been writing a lot of radio and adapting a lot of fiction and I just thought why don't I try to do this thing that I've always wanted to do. So I stopped everything and I started writing this radio play as a novel. Because my dad had been part of the inspiration for it, I did feel that I was working something out. And also at that point in my life I had just moved to a house near Stroud, an amazing spot that looked over this beautiful valley. I think I was just rapturously in love with the place. If I'd been a painter I would have been painting it. But I am not so it came into the writing.”

In the book, Harold Fry – grey, tired and lonely – receives a letter from an old friend and heads out to post his reply. And keeps walking. From South Devon to Berwick upon Tweed. Leaving his bewildered wife Maureen behind. Because Harold is trying to make up for lost time, confront the ghosts in his past, and – perhaps – keep someone alive. As word spreads of his unlikely pilgrimage, a whole company of lost souls join him on his quest. And the horizons for both Harold and Maureen open wider than they could ever have imagined.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Rachel quickly found she had an affinity with Harold as she was writing the book, a character who turned up in her mind complete with his own name.

“I realised that Harold and I were in the same predicament. He didn't know if he would be able to make this journey and I didn't know if I'd be able to write a book but what Harold does is that he just takes one step after another, just as I found myself writing one sentence after another and you get there in the end.

The book was an immediate success: “It took me completely by surprise. For me the wonderful thing was having a UK publisher saying ‘Yes, I would like to publish this book.’ I couldn't believe it. I'd been wanting this ever since I was a child and I wanted to say to that child ‘Look! It's happening!’ But somehow it just caught fire. I didn't have any time at the time to analyse why it took off because things were just happening so fast. It became a huge seller in Germany. Very quickly it was selling all over the world. And a few years later I was told that because the Chinese edition was really, really popular they wanted me to visit China. They said that I was like a rock star out there. I thought it must have been just been a mistake with Google Translate but I went to China and it wasn't! I really was treated as a rock star! They absolutely loved the book.”