My inner grown woman

I re-read John Wyndham's 'Consider Her Ways' recently, his speculation about a future world in which male humans have been rendered redundant. Oxford based Transita don't exactly need men, but they did read Slippery When Wet and allow me in. They asked me to write my experiences of being the only male writer on their list. How rare is such a being in the annals of publishing? Here's my response:

I’ve been flexing my feminine side. “It’s from my inner grown woman,” I told Transita when I introduced them to Slippery When Wet. Now I am the one male author on Transita’s list.
Who trained my feminine side?
My mother, I guess. My father wanted me to join his shooting parties and the village cricket team. My mother was having none of it. She was used to having her way. Since her way meant music, reading and writing, that was fine by me. My father fell asleep on the sofa while I joined my mother’s friends in the kitchen, talking them through their weariness with marriage. They drank and let rip with fantasies about life free them from the drudgery of their men. It was all grand training for an adolescent writer.
Home at that point was the Old Rectory in Rempstone, Nottinghamshire. Oliver Cromwell was taught there, and two writers lived in my bedroom before me. One was Cecil Roberts, the best-selling novelist of the 1950s. The other was the food writer Dorothy Hartley, who fed raw meat to owls at what became my bedroom window. The house features in Cecil Roberts’s fine novel ‘Scissors’ and in Dorothy Hartley’s classic ‘Food in England’. I travelled with my father to stay the night with Hartley at her home in Wales. Miss Hartley was the first woman to travel from Cape Town to Cairo, driving a Ford 7, but that was the past. Now was the present. Old beyond debate, she uncorked the wine and decided to seduce my father. She was a force of nature.
Men are great beings for entering ruts. Women seem to carry a bounty of reinvention along with them. Each day, each moment, they can become a newer version of themselves. Women are as constant, as vital, as unpredictable as weather.
Transita’s motto, ‘grown books for grown women’, is a heady and dangerous recipe. It’s like ‘storm clouds for mountain eagles’ or ‘child rearing tips for pumas’, something as tame as that.
Work out a thread of the potential and desires of a grown woman, unleash her on a world more used to the stale routine of men, and all you can do is admire and enjoy and learn and be amazed.
I’m glad Maggie chose to stride through the pages of Slippery When Wet. It was bracing to come to know her. I hope she gives readers some of the boon I have received from the women who form my own life.