To her family she's 'Our Josie', but to her fans she's Josephine Cox, prolific author, who plants a little piece of Blackburn in homes worldwide. PAULINE HAWKINS went to meet her.

JOSEPHINE Cox is a self-confessed people-watcher. She loves to observe those around her, soaking up their mannerisms and facial expressions like a sponge.

It's a habit which has been with her since childhood, when she sat on the doorstep of her tiny terraced home in Blackburn, watching lovers squabbling, women playing 'mum' to an entire street of raggy-trousered children and fathers trooping to the pub with their week's wages.

Her current lifestyle -- she has a home on the sunny island of Cyprus and a house in Buckinghamshire -- is a far cry from the streets of post-war Blackburn where the seeds of her writing career were sown.

But she finds it just as easy to breathe life into her characters in Paphos as she would if she could turn back the clock and return to the doorstep on Derwent Street as five-year-old Josephine Brindle.

"It's all in my heart and soul. Even now, things come back to me that were stored away. I do not forget," she says.

Her lifetime of storytelling began when she was a child, charging other youngsters a penny to sit and listen to her. "It was for my mam. I would do anything to help her because she was so downtrodden and yet she never complained," says Jo. "She was a calm, quiet person. There was never anything pretentious about her, and she coped."

There's nothing pretentious about Jo either. Naturally friendly and easy to talk to, she laughs as she recalls her visit to a television studio in Canada. When she walked through the door with husband Ken, the studio staff stood as if they were waiting for someone else to come through the door. When Jo asked if they were waiting for someone, one of them replied: "Where is your entourage?" A previous guest from England had arrived with six flunkies in tow.

And her preference for train travel is a second-class carriage. "I like to people-watch. I like to be in with the screaming babies and the old ladies -- you can't people-watch in a first-class carriage that's empty," she says.

Josephine Cox is the UK's biggest-selling living saga writer. She writes two number one best-sellers every year and her work has been translated into many languages, including French, Dutch, Polish and Russian.

Jo's parents both died before her first novel was published, but she likes to think her much-loved mum is still watching over her, enjoying her success.

Jo, now 58, describes the early years of her life in Blackburn, sleeping up to six in a bed and often facing hardship and hunger, as 'very grim'. But she adds: "It was not sad or unhappy, because you had your brothers and sisters and you made your own fun and joy. There was a lot of laughter."

She remembers the times when the family lived in Henry Street in the town, which backed onto the river, and when its level rose their yard, cellar and outside toilet would flood. The youngsters would sit on the toilet with their feet off the ground to avoid the rats and when the family wanted coal one brother would have to swim across the cellar to retrieve it.

But her little kingdom, which she had begun to observe from the doorstep of her first home in Derwent Street, was shattered when her mother took her and her sisters south to live with their aunt in Dunstable. The 13-year-old had to leave her father and brothers as well as her home and friends behind.

Jo says: "It was traumatic. I have always been a family person and I think the most precious thing in life is your family. To see it torn apart unsettled me for months and years, but I kept close to my father and brothers.

"I think when you are little -- and not so little -- things that happen, that really wrench you inside out, are etched in your mind for all time in every little detail."

Jo, mother of two sons, is a great believer in fate -- her move from Blackburn took her into the arms of her husband of more than 40 years, Ken. After having the children she won a place at Cambridge University but rejected it because it would have meant living away from her family. Instead, she became a teacher and later returned to her love of storytelling.

"If I had gone to university I might have done something different but writing was always there, always an obsession," she said.

"There are some really talented people who send me snippets of their work. One piece of advice I would give is to write from the heart. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar -- write the story, all the blood, sweat and tears -- then you can go back and worry about the spellings."

Josephine Cox's 27th novel, The Woman Who Left, is published by Headline on November 1, price £16.99. Her new paperback, Let It Shine, is now on sale at £5.99 and her life story, Child of the North: Memories of a Northern Childhood by Piers Dudgeon, is published next Thursday in hardback at £18.99.