JOSEPHINE COX’s 33rd novel, The Journey, is published this week, 21 years after her first book, Her Father’s Sins, came out.

Cox, 60, has overcome incredible hardship to get to where she is today. One of 10 children, she was born in Blackburn, Lancashire. Her parents split up when she was 14, and Cox moved south to Dunstable in Bedfordshire with her mother and seven of her siblings.

She married when she was 16. For years, she and her husband, Ken, struggled to make ends meet. Ken’s haulage company went bust in the recession of the early 1970s, and the couple, who by that time had two young sons, lost their house.

Cox worked in a plastics factory, but decided that she wanted to catch up on the education she had missed out on as a teenager — she had left school at the age of 14.

In the mid-1970s she enrolled for night school, which she attended for three years, studying for O-levels and A-levels.

She was offered a place at Cambridge University, but was forced to turn it down because she would have had to move away from her young family. Instead she went to teacher-training college, after which she taught English and history to secondary-school pupils until the mid-1980s, when she left to write full-time.

Cox lives with her husband, Ken, in a village on the Bedfordshire/Buckinghamshire border. She usually writes two novels a year, and has already started on her 34th book, Journey’s End, a sequel to The Journey.

How much money do you have in your purse?

I usually have £60 just in case — there is nothing worse than being caught unawares and having no cash. I don’t like having lots of loose change — I keep the silver, but save the coppers in a jar for my two granddaughters. I also keep a £20 note in a pocket of each of my coats, in case of emergencies.

Do you have any credit cards?

I have one, but rarely use it after an incident in America a few years ago when I bought a camcorder. It was in the days when credit-card transactions were done manually. One of the carbon copies must have been thrown into the bin and picked up by someone who used the details to purchase things fraudulently.

It took months to sort out and the rigmarole we had to go through has put me off using credit cards. I do use Switch, though, as I find that handy.

Are you a saver or a spender?