Jennifer Johnston led a charmed life until, aged 34, she realised she wanted more than a career as a mother and housewife. Now 79, she has just published her 16th novel, based on her 'rascal' father, Denis. Acknowledged as one of Ireland's finest writers, she tells Ciara Dwyer she's still not satisfied

'You can become a nothing so incredibly quickly," says writer Jennifer Johnston. "We all have to take great care that we don't become nothings. It's the easiest thing in the world to do."

It nearly happened to her.

"I was scared of trying to do anything because I decided I couldn't. It was a total lack of confidence."

Jennifer Johnston is one of Ireland's finest writers. From The Captains and the Kings to The Old Jest, readers have relished her masterful storytelling. In How Many Miles to Babylon, she wrote of young Irish men fighting in the First World War. Her novels often deal with Protestants, middle-class worlds and people's emotional lives. At 79, her 16th novel, Truth or Fiction, has just been published but her books might never have seen the light of day had she not woken up and decided to make something of herself.

Up until then she had drifted through life. As she says, "I didn't ever have any drive."

She had enjoyed a happy childhood in Dublin. The daughter of playwright Denis Johnston and actress Shelah Richards, she was drawn to the stage. She had watched her mother from the wings and was mesmerised. "She was very good and it was quite difficult to disentangle her from the part she was playing. I saw her in everything from O'Casey to Shaw. She was a wonderful St Joan. I played a tiny part with her in that and then I had to go home to bed."

The world of the theatre didn't seem exotic to Jennifer. "You take what comes when you're a child. It's normal. I was always a little surprised when some of my friends would say, 'She's your mother?' I'd say, 'Why not?' You get used to it."

While at Trinity, Jennifer met Ian Smyth, who was to become her husband and the father of their four children. "I left college at the end of three years. We got married and went to live in France."

While in Paris, she was happily idle. "I wasn't doing anything. I went to the Cordon Bleu cookery school. Every good wife should learn how to cook," she says, tongue in cheek. "Then we came back. Ian decided that he wanted to become a lawyer and we lived in London and started having babies."

They led a charmed life. As Ian worked for the National Film Finance Corporation, they got free tickets to the cinemas and theatres. "We did everything we wanted to do and we had lots of friends. Then, when I was about 34, I came to the slow realisation that I was going to go through my life and be nothing but a housewife and a mother. I suddenly thought -- my God, time is passing. My husband bought me a typewriter and I started writing."

She had dabbled in writing before but had abandoned any efforts, thinking that everything that had to be written was already written. When she stopped writing it didn't bother her. Years later all that changed.

"The pain I felt at the age of 35 troubled me. I wanted to see if I could write the pain out of myself. I filled wastepaper basket after basket with unfinished novels and stories, never satisfied, tearing them up without giving them the chance to become real finished works. Then one day, when I was about to throw out a half-finished novel, a voice spoke in my head, quite loud and clear -- 'Finish it, you fool. You must finish something.'

"I started writing when Lucy was a baby and I was a writer by the time Malachy was born. I had to get a new passport and I had 'writer' on it, rather than housewife, or nothing. It was wonderful."

She carried on with the work, writing when the kids had gone to school. Although she managed this balance, she tells me that she never ignored her children crying so that she could finish a chapter. "That's because I'm a woman," she says.

When I ask Jennifer if motherhood changed her, she tells me no, then thinks a little more.

"You become more tolerant. The one thing that is very interesting about being a mother is you learn for the first time in your life what loving is all about. It doesn't matter what your child does. It is your child and you will defend it to the death. I wouldn't do that for either of my husbands. (She now lives in Derry with her second husband, David Gilliland.) I might fight a little bit but I would go back in again. But I would defend my children to the death, any one of them. It's not necessarily reciprocal because you wouldn't know whether your children would defend you to the death. They probably wouldn't and they'd be quite right because they would have other things to do with their defence mechanisms."

Jennifer is in regular contact with her children. Two of them -- Patrick (an Irish Times journalist) and Sarah (who runs the Russian department in Trinity) -- live in Dublin and she sees them quite a lot. Lucy is a lawyer in London and Malachy is a writer.

Her husband David has five children and two of them and their families live close by in Derry.

Johnston believes that there is always a line between parent and child. However strong the love is, you should never try to be their best friend. When her parents died, did she have unfinished business with them?

"Yes and no. I loved them both. My mother was a wonderful woman but she was an awful mother because she wanted you to do exactly what she wanted you to do -- now and not argue. She did love us very much but she had all sorts of notions in her head about the way we were thinking, when we weren't thinking like that at all.

"I didn't really know my father all that well. He wasn't there. (Her parents separated when she was seven.) It was quite a distant relationship but I did admire him enormously. I didn't admire him quite so much when I read his diaries, mind you. But people say he was OK. We all have our faults."

Jennifer's latest novel Truth or Fiction uses elements of her father's life and transforms them into fiction. It is about an English journalist who is sent to Dublin to interview Desmond Fitzmaurice, a long-forgotten playwright who was also a war correspondent. He has kept diaries of his life and taped himself talking about his life and his many lovers. The elderly man lives with his second wife yet meets his first wife for drinks every week. He also talks of two past lovers, both of whom became pregnant. (All these things match Denis's life.) The journalist asks whether what he tells her is truth or fiction.

When Jennifer was 45, her father invited her to have dinner with him. He told her about a woman called Nancy Horsbrugh-Porter, the love of his life with whom he had an affair and then regretfully let slip away.

"I was very nice and sympathetic," she tells me. "Here was this sweet old man and all this happened when I was seven. He just decided that he was going to tell me. I think it was something to do with some sort of self-aggrandisement. He wanted me to know that he'd had this great pain and anguish in his life. I felt sorry for him. This was the great love of his life and he'd thrown it all away. He told me how stupid he'd been.

"I don't know much about Nancy because nobody ever really talked about her. She is dead now. But I do know she was a hunting and fishing type. When my father was married to my mother, he had two affairs, so he was running three women at the same time. He was a rascal."

Both his lovers became pregnant within a short space of time. The other lover was the actress Betty Chancellor, who became his second wife. Nancy went on to marry someone else.

That night Denis asked Jennifer how she felt when he and Shelah broke up. She told him how angry she had been because nobody told her about the divorce until some eight years later when a school friend blurted it out. Until then she had assumed that he was away working for the BBC.

Jennifer read her father's account of that dinner with her in the diaries he left behind. "He wrote --'She tells such lies.' So, I thought, f**k you. Excuse the language." No wonder she couldn't read any more of them.

Jennifer will be 80 in January and there are plans for a big party. She certainly doesn't seem like an old lady. She is bright-eyed, forthright and has a wonderful deep laugh. What drives her?

"Why bother getting up in the morning if you haven't got something to do? I sit down at my desk at nine o'clock every morning and I write. I just want to go on writing books but I'd like to write a really good book. I always give it my best shot but I haven't reached what I would like to reach. My novels have got all sorts of things that I don't like. I'd like to write a novel that in a hundred years time, people would say, 'Now there's a novel about Ireland in 2010. Read it because it's absolutely perfect.' I think when I will float away, my books will float away too; except for How Many Miles to Babylon, which will go on being read in schools but only until we've got the First World War out of our system. Then they'll stop reading it."

Johnston is too hard on herself. Her vast body of work will most certainly last. It is a pleasure to read and a shining beacon to other writers. But above all it is a testament to those wilderness years in her 30s when she took hold of herself and her talent and courageously persevered to the end.

Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston is published by Headline Review, €15.99

- Ciara Dwyer

Sunday Independent