GODALMING College English teacher Gill Thompson has fulfilled her childhood ambition to be a writer – winning a two-book deal after her first novel became a Kindle number one best seller.

After more than 30 years of teaching, she began the novel nine years ago that was to become The Oceans Between Us, while doing an MA in creative writing at the University of Chichester.

It was inspired by the true-life story of child migrants to Australia in the 1940s and 50s.

Shockingly, many were told they were orphans, but in fact had parents who were alive and desperately searching for them. Often these families were never reunited.

To Gill’s delight, the manuscript was picked up by Headline, which published the novel last year.

Her second novel, The Child on Platform One, is about a girl on the Kindertransport rescue mission in the Second World War and will be published on March 19.

Some of the children sent to Britain were housed at Stoatley Rough School in Haslemere, founded in 1934 by Dr Hilde Lion as a mixed boarding school catering mainly for refugee Jewish children.

Gill said: “It’s incredibly hard to get traditionally published these days, so my two-book deal really was a dream come true. “It was even more precious because that dream took 50 years to be realised.”

* The Child on Platform One is already available on Kindle at a special price of 99p until Saturday. The paperback can be pre-ordered now.