ONCE upon a time there was a former nurse called Christine Martin. She lived near Crook, where she'd grown up and gone to school, and ran two successful businesses - a care service for the elderly in their own homes, and a posh car hire business, which included a Rolls-Royce and a 29 foot stretch limo.

She regularly drove the huge cars herself. The home care service was so successful that it won a couple of awards. Christine was a very canny County Durham businesswoman, working seven days a week.

Now meet Ellen Dean. Ellen lives in an idyllic village in North Yorkshire, where she's thrown herself into local amateur theatricals, film-making and fund-raising for the church, the village hall and orang-utans. She is also a writer and has just self-published her first novel - a lesbian romp with a lot of rich women, a bit of blackmail and witchcraft and not much underwear.

And the odd thing is that Christine Martin and Ellen Dean are one and the same woman.

Not an obvious career path...

True, there was an in between period. Christine was always a bit mystical, interested in spiritualism and astrology - she dreamt three times about the Boxing Day tsunami before it happened - so it was no surprise when she became one of the first Feng Shui consultants in the North-East - advising on, among other things, Centre North East, Middlesborough's tallest building.

"I'd always been interested in Feng Shui and I wanted to sell the car business. For six years I hadn't had a day off - if a driver was ill or something went wrong, you couldn't just not turn up for someone's wedding. Or I'd be collecting a hen night from a nightclub at three in the morning. It was fun and I loved the cars, but I was ready for a change.

"So I studied Feng Shui and found it fascinating. After all, I'd been a nurse and Feng Shui is all to do with health and well being. There was a sort of link there."

Christine left school at 15 with no qualifications, worked in an office and trained as a nurse in the days when you didn't need a degree, or even O levels, but just sat an exam to start. After 15 years, an accident meant she had to give up working, but she nursed both her parents through their final illnesses and realised there was a desperate need for nursing care for people in their own homes. That's when she set up Devereux - named, incidentally after one of her favourite characters in the Golden Girls, the TV series about glamorous pensioners

After building up the business, she sold Devereux as well, moved to Staindrop with her partner Gloria, and was doing some occasional consultancy and lecturing when she saw an advert for the house in Fearby near Masham. "To be honest, I didn't even know where Fearby was but I just knew as soon as I saw the picture that I wanted the house," she says.

So they moved to the old farm house in the main street, where the back garden runs into fields and there are stunning views across to the hills and Christine, now retired, threw herself into village life. "After all those years of really hard work, I decided to have some fun," she says.

After appearing with the Masham Players, she thought it would be a good idea if Fearby did a village panto.

"We did Cinderella. It was a sell-out. I was Baroness Hardup and we raised a huge sum of money for Healey church," says Christine.

Now there's a film under way, based on the Rocky Horror Show, filmed at Swinton Castle and featuring all sorts of local people, from the local joiner to the Cunliffe-Listers, Swinton's owners. The film is destined for a festival and as a fund-raiser.

And there's the book...

When she sold her businesses, Christine had already started a writing career - magazine articles and photographs.

"But I always knew I'd write a book. I went to see a spiritualist once and she told me 'I can see a book being bound' so I knew it would happen and I never had any negative feelings about it."

It is probably fair to say that Beautiful Strangers will never win the Booker, but it races along with beautiful heroines and rich villains and a lot of tingling bodies in Newcastle, North Yorkshire, London and Cannes.

(I wanted to ask about the research, but inexplicably chickened out).

"I published it myself because I didn't want a publisher trying to change anything about it. It's my book and I wanted it to appear just the way I wrote it," says Christine.

It took her three years to write. "I do it all in longhand before I put it on the computer. I loved doing it."

At first she was unexpectedly shy about her achievement. The publicity shot for the book and on her website shows an unrecognisable back view. And she chose to write under the name of Ellen Dean. "I'd played Ellen Dean in the Masham Players production of Wuthering Heights - she's the housekeeper - so I felt the name sort of belonged to me already. And I wasn't sure how people would react to the book."

She needn't have worried. Fearby is stolidly unshockable and seems to have taken it in its stride. "I get stopped in Masham now by people who've read it," says Christine.

It was a big seller at the lesbian book festival in York last month and Christine is already on with the sequel. There are also plans for children's books "though I'll probably write those as Christine Martin".

She is now, just, in her 50s and relishing her new career and her new life. Her sitting room is welcoming, comfortable and relaxing - as one would expect from a Feng Shui expert. There are deep old window seats, touches of oriental decoration, crystals, some of Gloria's accomplished paintings, and through the window you can see Christine's horse grazing happily in one of the fields.

Although technically retired, Christine shows no sign of slowing down. And now we just wait to see what she does next.

"If you get an idea, I believe you should act on it," she says. "I never thought of failure. I just don't like that word."

www.ellendean.co.uk