Born in Liverpool in the Depression, to an Irish Catholic family, Pat grew up in a tradition of oral storytelling, humour and religion. She was educated in a Catholic elementary school, was evacuated at the outbreak of WW2, then came back to bombings and "Home Teaching" where a teacher taught small groups for an hour or so in somebody's front parlour. She won a Liverpool Junior City Scholarship to Notre Dame Collegiate School, Everton Valley, Liverpool, and left there in 1947 with her School Certificate. She was the first in her family to get a secondary education.
She had her first stories published in The Liverpool Echo, which had a children's section, "Aunty Muriel's Treasure Chest". She was addicted to the radio, and listened avidly to the radio plays. She also loved theatre, read the complete librettos of Gilbert and Sullivan at the age of eleven, and would queue for the Liverpool Playhouse Gallery where she sat on bare board seats for 1/6. She gained a Lab Techncian's Certificate at the Liverpool Institute of Technology and worked in various laboratories as a technician in penicillin research, and in zoological research at Liverpool University.
She met Les Lloyd when they were both working in the Zoology Dept, and they were married in 1954. In 1963 they emigrated to Australia with their four children aged from one to eight years. She worked in school laboratories in SA and on the Oenology Course at Roseworthy Agricultural College. Her first short story, "Beetle Night" was written in Australia, and was published in New Idea. She used to write lots of "pars" for magazines, which paid for her typewriter. In 1964/5 she did Ian Mudie's Creative Writing Course at the University of Adelaide. In 1972-3 she studied at the SA Institute of Technology for a Certificate in Industrial Microbiology.
While she was working at Roseworthy she decided on a career change, and undertook study at Flinders University, majoring in English and Drama and graduating with a BA in 1979. During this time she was involved in a number of student theatrical productions. In 1981 she began a Post-graduate Diploma in Library Studies, but didn't complete it. In 1983 she began a Certificate in Commercial Photography at Elizabeth TAFE. She had to withdraw halfway through due to her husband's illness, but during this time she won several prizes for black and white photography.
She has freelanced in all media, lecturing in writing, role-playing for the Dept of Community Medicine, storytelling sessions in local primary schools, and running Creative Writing courses, including for the University of the Third Age for whom she edited yearly anthologies of class writings. She has written radio and TV scripts, and has had several plays performed, workshopped and/or read publicly. She had two unpublished teenage novels commended in the Alan Marshall Awards (Victorian Writers' Centre) for unpublished manuscripts, 'The Girl in the Rear Vision Mirror' in 1987 and 'Strangers in Summerland' in1988.
