A fatal fall during steel erection, in daylight and with witnesses, was incorrectly interpreted in different ways by those involved. The repercussions cost further lives and damaged families. It took another war to mend some of the harm.
At the close of the last millennium, Grace Moran is living in a care home, suffering with dementia, and having time to look back on her life.
Grace was born in 1917, in the Suffolk village of Hartley Halt, where her grandfather was the rector at the village church. Her father, Gerald Whittingham, had been invalided out of the army, having been blown up and gassed and was suffering from severe mental issues.
The Second World War was underway and Grace, now a young woman, no longer wanted to stay in this stifled community; she moved to London, where she shared a flat with Mary. Having secured a clerical position working in Churchill’s War Rooms, she returned home one morning, after a night shift, to discover the house had been blown up and so had Mary.
Through the next five years, Grace experienced the horrors, the loves and losses of war, finally meeting Charles Moran on VE Day, 1945. They married two years later, having two children. Married life, for Grace, was not always an easy ride and she was afflicted with many emotional and difficult decisions. And now living in a care home, she has the time to reflect on the past, as well as worrying about her daughter, Robyn, in the present.
Greg Caine is a radio journalist on a week-long working holiday at a beach resort. Radio Sam is an experiment by a private broadcaster to provide music and information for three weeks over the Christmas-New Year holiday period.
Jackie is the eldest of three, spending summer with her family at the resort. Her curiosity leads to her meeting Greg, and soon they’re inseparable. But not everyone is happy with their relationship.
Jackie’s mum, Beth, is concerned about the age gap between her daughter and the newsreader and does her best to discourage the relationship because her own marriage is on the rocks.
Is it jealousy or self-preservation? Or is it because Beth could be losing everything?
Despite this, the love between Greg and Jackie only grows stronger.
But when Greg is forced to head to Australia, another woman decides to seek him out and sets out to destroy his relationship with Jackie for her own self-interests.
Greg is caught unaware amongst a web of lies and struggles with the truth.
Will his love for Jackie prevail? Or will he make a decision he could regret?
Or will there be a happy ever after for Greg and Jackie?
When I reached 78 I began to write about how it feels getting older and how I am trying to cope. I shared my rhymes and they were well received and so I was encouraged to keep writing and I did!
I’ve had so much fun writing them and sharing them with groups of pensioners locally. I’ve met so many lovely people and we always have plenty of laughter and chat because they feel just the same!
I hope that you enjoy them too!
Born into a banking family, Martin spent most of his adult life resisting the ambition of his father that he take his place in the family bank in the footsteps of his grandfather and father.
While trying to avoid this fate, he worked in a hotel, lost most of his money to a blackmailer, connived to conceal the operation of a brothel, brokered a solution to a dispute as to the ownership of a substantial French property, and supervised the construction of a dam in the Moroccan desert.
He eventually stopped fighting his father’s ambition for him, but there was a final unexpected twist in the tale.
‘Imagine’, said Madge, ‘if we could bring this village back to life, hear the sound of children playing again.’
‘I have all the keys to the holiday lets,’ muses George. ‘What if we rent them out when nobody is looking?’
‘Social recycling!’ says Nigel. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
So the conspirators, fortified by the bravado of Briardale Brew and with the help of Snow Plough Dave, hatch a plan to rejuvenate a small Derbyshire hamlet.
‘And one day’, says Tommy, ‘maybe even the Flying Heifer will be a proper pub again too!’
A group of women from diverse ethnicities and cultures, with telling behavioural diversity, living together in a coven sharing limited space in a cave—this is the 21st century. Not just any sort of women; some from generational wealth, somewhat abandoning it for such a mundane existence living like a pleb—in with a mix of a few others, some of whom had experienced life not too dissimilar from a forest-dwelling nomad.
Personality clashes galore—not surprising—more so to do with leadership and power-sharing. The story is steeped in the mystical: humans and spirits living together, hybrids in-between: Spirit-Humans and Human-Spirits. The former is more of mortality as we know it, with the supernatural ability transcending between the two. The latter is more of a spirit, with the same ability to alternate between humanity and spiritual lifeforms.
This novel is fast-moving and replete with absorbing romances, real-life experiences and plenty of excitement. All the characters make significant inputs into the whole theme of the story and there is an easy blending between the main characters. Drama abounds throughout the book and readers will be easily enticed into all the various dramatic aspects of the story. Although the book is fast-moving, the readers will enjoy what is a very impelling saga with all its twists and turns.
A Prize Beyond Price
What could be so valuable that ownership or destruction are the only choices?
Greed is a powerful motivator; wealth is another.
Power may be the greatest.
Suppose a telepath exists…
What lengths would you go to to have access to her abilities and the benefits?
Viki, a runner, was only eleven when she experienced one of the effects of her abilities but needed help to discover what it was.
Andy, a child psychologist, was called in when she was in hospital to discover if she could speak. After she fled the hospital, she contacted him to help her. Little did he realise what they would discover and what his phone call to an expert on parapsychology would expose them to.
MI6 was soon aware of Viki and determined to track her down, but in the world of espionage, where secrets are always sought, others, too, were soon seeking her: others who had fewer morals.
Viki became aware of this and recognised her death was the only escape…
What started as a dreaded Christmas vacation soon spiralled into absolute chaos.
His parents were desperate to be the image of the perfect, happy, normal family, but Charlie Rose is anything but. He’s quirky, he stutters, and he is nothing but an embarrassment to everyone around him.
Charlie harbours a secret that would dismantle all notions of normality. A secret so twisted, even he is unaware of it.
Until now.
Everyone will have to live with the fallout from sweet, little Chuck’s new reality, but all Charlie wants is to feel safe in the comfort of his family and have a nice Christmas morning.
Is that too much for a twelve-year-old boy to ask? Where do you turn when even your own shadow is a stranger?
Fairness, equality, friendship, attraction, lust, the dashed and the downhearted.
Step forward the heroes, the courageous, the adventurous, the amorous. But don’t forget the downtrodden, the destitute and the desperate.
This book, Compendium of Games and Shames, offers a collection of fictional short stories that cover a broad range of scenarios. Each storyline places focus on the key words of ‘games’ and ‘shames’, and the myriad of meanings and contexts in which they can apply, offering the reader their own sense of connections they may take from them.
Raw emotion, intimacy, intrigue and the human touch are central to these short tales. The book looks to bring interrelationships, successes, celebrations and indeed tragedies to the fore, depicting how they impact on the lives of the main characters within, for better or for worse.
How will our key protagonists fare? And what does the future hold for them and their nearest and dearest? Read on.
1940 and in the skies over England, the Battle of Britain is raging. A Luftwaffe Dornier 17 bomber is shot down and crashes into the North Sea off the coast of Norfolk, a single parachute floating down. The bodies of three other crew are eventually recovered from the sea.
To the present, and In Berlin a young brother and sister strike lucky on the lottery and decide to fulfil a long family promise: to bring the body of their great-grandfather back to Germany from his resting place in a quiet war grave in the corner of an ancient Norfolk church.
Meanwhile, a gamekeeper is found shot dead at a charity clay pigeon shoot on the Royal Sandringham Estate. Our unlikely protagonist photographer Mark Elwin is on hand to record both events and to unravel the mysteries they both throw up.
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