Excerpts – I Walk Alone

Sneak preview ~ A Dish Best Served Cold

You may have noticed that I’ve been quiet for the last couple of weeks. This is partly down to a horrible cold and a great deal of snuggling under a blanket, feeling sorry for myself whilst coughing and sneezing. I have also been busy reading through proofs and approving cover designs for my next novel, A Dish Best Served Cold. The book is set in Southampton in 1935 and features, amongst other things, a famous gold robbery at Croydon Airport. I promise I will tell you more about the research that went into this book later, but for now, I will give you a sneak preview to whet your appetite.

Research rabbit hole ~ The Great Depression

The years of the Great Depression were hard for the working classes of Southampton. They had no control over what was happening, and most had little understanding of the causes. The Roaring Twenties had bypassed them. Men working in low-paid, insecure jobs, had no money for frivolity or playing the stock market. They lived from hand to mouth at the best of times. Sadly, the depression, when it came, did not bypass them. Lives that had always been hard became harder. There was little for it but to carry on as best they could. This is the world the characters in Seventh Daughter inhabited, and researching the political and economic climate in 1931 led me down some interesting rabbit holes.

Research Rabbit Hole – Southampton Parks 1926

The town of Southampton was once surrounded by ancient fields where townspeople grew crops in summer and grazed animals in winter. By law, all crops had to be harvested by 1 August, Lammas Day, so the fields were called Lammas Lands. In 1844, the Marsh Improvement Act allowed the council to drain the Saltmarsh around the new Terminus Station. To compensate the townspeople for losing this common grazing land, the council agreed to turn the other Lammas Lands into parks. The Central Parks were laid out in the late 1850s, and old OS maps of the time show the layout has changed very little since. Southampton’s wonderful parks are still a prominent feature to this day, and they also feature in many of my books. Making sure I got things right required a good deal of research.

Sneak preview – Seventh Daughter

My third historic novel is coming out soon. It’s another story set in Southampton, this time in Northam Street. In the summer of 1931, helping a neighbour unleashes a chain of events that threatens to tear the close-knit but impoverished Northam Street community apart. Daisy is convinced death is coming for someone. Will it be Jacob’s wife, Annie, or the women who have spirited her away — Nancy, the prostitute, Mabel, the handywoman or Daisy herself? Albie believes Jacob’s war wounds are behind his strange behaviour. The neighbours think he’s dangerous. If Albie can’t persuade them that Jacob poses no threat, somebody will get badly hurt. Sam’s unrequited love for Nancy is the least of his problems. He thinks he has escaped his troubled past until someone starts attacking women down by the docks. Then fingers point at him. ~ Read on for a sneak peek at chapter one . . .

Sneak preview

1 – Saturday 24 April 1926

When Lenny saw young Albie Joyce on the doorstep he knew he was in for a long night. He liked Albie, he was a good lad and a hard worker, but there was only one reason he’d be knocking on the door at nine o’clock on a Saturday evening.

‘It’s Percy.’ Albie was a little out of breath, his collar was turned up and rainwater dripped from his cap.

‘Isn’t it always?’ Lenny sighed and looked over Albie’s shoulder at the teeming rain. The house lights and streetlights reflected gold in the growing puddles, and chilly air, thick with the acrid smell of the gasworks, drifted into the hallway. ‘What’s he done now?’

Just a tease

If Mary could see him now, stirring his underwear in a bubbling dixie of petrol-tainted water, she’d laugh her head off. It was a far cry from any kind of laundry she knew, with no soap or mangle and a metal tin precariously perched over four stubby candles in the dark instead of the copper boiler she used at home. That he was attempting the task at all would have amused her, but it wasn’t something he could add to the letter he was trying to write. For a start, he wouldn’t want to mention the bayonet he was using to stir the pot, or the lice he was trying to kill. She didn’t need to be worrying about that kind of thing. The trouble was it was difficult to find anything to write about that wouldn’t make her worry. One way or another, even the most innocuous things tended to end up running to horror, and every letter he wrote could so easily be his last.

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