PART 35 :THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND

Just been watching the first stages of the Tour de France in beautiful Yorkshire . With hand on my heart I admit that the White Rose County is as lovely as Lancashire, county of the Red Rose - the Red Rose can been seen wrought in the gates of Liverpool’s Central Library. Watching the cyclists who were as colourful as the scenery in their cycling gear, I was transported back to 1962, the year John and I went youth hostelling on the bikes we had bought second hand that Spring. His was a Claude Butler with gears. Mine was a lady’s bike without gears. I had never owned a bicycle before. No, I tell a lie, my sister and I were given my sister-in-law, Elsie’s, to share. I learnt to ride by simply getting in the saddle and peddling up and down our street. I only fell off a couple of times. That was around about 1957 - the year most of my present manuscript, LOVE LETTERS IN THE SAND is set.

But back to 1962. John, having decided we were going to cycle from Liverpool to Cornwall, had me getting into condition by cycling to places such as Formby on the Lancashire coast and for hills, those ones in Liverpool that rise up from Great Homer Street, and up to Netherfield Road and Everton Brow. I can’t say I arrived the top without getting off my bike.
http://streetsofliverpool.co.uk/tag/netherfield-road/

When we eventually did set off for our epic cycling trip two hills stand out in my memory. The first is Porlock Hill, Devon, which has gradients of 1in 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHRDOu-Psz4
 John, of course, took it all in his stride. As for me, I spent most of that climb, pushing my bike up the hill. I discovered that passing motorist informed him that “She’s on her way, lad!” and he kept cycling down to where ever I was at that point. I did eventually reach the top and remember crossing part of Exmoor on what some would call a typical English summer’s day, mist, rain, etc. Suffice to say I never did reach Cornwall because by the end of that day when we arrived in Barnstaple on the north Devon coast, I’d had enough.

Going back a bit - the other hill - a gorge actually. We took what we thought was a short cut to get out of the wind after leaving Chepstow, bypassed Bristol and went through the Chew Valley, Somerset and ended up at the top of what we discovered was the famous Cheddar Gorge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Gorge 
 At the more sensible age I am now, I would never have cycled down it but it wasn’t until we had freewheeled down it and were almost at the bottom that we read a notice saying that cyclists were advised to walk.

I have had several bikes in my life so far, never having wanted to learn to drive. When I had my youngest son, Daniel, in my mid-thirties, when he was a toddler we bought a bike seat for him. I used to cycle with him on the back and a shopping basket on my front handle bars . I suppose it’s not surprising that when he was in his twenties, he cycled from Liverpool to France and throughout that beautiful country.

Those were the days, my friends.

I still have a bike which I generally remove from the shed to cycle along the canal towpath and in our country park that used to be the local council tip. It is now full of bird song in spring, wild flowers in summer and is great for picking blackberries in Autumn.

In my early writing days one of the first things I had published was an article in a series called MY FAVOURITE THINGS, you’ll probably guess that mine was MY TWO WHEELED FRIEND MY BIKE.

 

     

 

PART 34: NO HIDING PLACE

I’ve  just got back from the Ladies Brunch at Caradoc Mission which is not far from Gladstone Dock, Seaforth, which gets a mention in the book I’m writing at the moment - as does the Caradoc pub. I meet my cousin and her daughter at the mission, so once a month we catch up on each other’s news, have a brilliant brunch and listen to how other people are coping with life. Our leader talked about her need to find a hiding place when life got a bit too much. I was reminded of the prophet, Elijah, in the Old Testament, and his trying to hide from God and in a storm he hears a still small voice telling him not to be afraid.

John and I were talking about hiding places on our way to Ormskirk yesterday. I remembered enjoying hiding in the rhododendron bushes in Newsham Park when I was a little girl and believing no one could see me. I loved hiding under the table in our kitchen with the table cloth pulled right down, so my sister and I could pretend we were in a tent. My brother preferred the coal cellar. All time favourite street games were “Hide and Seek” and “Stroke the Bunny”. We’d hide behind gate posts, private hedges, up jiggers (back entries) and neighbour’s front steps and shop doorways.  One of my own children used to like nothing better than a large cardboard box with the top firmly closed, while another of them much preferred behind the sofa. My youngest son, Daniel, made his own hiding place at the bottom of the garden and stealthy absconded with a bottle of orange juice, several cushions, a large towel and some biscuits.   

In the Fifties, the decade, my latest and last three books are set, there was a television programme called “No Hiding Place” which was a police detective series, staring Raymond Francis as Police Inspector Lockhart. Obviously the theme was that there was no hiding place for thieves when he and his sidekick were on the case. I discovered an episode on You Tube a few weeks ago and it really took me back to my teen years when my life seemed so much more simpler and less stressful.

When I feel the need to escape from everyday life, I like to get away or lose myself in a book. My perfect hiding place is in a book on holiday.  I read eight books, each one very, very different whilst staying at the Lindos View on the Island of Rhodes.

They are as follows: ELEGY FOR EDDDIE by Jacqueline Winspear. Our heroine is Maisie Dobbs who is  a woman sleuth, out of the norm, and the setting is mainly Thirties  London. There is a whole series of Maisie Dobbs books and I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve read so far.  PORTRAIT OF A SCANDAL  by Annie Burrows, is pure historical romance escapism with a likeable hero and heroine set partly in Paris during the Regency era. THE WYNDHAM CASE by Jill Paton Walsh, is a mystery set in a Cambridge college. Our heroine is Imogen Quy and there are another two in the series. I read it in a day. The author was known to me for having written two Lord Peter Wimsey books in conjunction with notes left by Dorothy Sayers, if I’m not mistaken.

 STARRY NIGHT by Debbie Macomber. I bought this for light relief and it is an easy read by an extremely popular American author. THE PROMISE by Freda Lightfoot is a family saga which involves a family mystery and is told from two points of view, that of the grandmother and which takes us back to late 19th century, early 20th century San Francisco and the granddaughter in late forties Britain. A page turner with lots of action and emotion. Well worth a read. THE ISLAND HIDEWAY by Louise Candlish. She is a new author to me but I went for the island of Sicily setting. Not my usual kind of read but I did enjoy the setting and found it interesting hiding out with modern characters whose lifestyle was so different to mine. I did finish it.

WE THAT ARE LEFT by Juliet Greenwood. This is a WW1 novel. Having researched the period myself, I still found plenty of interest in this book. I liked the main characters and enjoyed the settings. I was moved to tears and I’m glad to say there were happy satisfying moments as well as sad. Well worth a read. HEARTBREAK HOTEL by Deborah Moggach. I bought this because she is the author of THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, of which I have seen the film. It is a sort of Rom-Com. I had problems from the beginning with the title as I kept thinking of Elvis’s hit song of the fifties. Then the main character’s nickname was Buffy, so what with my having a son who is a great fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I kept thinking of that Buffy. Having said that as a lover of Wales, I enjoyed the mainly Welsh setting. Lots of characters who I had trouble distinguishing one from the other at times. I also had to suspend belief in their actions. Occasionally amusing and touching, I did feel the author was perhaps much more au fait with today’s young woman than I am as a mother of sons.

I also read a bit each day of Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird’s SPIRITUAL DIRECTION which I found interesting and helpful but will need to read again.

On the last day of my holiday and homeward bound I began to read THE IVY TREE by Mary Stewart, bestselling author of  romantic thrillers and historical novels. My favourites are THE MOONSPINNERS and MADAM, WILL YOU TALK.  She is one of my favourite writers, who died recently at the age of 97. I re-read her books and this one I actually read about thirty years ago, so could remember little of what it was about. I finished it a few days ago and enjoyed it.  

Now I have no hiding place from work as I have a deadline to meet and so I have to sit at my desk and get on with finishing my latest manuscript LOVE LETTERS IN THE SAND. Definitely few hiding places on a beach, although there’s always the sea.

 

 

    

  

     

       

 

PART 33: I WAS DOWN AT THE PIERHEAD ...

 When I was a lot younger the Pierhead was a favourite place to visit when I lived in Liverpool. Whether it was to take the ferry across the Mersey to New Brighton or to Birkenhead where we’d catch a bus to Chester, Thurstaston or Hoylake for a day out. Sometimes we’d go the Pierhead, simply to watch the ships go by because in those days there were all kinds of boats and ships docking in Liverpool. It was a real working port and exciting. Now I live even closer to the Mersey but just a bit further along the coast a short distance from the Freeport at Seaforth where most of the container ships dock now.

But the other day I was meeting a reader of one of my books from California, whose mother had been born in Liverpool but emigrated to America not long after WW2. Her mother had passed on but my reader was visiting Liverpool for the very first time to meet a cousin and she emailed to say that she would like to take me out for Afternoon Tea. She booked a table on the top floor restaurant of the Maritime Museum which has a fabulous view over the Albert Dock.

I was early and had been dropped off the other side of the Liver Building, which meant I had a great view of the new Queen Mary at the new ocean liner terminal. It was huge with numerous decks, so extremely high.

Now I have several friends who really enjoy cruising, but although I have a yen to visit Norway where my great-grandfather Martin Nelson hailed from, so far my dh and I have not taken the plunge. It’s not that either of us fear suffering from seasickness. My husband just loves the fells and enjoys running up and down them.

I’ve been to the Isle of Man and also Ireland by ship several times. Once with my youngest son, Daniel, so we took our bikes and cycled into the Wicklow Hills for research purposes (Fateful Encounter)and we also stayed in a hostel in Dublin. The experience also came in useful for when I wrote Flowers On The Mersey. I’ve also crossed the English Channel more than once. The first time was also to research a book (Love’s Intrigue) and I took Daniel. We travelled by hovercraft and although much faster, I preferred a ship. Also John and I went on a trip to the Isle of Skye and Iona in the Hebrides on quite a choppy day and I’ve visited the Farne Islands to see the seals while on retreat in Northumberland. I’ve also been in a small boat off the coast of Anglesey whilst pregnant. Then there was the boat trip off the coast of Crete after walking the Samarian Gorge. So we do seem to have our sea-legs, although I have been told that you don’t really feel like you’re at sea in today’s huge liners.

So although impressed by the size of the Queen Mary, I was more interested in having a look at the changes that have been made to a place with which I was once so familiar with. I was relieved to see that the Liver Buildings was unchanged, except it was much cleaner than when I was a young girl before the Clean Air Act was passed. The India Building was also dazzling in the sun. I was later to tell my reader, Devo, that my plasterer father actually worked on the latter building after the war. I have a small photograph of him with some other workers high up outside the building standing on a balcony by what appears to be a flag pole.

I found myself moved to tears when I came across several memorial monuments, one dedicated to Merseyside seamen if I remember aright, another large one to the Norwegians who fought in the North Atlantic, the servicemen of Poland, another to those of the Netherlands, as well as the Chinese seamen who helped Britain in two world wars. There were probably others I missed because who could forget the Yanks helping us out.

I haven’t forgotten the statue of Johnny Walker, the hero of the Battle of the Atlantic. He was largely responsible for the final destruction of the German U boats who destroyed so much shipping and caused the deaths of so many British sailors. Sadly he died of exhaustion.

On another note there is a statue of Liverpool, singer Billy Fury, whose big hit “Halfway to Paradise” I remember well. Regretfully he died in his forties. There is also, of course, the Beatles Experience.

Close by the Albert Dock is the new Museum of Liverpool, and just further along is a Ferris wheel. There are also other changes to Liverpool’s seafront as just across the road from the Albert Dock is Liverpool One’s shopping centre and the Hilton hotel.

I had an interesting chat with Devo, who is from Santa Monica, over Afternoon Tea about all kinds of subjects, including, of course, books and Liverpool. The port did not disappoint her and I’m sure she’ll be back again one day.

For a time lapse of Liverpool by my son Tim Francis, writer, director, photographer,

LIVERPOOL TIME LAPSE City in Minutes from Tim Francis on Vimeo.




As for me, as I made my way up past Waterstone’s bookshop - slipped in there for a few minutes, to catch the bus, I thought I really should get out more away from my word processor and my characters living in the Liverpool of the fifties and mingle with those enjoying that of today.





　

PART 32: THEN AND NOW

This weekend is what most now call the late Spring Bank Holiday. When I was young and even now many of my generation call it the Whit Bank Holiday weekend. It’s when Christians celebrate Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

    But I knew little about the Holy Spirit when I was growing up in Liverpool and what I remember about Whit was it was one of those rare occasions when my sister and I were bought new frocks. I can recall one frock in particular being made of a waffle material in pale turquoise with a stand up collar and a V opening at the neck. It had a fitted waist and a flared skirt and I wore it with white ankle socks and white cross bar pumps (plimsolls). My sister, Irene’s frock was of a different design and colour.

    At that time, although, I was only 18 months older than her, I had shot up during the previous months and was at least four inches taller than her. My dad took a photograph of us standing on the kerb at the bottom of our small front garden. I wish I had that photograph now.

     Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, I also remember Mam taking us girls to the corner of Boaler Street and Sheil Road to watch the Orange Lodge process to Newsham Park on a Whit Monday where they would picnic and play games. At least that’s what I presumed they did because we would just watch them march past and then go home. My Uncle Jim was a member of the Orange Lodge and played the flute and we also went to watch some of the family who lived across the street to us, the girls dressed up in satin frocks and their widowed mother with a sash across her ample bosom.

      The sound of the drum and then the flutes when the procession was still in the distance stirred something inside me and a marching band still does. I remember snatches of a song from those days and know now that I muddled up the words because I’ve just found it online. But us kids used to sing: Sons of the sea, and we’re all British boys, bobbing up and down like this. Sailing the ocean, laughing folks to scorn. They may build their ships by night and think they know the game but they can’t beat the boys of the bulldog breed, that made old England great!  Bobbing up and down like this.

 

This past week I read in the Radio Times about a programme concerning polio and what a scourge it was years ago. In 1955 I fell off a wall while at school and fractured my spine and skull and was transferred from Myrtle Street Hospital, Liverpool, to the Agnes Hunt orthopaedic ward in Heswall Hospital on the Wirral. I was to lay flat on my back for six weeks and fortunately after that period the vertebra that had been cracked in my spine knitted and I was able to walk again. But in that ward there was a girl who’d had polio and her means of getting around was to leap from bed to bed.

     When I began to think about what I would do when I left school, I considered being a nurse and one of my teachers arranged for me to visit Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. The only memory I have of that visit was of seeing an iron lung which had a dummy in it and the noise of the machine that helped some polio sufferers to breathe. I knew then that I wasn’t made of the stuff that those angels in starched uniforms and caps that tended me in the Agnes Hunt Ward were, as well as others caring for the sick and suffering worldwide. My strengths lay somewhere else, although like many a mother, daughter and wife, I’ve acted the role of ministering angel to members of my family many times.

      I never knew who Agnes Hunt was in those days but interesting when reading a book called “Liverpool’s Own” by Christine Dawe about famous Liverpudlians and those born elsewhere but who came to Liverpool and performed outstanding acts to improve people’s lives, I came across her name in a chapter about Sir Robert Jones, an eminent surgeon, who in 1899 was working at the Royal Southern Hospital. One of his patient was to be Agnes Hunt, a nurse from Shropshire, who’d had osteomyelitis as a child. A painful hip was what had brought her to Liverpool. They hit it off and he was to visit her Home for Crippled Children back in Shropshire. Later they were to create the first children’s orthopaedic hospital in the world and they were to open many more. In 1926 Agnes was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1946 at the age of sixty. I am indebted to Christine for learning about a wonderful woman who did so much for crippled children.

     The book I am working on at the moment is set between the end of 1956-1958. It was a period when a vaccination for polio was on the horizon. When I hear people on the telly giving the impression that the fifties in Britain was drab, it never seemed like that to me and I only have to think of the music and all the changes in Liverpool going on, as well as the strides that were made in the field of medicine. This was also a time when there was a mass X ray programme for TB and I remember being vaccinated in school. Within years that scourge was to be pretty well eradicated from the western world, as was polio. By the time my three sons were born they were being given the vaccine for polio on a spoon and then a sugar lump.

      

I was reminded also this week about how different it was in the fifties when it came to travelling to America and Canada. My cousin, Maureen, went with her husband Pete, by liner to Canada in the late fifties. The voyage would have taken about five days. They were later to travel down to New Jersey where they lived for a while before returning to Liverpool several years later. They’ve been of a great help to me when doing research for a chapter in my latest book. A couple of days ago I had lunch with another cousin, Lee, her husband, Jerry, and daughter, Erin, who had flown over from Canada. The journey altogether from New Brunswick took less than a day. Erin and I know a little about what the other is doing, both of us being on Face-book.
     The wonders of technology!

    This week I have been invited to have afternoon tea with one of my readers from Santa Monica, California, at Liverpool’s Maritime Museum. Her mother was from Liverpool but she has never been here before and will be staying with a cousin. I’ve met readers before but never one, outside family, who have come so far. I’m looking forward to it. Now this wouldn’t have happened to the girl that was me in the fifties that's for sure. I never dreamed then that one day I would become a novelist!  

        

     

    

PART 31: WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM?

 GLIMPSES FROM THE PAST
This week I’ve been doing two writerly things: filling in a questionnaire for Ebury Books in connection with my forthcoming release in August of A MOTHER’S DUTY and also I’ve been working on the second draft of my latest book in progress LOVE LETTERS IN THE SAND. I enjoy this stage of writing because I’ve a good chunk of the story written and it is a matter of putting in more emotion, action and description but there are also gaps to fill in.

On Friday I was writing a new scene. Irene Miller, who has featured in some of my other books, is now a trainer nursery nurse in the late fifties. I’ve done some research on the subject but it’s not always easy setting up a scene when you don’t have that much information. But having read that part of the toddlers’ routine was having a ramble or walk in the morning online, I placed Irene with another nursery nurse and some children on a walk to the beach in Blundell Sands.

An idea struck me that I could have them chanting nursery rhymes on the way. This meant my scene would hopefully contain some realistic dialogue. Inexplicably the nursery rhyme that came into my head was Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pies. The second line is kissed the girls and made them cry. Immediately I had a name for one of the little boys and the words to put in his mouth.  (There’s a lovely site on the internet that tells you where this nursery rhyme and others originated from.) http://www.rhymes.org.uk/
　
   Thinking of nursery rhymes took me back, not to the days when I was learning them myself but when I bought this enormous book of Nursery Rhymes to read to my own children. It had amusing illustrations and more rhymes than I had ever heard of and can remember now but it’s surprising what does come to mind.

My mind seldom stops working and I was reminded last Sunday whilst watching “Country File” of several days I spent on retreat near Whitby in Yorkshire because that’s where part of the programme was set. Mention was made of jet which can only be found in that area. It is fossilised monkey puzzle tree and jet was made into jewellery and was extremely popular with widows in Victorian times. In my book IT’S NOW OR NEVER I have a character who never actually appears but gets a mention as does Whitby and jet jewellery. Then on “Flog It” the other day Fireweed was mentioned as growing on bombed sites in London. And I was reminded that was another name given to Rosebay willow herb which also grew on what we called bombed hollas in Liverpool after the war. One of those snippets of information I remembered from childhood and put in a couple of my books set in 40s Merseyside.
 
Earlier this morning whilst walking and thinking of my writing, Maggie Thatcher popped into my mind and the rhyme, Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher. When was this? In 1971 when she was Education Secretary and wanted to pass an act through parliament which meant children over 7 would no longer get free milk at school.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7932963/How-Margaret-Thatcher-became-known-as-Milk-Snatcher.html
 Milk for secondary school children had been stopped in 1968 by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. It was the former Labour government leader, Clement Atlee who had introduced free milk for school children under 18 in 1946. 

I well remember as a child drinking my third of a pint through a straw along with the other 51 children in my class. I’m sure many other war babies like me and post-war ones, too, do. Which mean I can have my nursery infants in the 1950s drinking their free milk on their return from their walk. A true glimpse from the past.



　

PART 30: MY LOVE OF BOOKS AND BOOKSHOPS - TODAY AND ALL MY YESTERDAYS

 

On Saturday I went along to Formby Books to do a signing. Fortunately Tonythebook (Higginson) had some of my books in stock because the order he had put in two days before, including my latest book, had not arrived. These things happen as many a novelist will tell you. The lovely Jane Costello was also there to meet fans and sign copies of her novels. I had met Jane when she came to talk to the North West Chapter  of the RNA a couple of years ago. Her latest book is called THE TIME OF OUR LIVES and in brief is about a group of girlfriends going on holiday abroad where all sorts of mishaps happen. Unlike my books it is set in modern times.


https://www.facebook.com/june.francis1?fref=ufi  This link will take you to some photographs.

The highlight of the hour for me was when someone asked, ‘Is June Francis here?’ The lady asking was called Elsie and her family used to live in the street where I grew up off Whitefield Road in Anfield. She had seen the board outside Formby Books advertising that I would be there between 11-12. When she told her mother, another Elsie Clarke, aged 88, who still lives in Liverpool, she was given her orders to go and buy a signed copy of one of my books and make herself known. She had brought photographs of her mum and other members of the family. It was a real thrill, knowing that she and her mother remembered our family so well, especially my mother and brother, Don, and me. She took a photo of me for her mum and we exchanged email addresses.

      Several members of Formby Writers’ Group came along to chat, ask writing advice and bought some of my books. One of them, David, had asked me to read his manuscript several years ago and I’m pleased to say the book about his Irish childhood and growing years made it into print in the US of A.

     I must admit that talking of years gone by and being in a bookshop made me come over all nostalgic. I remember clearly my father first taking me to choose my birthday present - I think - it was my tenth birthday. I wanted a book but there were no bookshops nearby, so we visited the post office on Breck Road, the one near Belmont Road for those who might remember it.

     The books were all hardback and kept in a locked glass fronted cabinet. It was such a thrill getting my hands on the latest Famous Five book by Enid Blyton. Although I visited the local library every week, it was tremendously difficult borrowing a copy of Enid Blyton’s books because they were incredibly popular and never on the shelves.

      We had very few books in our house because there just wasn’t money to spare for such luxury items. My father had just one or two to do with art and sigh-writing and, of course, we had the family Bible that I think had been my grandfather Nelson’s. My eldest brother, Ron, possessed a book of WW2 spy stories, one on ju-jitsu and a copy of CORAL ISLAND. I think it was my brother Don, who had the TARZAN books. I sneaked them from their rooms because I was so greedy for reading material. I also read their comics: The Hotspur, The Wizard, The Dandy, The Beano, Radio Fun and Film Fun. But I also read School Friend and occasionally Girls’ Chrystal and The Girl.

      The year I was given my very first book, Dad bought me another for Christmas which again I was able to choose for myself from the Post Office’s locked cabinet. Of course, it was another Enid Blyton but one of the Adventure series with Jack and his parrot Kiki and sidekicks.

     Such books were so valued not only because I so love reading to learn and for escapism, but because my father would have had to save up to buy those books for me.

     Those visits to the post office became a twice yearly event which I looked forward to for months on end. When I was about fifteen I cadged an old orange box from the local greengrocer and painted it blue and used it as a bookcase. By then I had my own very limited library enlarged by the DAILY MAIL ANNUAL and SCHOOL FRIEND ANNUAL which my Aunt Flo and Uncle Bill, and Mam used to buy me at Christmas. I learnt the names of the planets from the DAILY MAIL ANNUAL, as well as the words to The Twelve Days of Christmas.  

       I never went inside a real bookshop until I started work and earned my own money. Working in Liverpool city centre I used to go out for a walk at lunch time and not far away was Wilson’s bookshop on Renshaw Street. The other bookshop I loved was Phillip, Son and Nephew’s in White Chapel. I would visit these shops and the book departments in big stores such as Blackler’s and Lewis’s, as well as W.H.Smith’s.

      Alas, not only have the best two bookshops in Liverpool closed down but so have Blackler’s and Lewis’s. As for W.H.Smith’s, it went and moved from the lovely building in Church Street where I used to do signings of my own books to the one in Liverpool One, which for me will never match up to its former home in Liverpool.

      On Tuesday by special request I visited Formby Books again. As it was a lovely sunny Spring morning, I sat outside the shop behind a table containing my books which had at last arrived and chattered to fans of my books and passers-by and sold quite a few books. This really is the way to do it, I thought.

     Alas, independent bookshops are getting fewer and fewer. The internet might have put us in touch with a larger market so we have more choice and e-readers do have certain advantages over paper books but they lack the wonder and magic I found as a child in public libraries, the old post office and our independent bookshops. It’s the same with supermarkets, books might be cheaper there but they don’t have the range that the independent have, mainly just bestsellers. Neither would I think of asking the staff for advice and to recommend a book. I know time can’t stand still - thank goodness or the working classes might never have the opportunity to learn to read - most of my great-great grandparents certainly couldn’t read or write - and there’s much I love about the new technology but there are some things that I will always feel nostalgic for and I don’t think I’m alone. 

         

 

 

PART 29: SIGN WITH AN X

  I’ve just finished reading a book recommended to me by Tonythebook of Formby Books called THE ROSIE PROJECT by Graeme Simsion who is an Aussie. Previously an IT consultant with an international reputation and married to a professor of psychiatry who writes erotic fiction, this is his first novel. It gets good reviews and some stress that it’s a laugh-out-loud book. I enjoyed the novel and learnt something from it which is something I like to do when reading. But I didn’t laugh out loud once! I put that down to my age and you, dear reader, might find it hilarious. Years ago when I saw THE PINK PANTHER for the first time I nearly choked because I was laughing so much but when I saw it recently, alas, I only smiled faintly.

     When checking my emails earlier I received one from the VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas). It was sent by a man in Nepal, who was telling me about the different my support makes to those girls, who without it, wouldn’t have been able to go to school and learn to read and write.

     The thought of not being able to read or write fills me with horror. Yet if I’d been born two hundred and fifty/two hundred and sixty years ago into a working class family in Liverpool, it was highly likely that I would have been illiterate. In 1865 when my Norwegian mariner great-grandfather Martin Nelson, married my great-grandmother, Mary Harrison, neither of them could sign their name but made their mark with an X.

     I’ve often wondered why an X? Why not an O or another letter? It’s the same with voting papers or questionnaires. Why an X?

     By the time their son, my grandfather, William Nelson married my grandmother Ada Florence Cooke in 1896 now they had been taught to read and write and were able to sign their own names.

     Education is a marvellous thing.

     Whenever I do a talk on how I became a writer and my writing life, I always mention how my dad taught me my alphabet from a sign writing book. The letters were in all different kinds of scripts, some fancy, some plain, but I learnt my letters backwards and forwards before I went to school. That book was the only one in our house barring another one on how to draw figures. They were in Dad’s possession because he had a sideline in sign writing for shops and also enjoyed drawing, painting and making plaster models, him being a plasterer. If there had been more money in the family, then he might have become a commercial artist as his commanding office suggested when he was demobbed from the army after the war. He used his talent to decorate the envelopes containing the letters he wrote to my mother while in the army. I’ve often wondered where he got his artistic talent from and whether there were ever any-would-be writers in my ancestry. I suppose I'll never know but both my brothers followed in my father's footsteps and I have originals by my eldest brother Ron on my wall.
 http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/f/june-francis/ 


Above is a link to all my covers, including the latest ones to be published and reissued under a different title this coming year.