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.

    

        

PART 28: IF YOU EVER GO ACROSS THE SEA TO IRELAND...

For hundreds of years the Irish have been leaving Ireland’s shores but their patron saint, Patrick, whose day is celebrated on Monday, did it in reverse. He wasn’t Irish but a native of Briton in the 5^th century. Believed to have been kidnapped by pirates at the age of sixteen, he was taken as a slave to Ireland and lived there for six years before escaping and returning to his home in Briton. He became a cleric and eventually returned to northern and western Ireland as a missionary and in later life became Bishop of Armagh.

Of course, there will be celebrations in Liverpool of one kind or another this weekend and on St Patrick’s Day, what with the city boasting a large number of Irish. There’ll be food, music and dancing.  Liverpool FC headquarters is said to be putting on a special menu that day which will include potato and leek soup with soda bread for starters and finishing with chocolate bread and butter pudding. No doubt Irish whiskey and Guinness will be the drinks of the day. 

 

I was amused to find online that - just for fun -  you can play a scene from films of the worst Irish accents created by famous film stars -  they included - Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, and I must  mention Irishman, Pierce Brosnan. It also says somewhere else that a number of famous people (mainly Americans) claim to have Irish blood. Writers have to be careful about dialect. Overdo it and the reader cannot understand what your characters are talking about. So I'm careful to play the Liverpool accent down and have just one talking the lingo.

 

I’ve probably mentioned before that I was one of those Liverpudlians who when I went to Ireland, denied having  a drop of the Irish in my veins. The taxi driver in Co Mayo on the west coast, refused to believe my sister and I, saying if you came from Liverpool, you were bound to have some Irish in you. His words have since proved prophetical because I discovered on Ancestry that I have a great-great-great grandfather who was born in Ireland, also my husband’s grandfather was born in Co Antrim. The Irish family connection was strengthened when one of my nieces, Christine, married an Irishman. The wedding took place, not far from Naas, which happened to get a mention in one of my old Mills & Boon romances set in Ireland during the reign of Richard II. It was great fun writing it because for me Ireland had a touch of magic about it even in those days. As according to legend, St Patrick discovered in his day when he battled against the Druids for the souls of the Irish and eventually won.

 

PART 27: IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN This blog is copywrited.

Today is the first Sunday in Lent and last Wednesday (Ash Wednesday) signalled the beginning of a time when thousands of people decide to give up something they enjoy, such as chocolate, wine or cake for Lent. This despite the fact that often they’d say that they weren’t religious. I only discovered recently that some churches burnt the palm crosses from the previous years Palm Sunday and it is the ash from them that the priest would smear on penitents' foreheads at the start of Lent. I purchase the palm crosses for my church from a church in London, who see to the distribution of them throughout the country. They, in turn, buy them from a village in Africa called Masasi. They aren’t expensive but they provide a welcome income for the villagers who make the crosses from palm leaves.

When I was young growing up in Liverpool my parents weren’t churchgoers, although us children were sent to Sunday School with our penny collection clutched tightly in our hands. The one I went to was in Dawber Street, and was attached to St Chrysostom’s Church on Queens Road, Everton. Along with the stories my father told me, those Bible stories I learnt at Sunday School made a big impression on me as they were full of drama and courage and often humour. I also learnt to think of others worse off than myself. We used to collect halfpennies to help the Leprosy Mission, although I think in those days it was called Mission to the Lepers. It was a marvelous day years later when I heard about the drugs that had been developed to cure leprosy. There’s a wonderful novel by Victoria Hislop called “The Island” The title refers to Spinalonga, off the coast of Crete, that was a leper colony. The story stirs the emotions and deserved to be the million best seller that it was.

We kids also used to go to a Christian Endeavour hall on Breck Road where they would show films and sometimes lantern slides. It was there I saw my first photo of a chimpanzee so that when later we went to watch Tarzan films at the local cinema, I recognised Cheetah, Tarzan’s animal companion, straightaway.

This Lent I’m not really giving anything up but rather taking something up. There’s a book I read every now and again called “Finding Sanctuary” by Abbot Christopher Jamison who had an important role in the TV series THE BIG SILENCE and THE MONASTERY. "Finding Sanctuary" also has a sub title, Monastic Steps for Everyday Life. I grew up C of E but in the Seventies the ecumenical movement took off and, I’m glad to say, the different denominations of Christianity in our area came together during Lent and we got to see the inside of each other’s churches when we met to study aspects of our faith. So different to when I considered it daring to peep inside a Catholic church.

The book led me to a website called Sacred Space. It’s organised by Irish Jesuits and there is a Daily Prayer and reading for each day. You can also click on a Guide button and Looking for Inspiration button which is helpful for meditation. So I plan to visit the site everyday. The good ol’ C of E also has a good website with readings and prayers which I’ve often visited when leading the prayers in my church.

It’s good to mark off the year with special occasions. My mother always made pancakes on Shrove Tuesday which was often at half term and we always had fish on Fridays. Come the end of Lent no doubt it will be fish and hot cross buns in our house and chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus and the new growth of Spring. One of the first pieces of writing I had published in MY WEEKLY magazine was about Easter Customs, come Easter, maybe I'll remember to blog part of the article.

PART 26:WINDY WEATHER, FROSTY WEATHER WITH OCCASIONAL SUNSHINE! All these blogs are copywrited.

When I was a kid, there used to be rhymes we’d chant on different occasions. One was Windy weather, frosty weather, when the wind blows, we’ll all blow together. I used to sing it with my boys when they were small, making a game of the walk to school or the shops. We’d hold hands and run and then on the all blow we’d swing together and collide into each other. There was also When the North Wind doeth blow, and we shall have snow and what will the robin do then, poor thing? He’ll sit in a barn to keep himself warm and hide his head under his wing, poor thing. I was curious enough about the latter to google it and discovered that it is British and believed to date from the 16^th century, which means that probably my ancestors recited it when they were children.

    Growing up in Liverpool I don’t remember ever seeing a barn and the only robins would be on Christmas cards. Sparrows, pigeons and gulls were the only birds with which I was familiar. It’s different today because we have a garden and at this time of year all kinds of birds are regular visits to the seeds, nuts, bread and other scraps John puts out for them. We also do the same on our early morning walk across the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the field that leads to Waterloo.  

I’m reminded of these rhymes due to the atrocious weather that has been hitting Britain and is still giving so many people a miserable time. Fortunately Merseyside hasn’t come off too badly. A week or so ago on Windy Wednesday the worst damage our property suffered was a buckled fence panel and a toppled plant pot. We’ve had scarcely any frost and some of last year’s geraniums are still flowering in a pot just outside the back of the house.

Whenever my son, Iain, does research for me, I always ask him to check the weather at times, such as Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Easter and various bank holidays as I consider it plays very much a part in our lives. There are certain years that stand out in my memory. Early 1947 was when the snow seemed to last forever and snowman lingered for ages as did the icy slides in the street and on the bombed holla where there had once been a church. The summer that year was a hot one when the tar between the cobbles in Whitefield Road melted and we’d poke at it with lolly ice sticks. 1976 was the long hot dry summer during which I sat the exam for Geography O level whilst pregnant with my youngest son, we also bought our first car for which we paid a £100. We motored down to Dawlish in Devon, which has been so much in the news lately because the storms put the railway out of action. The car broke down on the way home and we had to wait from 10am until midnight before the AA Relay came to our rescue and took us home. Daniel was born in the autumn of that year after the rains finally came.

 Daniel was to accompany me to Ireland during the school summer holidays in the late 1980s. We took our bikes on the ferry and cycled from Dublin into the Wicklow Hills, having never been there before to stay with the relatives of a friend of church. I wanted to research an historical romance set in Ireland in the reign of Richard II. It was unusually hot and the tarmac stuck to our bike tyres and the tips of Daniel’s ears got sunburnt and peeled. The house had no running water and an outside loo with no main drains. Some water was collected from a tank on the roof but I remember carrying a bucket to the river for water, too. Within two days the rains came and we managed to get a lift in a van to Dublin where we stayed in a youth hostel there. Unfortunately Dublin Castle was closed to the public as it was being renovated. Today, I would have discovered that online before we left home but at least I got the feel of the city and the experience came in useful when I wrote not only FATEFUL ENCOUNTER but also my second saga FLOWERS ON THE MERSEY set in Liverpool, Ireland and on a ship going to America during the Irish Civil War.





As I have no photographs of us in Ireland or France, here is one of Daniel and I outside the lovely Ely Cathedral when he received his Open University Mathematical Science degree in 2006.



Daniel also went with me to France by train and hovercraft a year or so later. Another first for both of us and the research that time was for an historical set during the time of Henry V. We stayed in Calais for a couple of days but my plans to go further afield were scuppered by the railways going on strike. The weather wasn’t too good either. GREY is the word I’d use. Still it was an experience and the book LOVE’S INTRIGUE was eventually published here and in France.

The weather this morning was bright and sunny and temperatures did reach 10 degrees C, and lifted the spirits but by 2pm it has clouded over and after visiting Caradoc Mission in Seaforth for a Ladies Brunch, sitting at my desk finishing the blog I started a week ago isn’t a bad place to be. Any minute now I expect it will rain.