A culinary Sloane, a take-away cook and a food journalist.
Add in:
A handsome host
Season with:
A celebrity chef
Bring to the boil:
At a luxurious cookery school in France!
Waltho Williams has no idea what he’s letting himself in for when he opens the doors of La Maison du Paradis, his beautiful French home. But with dwindling funds, a cookery school seems like the ideal business plan.
Running away from an impending divorce, super-snob Caroline Carrington hopes a luxurious cookery holiday will put her back on her feet. Blackpool fish and chip café owner Fran Cartwright thinks she’s won the lottery when her husband Sid books her on a week working alongside a celebrity chef. Meanwhile, feeling she is fading at fifty, journalist Sally Parker-Brown hopes her press week covering the cookery course will enable her to boost her career.
But will the eclectic group be a recipe for success, or will the mismatched relationships sink like a souffle?
Whip out an apron, grab a wooden spoon and take a culinary trip to La Maison du Paradis, then sit back and enjoy The French Cookery School!
The French Cookery School is a life-affirming story of second chances for our cast of 50+ characters set in the heat of Franch in the mid-summer, as well as the heat of the kitchen. Our main characters, and there are really four of them (Fran, Sally, Caroline and Waltho), all have their own struggles to overcome or ambitions to achieve, which sets the scene for a story of facing grief and loss and moving beyond the comfort of how lives have been led for so many years.
It is an engaging, quick read that is sure to appeal to fans of cookery, France, and second-chance stories who are looking for a more ‘serious’ take on the genre.
Meet the author
Caroline James always wanted to write, but instead of taking a literary route, followed a career in the hospitality industry, which included owning a pub and a beautiful country house hotel. She was also a media agent representing celebrity chefs. When she finally glued her rear to a chair and began to write, the words flowed, and several novels later, she has gained many bestseller badges for her books.
The French Cookery School is Caroline’s tenth novel. Previously, The Cruise, described as: ‘Girl power for the over sixties!’ was an Amazon Top Ten Best Seller. Caroline’s hilarious novels include The Spa Break and The Best Boomerville Hotel, depicted as ‘Britain’s answer to the Best Marigold Hotel’.
She likes to write in Venus, her holiday home on wheels and in her spare time, walks with Fred, her Westie, or swims in a local lake. Caroline is a member of the Romantic Novelists Association, the SOA, ARRA and the Society of Women’s Writers & Journalists. She is also a speaker with many amusing talks heard by a variety of audiences, including cruise ship guests.
Adrienne has written a fabulous post about her new book, In The Shadow of War. Welcome Adrienne.
Down on the Farm in 1930s Canada
In 1921, my grandfather, Frank Chinn, who had spent five years fighting in France in the British infantry – surviving shrapnel wounds and mustard gas – told his wife, Edith née Fry, that he’d had enough of Britain and Europe and had applied for them to emigrate to either Canada, Australia or South Africa on the Soldiers’ Land Settlement Scheme for British war veterans.
Edith Adelaide Fry Chinn and Staff Sargeant Frank Thomas Chinn, British Infantry 1914-1919
They had two young children, my Aunt Betty who had been born in 1918, and my father, Geoffrey, who was only two. Frank was allocated virgin land in Alberta, Canada to make into a farm, so off to Canada they went. My grandmother would never see her family in Britain again.
Edith in England in 1920 with my Aunt Betty (2) and my father Geoffrey (not yet 1)
As I grew up, my father and aunt told me and my brothers and sisters many stories about their early lives on a wheat farm in the small farming community of Westlock, Alberta during the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Westlock, Alberta, Canada 1930s
Edith in front of the Chinn farmhouse, Westlock, Alberta, 1930s
Edith in front of the farmhouse – the inspiration for Sweet Briar Farm.
As it turned out, my auctioneer grandfather from Nuneaton, England was no wheat farmer. In 1935, after 14 years of struggle, the bank foreclosed on the farm and they lost everything. They moved into a small shack by the railway which my grandfather called the Chicken Coop, and managed to scrape out an existence until my grandmother had squirreled away enough money for them to move to Victoria, British Columbia where she ran a boarding house with my aunt; my father became an apprentice butcher; and my grandfather gardened and joined the local veteran’s association. In 1939, both my aunt and father enlisted – Aunt Betty as a nurse and my father in the Royal Canadian Air Force – and their lives changed forever.
The “Chicken Coop”, Westlock, Alberta, 1935.
I wanted to explore the experiences and resilience of people like my grandfather’s family trying to eke out a living on farms in North America during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, so I placed eldest Fry sister Celie, her war veteran husband Frank, and their young daughter Lulu on Sweet Briar Farm in the fictional West Lake, Alberta, which was very much inspired by family stories and photos.
Wow, thank you for sharing such a fabulous post. The photos are fabulous.
Here’s the blurb
One war may be over, but their fight for survival continues…
For sisters Etta, Jessie and Celie Fry, the Great War and the hardships of the years that followed have taken a heavy toll.
Determined to leave her painful past behind her, Etta heads to the bright lights of Hollywood whilst Jessie, determined to train as a doctor and use her skills to help others, is hampered by the men who dominate her profession. On the vast, empty plains of the Canadian prairies, Celie and her small family stand on the brink of losing everything.
As whispers of a new war make their way to each sister, each must face the possibility of the unthinkable happening again…
Adrienne Chinn was born in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, grew up in Quebec, and eventually made her way to London, England after a career as a journalist. In England she worked as a TV and film researcher before embarking on a career as an interior designer, lecturer, and writer. When not up a ladder or at the computer writing, she often can be found rummaging through flea markets or haggling in the Marrakech souk. Her second novel, The English Wife — a timeslip story set in World War II England and contemporary Newfoundland — was published in June 2020 and has become an international bestseller. Her debut novel, The Lost Letter, was published by Avon Books UK in 2019. Love in a Time of War, the first in a series of four books in The Three Fry Sisters series, was published in February 2022. The second in the series, The ParisSister, was published in February 2023, and the third book in the series, In the Shadow of War, was published in March 2024.
Strong-willed heiress Johane de Geneville is married to Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, at just fifteen years old.
Soon Johane finds herself swept up in a world of treacherous court politics and dangerous secrets as her husband deposes Edward II and rules England alongside Queen Isabella.
Yet when Roger is accused of treason, she is robbed of her freedom and must survive catastrophic events in her fight for justice – with her life, and her children’s, hanging in the balance…
Will she pay for her husband’s mistakes, or will she manage to escape from a terrible fate?
A Court of Betrayal sees Anne O’Brien returning to the early 14th century, finding for her readers a wonderful character, Johane de Geneville. We all know the story of Queen Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, but what about the wife left behind in the Welsh Marches?
There is much of Johane and Roger’s life to cover before the tumultuous events that see Roger fleeing England for his life – 12 children for a start – and this period of Johane’s life is given full coverage by our fabulous author. Johane is fully formed. What I’ve always appreciated about Anne’s characters is that they are women of the time, with all the restrictions that bring with it. Yet, her female characters remain strong-willed and independent, doing what they can within societal norms. Sometimes we might not like Johane (the treatment of her sisters for one), but we are still very much invested in her, and her story. And this is her story. The children are, of course, mentioned, but we hear Johane’s thoughts and fears. Johane drives the narrative, even when she is held in captivity with little outside knowledge of events at the king’s court..
Through Johane’s eyes, we see her husband cast low at the pretensions of the Despenser’s, only to rise too high, too quickly, and we also hear of the many conspiracy theories surrounding his actions – particularly concerning what happened to Edward II. The symmetry between Roger’s actions and those of Edward II’s favourites is beautifully evoked, and the reader is left feeling that if a woman had been instrumental in all this chaos, she would have had much more sense than to upset everyone in the same way that Roger was previously disgruntled—a lovely touch.
I flew through this book in 2 days. Reading a new Anne O’Brien novel is an absolute treat. Just like Constance of York in a Tapestry of Treason, Johane will long live with the reader.
A Court of Betrayal is a wonderful, evocative novel that will delight readers.
Sign up for Anne’s monthly News Letter to keep up to date with books, events, giveaways and what Anne is writing about. https://www.anneobrienbooks.com/
I’m delighted to welcome Lynn Downey and her new book, Dude or Die, to the blog with a guest post.
Lynn Downey
I’ve been writing about the American dude ranch for the last few years. My novels, Dudes Rush In and the new sequel, Dude or Die, are set on a fictional Arizona dude ranch in the 1950s. My last nonfiction book tackled the same theme, American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West.
Dude ranches began in the Rocky Mountain West in the 1880s. They were originally the kind of place where men from the eastern states could go to hunt or just live like cowboys for a few weeks. It didn’t take long for women and families to start visiting these places, which opened up throughout Montana and Wyoming, and then in California and the Southwest around the time of World War I. People had experiences at dude ranches they couldn’t get anywhere else, and ranching is thriving throughout the western states today.
I first got interested in dude ranches when I was working as the company historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco. There was a catalog in the archives called Dude Ranch Duds, featuring clothing specifically to be worn on dude ranches. Not just the denim jeans and jackets, but western shirts, satin shirts with embroidery, gabardine riding pants, everything that real cowboys wouldn’t actually wear. But that was the point. The guests were dudes and dudines, they came from somewhere else to immerse themselves in the cowboy West.
Writing about dude ranching for so many years has yielded stories I never thought I would find, and they went beyond tales of cowboys and dudes. Doing research included perusing a lot of historical newspapers, which are available and searchable online. One day I found what is probably my favorite headline of all time. It was in a number of papers in July of 1935:
“Vampire to Retire to Dude Ranch”
It seems actor Bela Lugosi, most famous for playing Count Dracula in the 1931 film Dracula, had just finished making a new movie called Murder By Television (believe it or not). The Cameo Pictures Corporation was running publicity for the film, and told Lugosi to fill out a questionnaire for readers of various movie magazines. One of the questions asked what his “Present Ambition” was. His answer: “Dude Ranch.”
Of course, I had to read that article.
This just tickled newspaper reporters. One writer for the Brooklyn Times tracked down what he thought were a few more details about Lugosi’s interesting statement.
While the second leading fiend in the United States does not find his lot an unhappy one, he would rather be a cowboy…he has no intention of retiring to a haunted castle in the mountains of his native Hungary when his days of screen acting are over. His desires are for a home on the range, preferably a dude ranch, where all the midnight shrieks, if any, will be from guests whose digestive systems have disagreed with the ranch fodder.
Well, I didn’t believe that for a minute. So, I did what any good historian would do: I tracked down Bela Lugosi’s granddaughter.
She was lovely, and intrigued by the story, which she’d never heard before. She talked to her father, Bela Lugosi, Jr. and a few days later wrote me an email. “My grandfather was an interesting person and I believe he could have thought a dude ranch was a good idea. He really loved the outdoors and especially enjoyed hiking and taking walks.”
I think Lugosi also had a great sense of humor. Because I believe he told the PR people about his dude ranch ambition purely as a joke. Perhaps he was tired of talking to the publicity folks, and wanted to have a little fun.
This reflects how popular dude ranches had become by the 1930s. Movie stars like Errol Flynn and Joel McCrea told reporters they planned to open ranches of their own, but they never did. Gary Cooper did have a dude ranch during this decade on the property where he grew up in Helena, Montana, but it didn’t last long. That was probably because people expected to see the movie star when they arrived, but he was rarely if ever there.
Bela Lugosi could have made up anything when the Cameo Pictures Corporation people asked him about his ambitions for the future. But he chose the dude ranch, which was deeply embedded in American culture. It was also the absolute opposite of his character, both on and off screen. And he knew it.
Here’s the blurb
It’s 1954, and San Francisco writer Phoebe Kelley is enjoying the success of her first novel, Lady in the Desert. When Phoebe’s sister-in-law asks her to return to Tribulation, Arizona to help run the H Double Bar Dude Ranch, she doesn’t hesitate. There’s competition from a new dude ranch this year, so the H Double Bar puts on a rodeo featuring a trick rider with a mysterious past. When accidents begin to happen around the ranch, Phoebe jumps in to figure out why, and confronts an unexpected foe. And a man from her own past forces her to confront feelings long buried. Dude or Die is the second book in the award-winning H Double Bar Dude Ranch series.
She was the Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco for 25 years. Her adventures as ambassador for company history took her around the world, where she spoke to television audiences, magazine editors, and university students, appeared in numerous documentaries, and on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She wrote many books and articles about the history of the company and the jeans, and her biography, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, won the Foreword Reviews silver INDIE award.
Lynn got interested in dude ranches during her time at Levi’s. Her debut historical novel, Dudes Rush In, is set on an Arizona dude ranch in the 1950s; Arizona because she’s a desert rat at heart, and the 1950s because the clothes were fabulous.
Dudes Rush In won a Will Rogers Medallion Award, and placed first in Arizona Historical Fiction at the New Mexico-Arizona book awards. The next book in this series, Dude or Die, was released in 2023. And just for fun, Lynn wrote a screenplay based on Dudes Rush In, which is currently making the rounds of reviewers and competitions.
She pens short stories, as well. “The Wind and the Widow” took Honorable Mention in the History Through Fiction story contest, and “Incident at the Circle H” was a Finalist for the Longhorn Prize from Saddlebag Dispatches. The story “Goldie Hawn at the Good Karma Café,” won second place in The LAURA Short Fiction contest from Women Writing the West, and is based on her experiences in a San Francisco religious cult in the 1970s. (That will be another book one of these days.)
Lynn’s latest nonfiction book is American Dude Ranch: A Touch of the Cowboy and the Thrill of the West, a cultural history of the dude ranch. It was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, True West, Cowgirl, and The Denver Post, and was a Finalist for the Next Generation INDIE Award in Nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews said the book is “…deeply engaging and balances accessible writing style with solid research.”
When she’s not writing, Lynn works as a consulting archivist and historian for museums, libraries, cultural institutions, and businesses. She is the past president of Women Writing the West, a member of the Western Writers of America, and is on numerous boards devoted to archives and historic preservation.
Lynn lives in Sonoma, California, where she sometimes makes wine from the Pinot Noir grapes in her back yard vineyard.
Helen Bygrove, manageress of the Beach Hotel since her bullying husband was conscripted, is called to the foyer on the arrival of Detective Inspector Toshack. There’s recently been some libellous letters sent, and accusations have been flying around as to who’s been sending them.
In the foyer, Helen was alarmed to see that Sergeant Gardener was with him. Standing behind him were WPC Amanda Lovelock, who used to be her bookkeeper, and Constable Twort, who’d retired originally a few years before the war. A feeling of dread crept up her body and she had a bitter taste in her mouth. Surely they hadn’t concluded that someone from the hotel had written the letters. Could it be one of the new chambermaids, as Edie had suggested? Did Miss Harvey know something, and that’s why she’d turned up at the carol concert?
‘Inspector,’ she greeted him. ‘How may I help you today?’
The inspector opened his mouth to respond but was cut short by both front doors being pushed open. Lady Blackmore was fussing as she entered, along with around a dozen people Helen recognised from the businesses in Beach Town. Cecelia was nowhere in sight. The looks on their faces suggested they weren’t here for pleasure.
Lady Blackmore opened with, ‘Well, that decides it. The hotel crest was on my latest letter. Now try and tell me the letters did not originate from this hotel.’
‘And on mine!’ cried Norah Johnson, who as Norah Daniels had once been a chambermaid at the hotel. Before the dairy farmer’s son had made her pregnant and they’d had to marry. ‘Just because I used to work ’ere and had to marry my Jim, don’t give you no permission to send me letters calling me names like trollop.’
‘That’s what I was about to tell you,’ Toshack told Helen. ‘More letters have been received, but this time on hotel notepaper.’
‘And what have I ever done to you?’ said Mrs Riddles, the postmistress from Norfolk Road. ‘Calling me a stinking cow of a liar, just because I took my last letter to the police station.’ She pointed towards Helen.
‘I’ve never done any such thing,’ said Helen, feeling a weight in her chest. ‘And why on earth would I send anonymous letters on hotel paper.’
‘But they’re not anonymous,’ said the landlord of the New Inn, also on Norfolk Road. ‘They’re signed H.B. That’s you innit?’
‘That’s even less likely then,’ said Edie, coming forward.
‘No, it’s to double bluff people, Miss Harvey here reckons,’ said Norah Johnson. ‘And it makes sense. It’d be the best defence in a courtroom.’
‘That’s enough of that now,’ said Inspector Toshack. ‘If you’d all kindly leave me to carry out my job – ’
‘We want to make sure you do carry out your job,’ said Miss Harvey. ‘Not like last time.’
‘I used to think you were a decent sort,’ said Norah, ‘when I worked for you. Thought it was ya ’usband what was the silly bugger. I guess now ’e’s gone away you’ve taken over his meanness too.’
‘That’s enough of that, young woman,’ Sergeant Gardner warned.
‘And this accusation about her ladyship,’ said the landlord. ‘What proof have you got that her companion is her daughter.’
‘We don’t need to mention the details,’ Lady Blackmore whimpered, her hands covering her cheeks.
‘Mine had that ridiculous claim too,’ said Mrs Riddles. ‘I can quote it exactly, I can. ‘Lady Millicent Blackmore can’t keep her vile secret any more, it said. We can all see the likeness between her and Cecelia, and we know that she’s really her bastard child, born out of wedlock.’
Lady Blackmore let out a strangled cry of anguish. ‘Of course that’s not true! I am only ten years older than Cecelia. How could she be my daughter? Whoever heard of anything so absurd?’
‘I agree,’ said Helen. ‘And I would never say such a thing.’
‘Not to our faces,’ said Norah. ‘Makes me wonder what you said be’ind our backs when I was working ’ere.’
‘I’m warning you,’ said the sergeant.
‘What, only me?’ said Norah. ‘What, ’cause I’m the trollop ’ere, eh?
It seemed to Helen that the scene before her was diminishing, and the sound fading. She had an acid taste at the back of her throat. Was she still in bed, dreaming?
The gathering mob started to talk over each other, provoking both Sergeant Gardner and Inspector Toshack to censure them. The sergeant went with, ‘Quiet now!’ while the inspector went with the more polite, ‘Would you all calm down now.’
The double instruction had the desired effect and the incensed chatter ceased immediately.
‘Now, unless you want to be arrested for disturbance of the peace, I suggest you all vacate the hotel,’ said the inspector, stretching up to his full height. ‘And if I receive any reports that you’ve returned to cause trouble, I will spare no time in sending one of my officers to your abodes. Is that clear?’
There were several mumbles of assent, before each of them turned to exit. Lady Blackmore charged out of the door first, almost knocking Norah Johnson over. The rest followed on, subdued, apart from Miss Harvey. She stood, defiant, for several seconds, glaring at Helen. She was the last of them to leave.
Helen was grateful that nobody had emerged from either dining room during this scene, though she had no doubt that the throng that had gathered today would soon pass around news of the latest letters.
‘Mrs Bygrove,’ said Toshack. ‘Mrs Bygrove?’
‘Hm?’ She came to. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘I said, could we go somewhere more private.’
‘Of… of course. Edie, I’m leaving you in charge.’
‘Yes, madam.’
Helen took a deep breath, determined to pull herself together. But she was badly shaken. ‘Come this way.’ She led the four police officers to the staff area, stopping in the corridor. ‘We’ll go to my office.’
‘No, this will suffice,’ said the inspector. ‘WPC Lovelock, you know the building. Show Sergeant Gardner the way.’
‘Yes sir,’ she said with little enthusiasm. She opened the door to the stairs, that led to the staff living quarters.
‘What are they doing?’ said Helen.
‘Carrying out a search.’
Here’s the blurb
Can Helen save the hotel… and her reputation?
Helen Bygrove is managing the hotel, now that her husband has been conscripted. Against all expectations, Helen and her team are doing marvellously, despite the shortages brought by war. Even the exacting Lady Blackmore agrees. But then the calm is shattered when poison pen letters are sent to prominent townsfolk and Helen finds herself the target of a police investigation. Is someone trying to ruin Helen, and the Beach Hotel? And can she rely on the handsome but taciturn Inspector Toshack to help her? When her husband, Douglas, is invalided out of the war he is determined to take back control of the hotel and things go from bad to worse.
How can she ever escape his bullying? Is she a fool to hope that she may have a second chance at love?
Francesca has enjoyed writing since she was a child, largely influenced by a Welsh mother who was good at improvised story telling.
Writing under both her maiden name, Francesca Capaldi, and her married name, Francesca Burgess, she is the author of historical novels, short stories and several pocket novels. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists.
The first novel in the Wartime in the Valleys series, Heartbreak in the Valleys, was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association Historical Award 2021. Both the Valleys series and the Beach Hotel series are published by Hera Books.
Francesca was born and brought up on the Sussex coast, but currently lives in Kent with her family and a cat called Lando Calrission.
I’m delighted to welcome Katharine Quarmby and her new book, The Low Road, to the blog, with searching for The Low Road in Historical Sources.
Searching for The Low Road in Historical Sources
Katharine Quarmby
The search for the story that became The Low Road started around seven years ago now, when I came across a description of one local area in my Norfolk, England, hometown. It mentioned in passing an area at the end of the town called Lush Bush, where a local woman, Mary Tyrell, had been buried on the parish boundary in 1813. I started to dig further, through local newspaper articles and found that the Norfolk Chronicle had reported in that year that she had taken poison and died after being investigated for infanticide. She was then staked through the heart after death in an archaic punishment called felo de se. A daughter, then only described by her initials, A.T., had survived and had been sent to a refuge in London.
It wasn’t a lot to go on, but I really wanted to know more, so I started by guessing that her first name was Ann and was lucky enough to find an Ann Tyrell, (called Hannah in my novel) who had lived at the Refuge for the Destitute in Hackney, East London. I then looked her up in the Hackney Archives, in East London, just a bike or bus ride away from my home, in the great Minute Books that noted in copperplate handwriting the history of the Refuge and of the lives of the young people, known as Objects, who lived there. No traces of the physical building exist now – all that is left is writing. There is just one painting that shows the Refuge as well, looming above some local almshouses.
I walked up and down the Hackney Road in search for it, and found the rough location of the institution where she had been admitted, after being banished from the hometown we shared and being found to have understood, or be ‘sensible’ that her mother had committed an “Iniquity”. It was near a scruffy car park, there were dark alleys nearby and I did my best to imagine Ann living there, using the brilliant Layers of London historical maps to go back in time.
In real life, just as in my novel, Hannah met another destitute there, Annie Simpkins. The girls forged a friendship that I imagined deepened into love and in December 1821 they took a risky decision which then dictated the course of their lives from then on. The Minute Books revealed that on a winter evening in 1821 the girls ran away with stolen goods from the Refuge – perhaps to make a life for themselves, who knows – and were apprehended by the Superintendent of the Refuge.
I traced Hannah and Annie onwards, to the National Archives at Kew, West London, and also through the Old Bailey Online Proceedings, which have been digitised and provide a unique insight into the British criminal justice system. The Old Bailey records show that the girls – just fifteen and eighteen at the time – stood trial for ‘grand larceny’, or thieving, on January 10, 1822. They were sentenced to seven years’ transportation.
But as I found, when I visited the National Archives in Kew, West London, they didn’t go immediately. It was six years later when our Ann was transported. So what happened in between? I kept looking. First of all, they went to the Millbank Penitentiary, now buried underneath the Tate Britain gallery. A stone buttress by the Thames nearby states: “Near this site stood Millbank Prison which was opened in 1816 and closed in 1880. This buttress stood at the head of the river steps from which until 1867, prisoners sentenced to transportation embarked on their journey to Australia.” There are few other traces, except some prison walls, unmarked, and a trench which had been dug around the prison which is now used to dry washing for nearby houses.
Later, the archives also revealed that the girls had even been sent to a prison hulk on the Thames. At the National Archives I was handed a document, done up with red ribbon, about their life on the hulks. Had anyone else ever untied this, I wondered, as I pulled on the ribbon, then unfolded the document. There were the names of my girls and others, resident on the prison ship on the Thames – and there was a signature at the bottom from the then Home Secretary, Robert Peel, pardoning them, and so it was that in 1825 the girls were set free and ended up working at the Ship Inn in Millbank, near the Houses of Parliament.
The last traces of my Ann, in UK history, were back in the Hackney Archives. She had asked for money so she could return to Harleston, Norfolk, but found that all her friends were dead; she had then been granted a stay in the temporary part of the Refuge…and then she vanished. All I knew was that the Superintendent of the Refuge had written back to a lawyer in my hometown to let him know that Ann had been transported to ‘Botany Bay’ in 1828.
I could find no record of her in Australian archives and so at this point I had to pivot and tell the story as fiction, rather than non-fiction. I novelised what happened to them in Australia, taking as my guide the history of other girls and women who were exiled, and was lucky enough to receive a grant from the UK Society of Authors so I could visit both the Hunter Valley and Tasmania, landscape into which I imagined the story of my two girls, exiled, as part of the 26,000 women who were transported to mainland Australia and Tasmania – the largest forced migration of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish people, numbering some 162,000 convicts in all, between 1767-1868. Telling that part of the story – part of the story of these islands, also meant paying attention to, and honouring, the Indigenous communities whose lives were desecrated by the British arriving.
From a trace of a story, then, The Low Road became a novel that uncovered lost histories: the stories of poor women from rural areas, the stories of convicts sent to penal colonies because of poverty and political activism, the stories of people who often left no records behind as a result of illiteracy and hardship, and the largely overlooked history of same sex relationships between convict women. This was a story from the bottom up, of how three generations of girls and women from one family were caught up in political times, from the fall-out of the Napoleonic wars and the poverty after, to the rise of the agricultural workers, the Swing Rioters, and other political dissidents and beyond the seas to Australia.
When I go back to Harleston to visit my family we go on a walk that takes us through the town, past the inn where a jury of men held an inquest on Mary’s body, past the green where the pond used to be where the baby was found, and all the way down to Lush Bush, where Mary is buried in an unmarked grave. I think of Mary and Hannah every time, and I hope I’ve done them justice.
Heres’s the blurb
In 1828, two young women were torn apart as they were sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay. Will they ever meet again?
Norfolk, 1813. In the quiet Waveney Valley, the body of a woman – Mary Tyrell – is staked through the heart after her death by suicide. She had been under arrest for the suspected murder of her newborn child. Mary leaves behind a young daughter, Hannah, who is later sent away to the Refuge for the Destitute in London, where she will be trained for a life of domestic service.
It is at the Refuge that Hannah meets Annie Simpkins, a fellow resident, and together they forge a friendship that deepens into passionate love. But the strength of this bond is put to the test when the girls are caught stealing from the Refuge’s laundry, and they are sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, setting them on separate paths that may never cross again.
Drawing on real events, The Low Road is a gripping, atmospheric tale that brings to life the forgotten voices of the past – convicts, servants, the rural poor – as well as a moving evocation of love that blossomed in the face of prejudice and ill fortune.
Katharine Quarmby has written non-fiction, short stories and books for children and her debut novel, The Low Road, is published by Unbound in 2023. Her non-fiction works include Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People (Portobello Books, 2011) and No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers (Oneworld, 2013). She has also written picture books and shorter e-books.
She is an investigative journalist and editor, with particular interests in disability, the environment, race and ethnicity, and the care system. Her reporting has appeared in outlets including the Guardian, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Times of London, the Telegraph, New Statesman and The Spectator. Katharine lives in London.
Katharine also works as an editor for investigative journalism outlets, including Investigative Reporting Denmark and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
My fabulous publishers are working together and offering a hardback edition of King of Kings and The Royal Women Who Made England (UK only). To enter you will need to access one of the original posts from Boldwood on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. I will add links here. (Closing date 6th Feb 2024. T &Cs apply).
Check out the Brunanburh Series page on my blog for my information about my fiction.
And, because I never tire of making a slight fool of myself, here’s me talking about some more of the research I undertook for the book and trying to explain the family tree of Otto I, King of the East Franks. Who knows how successful I’ve been.
MJ Porter 