Category: Books

Where did Claudia Faraday come from?

Published on by patsywp

She originated in a short story I wrote some years ago, about a woman in her fifties and the mother of three grownup children who discovers the joys of sex for the first time.

‘It got better, in time, though to be truthful it always felt more of a duty than a pleasure: a little like homework, satisfying when over, and done well, but never exactly enjoyable. But then nobody had ever suggested it could be otherwise.’

That was Claudia talking about sex.

I was intrigued by the notion that for many women of previous eras sex was largely a matter of lying back and thinking of England. The idea that it could be pleasurable, and done not just for the sake of procreation, never seemed to enter their heads. Then along came Marie Stopes, who made the outrageous suggestion in her book Married Love that sex could be enjoyed for its own sake, and that there was such a thing as a clitoris – whose function was for the purpose of (self) gratification rather than producing babies – and, in her own way set the world of sex on fire.

Originally published by A C Fifield in 1918
(this cover from The Gollancz Paperbacks edition 1995)

But The Awakening of Claudia Faraday is not solely about sex. There is a bit of erotica of course. But it’s essentially – as the title suggests – about what the effect this new discovery has on a woman in her fifties, brought up in the rigid confines of the Victorian age and now, thanks to an unlikely happening, emerging into the bright lights of the Roaring Twenties: a time of bohemianism, Noel Coward and the Bloomsbury group; when women were shedding their corsets along with their inhibitions.

It’s a book about a reserved, impeccably-mannered woman of a certain age learning how to behave badly, you could say. What might have happened if Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (whose name was the inspiration behind Claudia’s) had met D H Lawrence’s Oliver Mellors.

  • Mrs Dalloway, originally published by Hogarth Press in 1925
  • Lady Chatterley (goodreads.com), originally published by Penguin Books in 1960
  • Claudia Faraday, originally published by Prefab Publications in 2019

© Patsy Trench
September 2020

Self publishing for family historians (again)

Published on by patsywp

This is an update of my previous blog (click here for the original) for the friendly attendees of a workshop on Self Publishing for Family Historians at the Society of Genealogists on Saturday 8 February 2020.

First of all, an apology. I misled you concerning inserting images into a paperback. I was confusing paperbacks with ebooks.

To insert an image into a paperback all you need to do is to click Insert where you want the image to go, click on Picture, choose your image, and Bob’s your uncle.

It’s best to make sure the image is the right size before inserting it into the page. If you try to alter the size after you’ve inserted it you may lose resolution. As I remember when I did this it this involved a bit of toing and froing to get the size and position of the image right.

NB: This is for black and white images only. For colour you will need to choose the colour print option on Amazon’s website, and I imagine this will bump up the price somewhat.

Here’s a link to Amazon KDP’s instructions: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202169030#tips

###

Recommended and reputable organisations who can help you with any or all aspects of your self publishing adventure:

MATADOR:   https://www.troubador.co.uk/matador/

SILVERWOOD: https://www.silverwoodbooks.co.uk/

I AM SELF PUBLISHING:  https://www.iamselfpublishing.com

PYNTO:  https://www.pynto.co.uk/ A friendly wife-and-husband team who can design any kind of book you like, from basic to custom-made.

LIFELINES PRESS:  http://www.lifelinespress.co.uk/  A bespoke, personal service for print books only, offering everything from ghost writing to editing to the end production of a beautiful work of art, printed on paper of your choice, hand-bound in leather or anything else you choose.

Before you approach any of these companies:

What you need to think of

EDITING:   There are three main types of editor:

  • Structural edit – checking the manuscript as a whole for clarity, over-writing, under-writing, repetition, overall structure
  • Copy editing – line by line checking for grammar, clumsy writing, repetition, clarity
  • Proof reading – checking for mistakes and typos

There is a certain amount of blurring between these three tasks, but do not expect an editor to proofread your book. She/he may correct mistakes if they spot them but it is a different process altogether, and one a sharp-eyed friend might be able to do for you.

COVER DESIGN

BOOK INTERIOR:  

Find a book whose layout you like to use as a template. Consider:

  • SIZE: Of the book; standard non fiction is 6”x 9”, fiction 8”x 5” (but you can choose what you like). 
  • TYPEFACE AND TYPEFACE SIZE:  There are specifically recommended fonts. I used Palatino 11 point. It’s not a bad idea to print out a few pages in various typefaces and sizes in your chosen page size to see what it looks like
  • MARGINS: Mine were quite generous at: top, bottom 1.9cm, inner 2 outer 1.5, gutter .33
  • CHAPTER TITLE LAYOUT:  Centred or left-aligned, upper or lower case, etc.
  • TRIMMINGS: Drop caps, headers, small caps etc
  • IMAGES: (photos, maps, family trees)

FRONT MATTER: What goes before the main text. This is a matter of choice, but for ebooks certainly it’s good to keep it to a minimum. Mine consists of:

  • Title page
  • Copyright page
  • Dedication/quote page
  • Table of contents
  • Photo of the subject of my book

END MATTER:  What comes after the main text.

  • Acknowledgements
  • Appendix & chapter notes/references
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • Author biography

You can also include reviews, if you have them, or books you’ve already written.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:  This is important to readers, so it’s a good idea to make yourself sound interesting and likeable!

  • Keep it brief
  • To the point and in the context of the book.
  • Write in the third person

BLURB: The blurb is what makes a person read a book or pass on.

  • Again, keep it brief – no more than 200 words
  • Write in the third person present tense
  • Remember it is a selling tool not a synopsis, so don’t attempt to tell the whole story

The blurb also acts as a reminder of what excited you enough to write the book in the first place.

SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT

The two major players are
Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/
Ingram Spark: https://www.ingramspark.com/

Both organisations publish in print and ebook form.

Amazon: free to submit, easy to navigate, they provide you with a free ISBN (or ASIN).Subsequent updates and changes, to the interior or cover, are also free.

Ingram Spark: fee of $49 to submit – unless you are a member of ALLi, in which case it’s free), and you need to have your own ISBN (through Neilsen: https://www.nielsenisbnstore.com/). Advantages of Ingram over Amazon are a) the quality is very slightly better, b) they have print outlets in the UK and Australia, c) they have a wider range of sizes and quality, including hardbacks.

Amazon has around 85% of the market but many people, including bookshops, don’t like them.

In both cases you upload your manuscript as one document (in Word), and your cover separately (as a pdf). You enter your title, author name. Chose categories and keywords, decide pricing. Make sure you fill in your tax details so you are exempt from US tax.

I will be adding details on ebooks shortly. I will also be updating my blogs on formatting.

Meanwhile, happy publishing!

Patsy Trench, February 2020

NaNoWriMo

Published on by patsywp

In November three years ago I sat down to attempt the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing 50,000 words of a novel in a month. I had heard of the National Novel Writing Month before but dismissed it as a gimmick. In the event it turned out to be a surprisingly positive experience, especially for a writer like myself who has a tendency to go back over stuff until that opening chapter is absolutely perfect.

The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that it keeps you moving forwards all the time, even if like me you have no idea where your novel is heading. All I had was a character, Prudence, best friend of the subject of another novel I had written, set in 1920s England, about a woman discovering the joys of sex in her fifties. (I wrote about Claudia for Books for Women back in 2016 –  http://booksbywomen.org/writing-about-sex-and-the-older-woman/) At the end of the month I hadn’t quite achieved the 50,000 words but my novel, or rather my character, had taken me to all sorts of totally unexpected places, including espionage in World War I, the suffragists, the Bloomsbury set and all sorts.

But there was a problem: having set my character up as a free-thinking woman who as a result of an inattentive upbringing breezed through life without rules, boundaries, plans or purpose, I realised my novel did not have a story. That’s to stay a well-structured beginning-middle-and-ending, with an inciting incident that set off rising action to a climax and back down again to resolution; where the main character goes on a journey and ends up other than where she started. In other words, along with my protagonist, the novel itself had no purpose.

I wracked my brains to come up with an Idea, but I soon realised it’s not something you can do in retrospect. That’s like being able to add the crucial ingredient to a cake after you’ve baked it. So in the end I did the only thing I could think of – I made a virtue out of what could be regarded as a drawback: I made the lack of purpose a feature of the book, I even used it in the title – The Purpose of Prudence de Vere.

If you google the word purposelessness, which I did in order to look for quotes for the book, you will find it is invariably regarded as A Bad Thing. A life or a person without purpose is not worth a pin. And yet my novel is a happy thing and my purposeless central character is – if you think of it in these terms – a model of mindfulness. She lives in the moment. She is open to surprise. She is open, period. She lives her life spontaneously, according to whim and happenstance. She is a lot happier than I am. To tell the truth I’d rather like to be like her.

Would more of us be happier if we took life as it comes? If we were not driven, often blinkered, by some purpose that we’ve invented for ourselves in order to have a reason to get up in the morning?

Discuss.

© Patsy Trench

This article first appeared in booksbywomen.org

Family Tree Live

Published on by patsywp

When I published my first book back in 2012 about my Australian ancestors, The Worst Country in the World, I contacted a number of magazines, organisations, newspapers and individuals asking if they would review it. About half of them ignored me, and of the rest, most of them told me rather begrudgingly I was welcome to send them a copy of the book but they could not guarantee anything.

Now I appreciate asking anyone to review a book, especially from an unknown author, is a Big Ask; but at the same time it costs a fair bit to send copies to the far side of the world, and then to hear nothing more is disappointing.

However among the few positive responses I received was one from a delightful lady called Karen Clare, Deputy Editor of Family Tree magazine. Not only was she pleased to read and review the book (and as it happens to review it very positively) she was extremely gracious about it. She even implied I was doing her a favour by sending it, and by submitting other pieces for the magazine’s blog, and she invariably answers my emails promptly and enthusiastically.

If you’ve ever been a novice writer you’ll know what a lonely business writing and publishing can be, which is why it was especially exciting for me to be able to say a brief Hello and Thank You to Karen at the Family Tree Live conference held recently at Ally Pally.

The two-day conference comprised a list of lectures and workshops on everything from DNA – a hot topic, and a few cats have been thrown among pigeons for some people when they discover their father/brother/grandfather was not who they thought they were – to the ethics of family history. As Dr Penny Walters said in her talk on ‘Ethical Dilemmas’, we may have a good chuckle about our g-g grandma who was seven months pregnant when she got married, but to your g-g-grandma it was no laughing matter.

According to Dr Nick Barrett – genealogist and historian, who among other things worked on the first four series of Who Do You Think You Are – there has been a big change in attitude towards family history over the past fifteen years. What was once regarded as a ‘navel-gazing’ hobby is now taken seriously by academics, as the findings of family historians and DNA testing is challenging historical records.

I was only able to attend the conference on one day, but I sincerely hope it happens again. Thank you to Family Tree magazine, and especially to Karen Clare, for making this family historian’s task that much easier and more satisfying.

© Patsy Trench

Research research research . . .

Published on by patsywp

I just spent two days in the British Library – separated by the Easter break – researching for a chapter in my forthcoming book Australia and how to find it about famous writers who visited Australia in the 19th century and what they said about it. (Early draft cover below.)

I had allotted myself one day to cover both Anthony Trollope and Mark Twain, but in the event it took two intensive five-hour days to cover them both, even sketchily. And as I was laboriously copying out yet another Twainesque witticism about, for instance, the absence of colonial governors – ‘The continent has four or five governors . . . but you will not see them. When they are appointed they come out from England and get inaugurated, and give a ball, and help pray for rain, and get aboard ship and go back home. . . ’ – or the multiple gauges in the Australian railway system which meant passengers had to constantly change trains. . . ‘At the frontier between NSW and Vic our multitude of passengers were routed out of their snug beds by lantern-light in the morning in the biting cold of a high altitude to change cars on a road that has no break in it from Sydney to Melbourne! Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth . . .’[1] I was aware that while I filled several pages for each of them, probably less than 5% of it would actually appear in the book, which got me thinking:

There must be a more efficient way to do this.

‘This’ meaning research in general. Over the years that I’ve been studying Australian colonial history and filled notebook after notebook and hard drive after hard drive I’ve come to realise how relatively little of it actually reaches the pages of my books. How a week’s work in a library can end up distilled into a paragraph, or a sentence, or maybe into thin air.  At a generous guess I would estimate around 10-20% of my research ends up in my books; and the more I do this and the more ruthless I become with myself the less of it I wind up using.

On reflection research is a bit like travelling, and you can approach it in one of two ways:
1) you make a list of sites you want to see, you go there, take pictures, don’t get distracted, tick it off the list, move on to the next one, repeat procedure, go home. Or
2) you can wander around the streets without any particular purpose, maybe taking in a famous site or two, but if you spot something interesting down a side street then you can investigate that and who knows what delights you may come across?

I find myself choosing the second method, not deliberately perhaps, more by default, or ignorance, or because I am never quite sure what it is I am researching in the first place. It is an expensive way to do things timewise but it’s a lot more fun because of the unexpected treasures you come across on the way. Hence my book (second draft cover below).

The book is intended as a kind of taster or introduction to my two heavily-researches tomes on my Australian family history – The Worst Country in the World and A Country to be Reckoned With. It contains observations and anecdotes about Australia and Australians I felt I could not include in my other books – the sort of stuff you find down the side streets, you could say.

If I can ever get to the end of it it will be published some time later this year.

And meanwhile I have to acknowledge my total failure to refine my research methods. But I am acquiring massive amounts of information. If I could retain half of it I could go on Mastermind.  

© Patsy Trench

Anthony Trollope (wikipedia)

[1] The Wayward Tourist, Mark Twain, Melbourne University Press, 2006. Edited extracts from Following the Equator, 1897

Fact v fiction

Published on by patsywp

How would you like it if in years to come you were depicted in a film as a debauched, serial womaniser/seductress, who drank neat rum straight from the bottle and squashed pet rabbits for a hobby?

I’m exaggerating a tad, but not that much. I’m thinking of two films currently on in London where our historical Queens Anne, Mary and Elizabeth are portrayed not quite as they or their cohorts may have been.

Film makers are renowned for playing fast and loose with historical fact. In ‘The Favourite’ Queen Anne is shown falling under the spell and influence of two different women at different times – her friend Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and then her cousin Abigail Hill. So much is fact. But did she really enjoy lesbian relations with both of them? And what about her husband, Prince George of Denmark? Did he not warrant a mention, even if he was dead at the time?

The Favourite (thetimes.co.uk)
Olivia Colman as Queen Anne (thetimes.co.uk)

It’s known fact that Mary Queen of Scots did challenge Elizabeth to the throne of England; though whether her husband Henry Darnley was a closet gay who early on in their marriage was found in flagrante delecto with Mary’s court musician David Rizzio (actually her private secretary), again is far from proven fact. (Historically, there was a rumour Rizzio was the father of Mary’s son James.)

Mary Queen of Scots (amazon.co.uk)
Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan as Queens Elizabeth and Mary (amazon.co.uk)

Personally, as regards Queen Anne, I far preferred the stage play, written by Helen Edmundson and performed by the RSC a few years ago. (See my review here.) It was entertaining, thought-provoking, moving and informative, and brilliantly performed by its three leading actresses. It also contained its own fair share of debauchery, but it felt a lot closer to the truth.

Which begs the question: why mess with history when the facts are strange enough in themselves?

When it comes to family history facts of course are paramount. I know I’ve added the odd fictionalised scene into my my books, but I’ve also made it perfectly clear (I hope) where I’ve added embellishments to recorded fact. And while I’ve gone over several generations of my Australian family history with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, there are still gaps that I am eager – and hope – to fill. Every so often an exciting snippet of news emerges from an unexpected source that promises to partly fill these gaps. But when I ask where the information came from the answer tends to be along the lines of ‘I read it somewhere’.

Australian Aboriginal history is even more complicated. It tends to be passed down orally from generation to generation of the Aboriginal community. And it’s often at odds with what you might call ‘official’ recorded history; that’s to say history as recorded by white Europeans, and as often as not in newspapers. Some of it is no doubt undisputed fact, though without background knowledge it could be misleading. And you only have to look at certain of our newspapers today to see how adept they are at distorting the news.

Curragundi Joe (Tom Pitt) from Clayton
Curragundi Joe,  a Kamilaroi man, aka (possibly) Tom Pitt. Did he have a connection with my Pitt family? Photo provided by Clayton Pitt

So: written history or oral memory? It would be wrong for the family historian to dismiss either of these sources of information completely. The best we can do is try to be as truthful and factual as we can. We owe it to ourselves, and more to the point we owe it to our ancestors. You never know who might make a film of your life one day.

The book launch

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In my case, it was like the 11 bus – you wait and wait and then two come along at once.

I have to confess first off that not only have I never had a book launch before, I have never even attended one.

Now I am Australia for two launches of my latest book about my Australian family history, A Country To Be Reckoned With, arranged by, respectively, a friend, fellow writer and self-made entrepreneur Michael Burge, and the Hawkesbury Historical Society.

The Makers' Shed (5).jpg
The Makers’ Shed, Glen Innes

Michael and Richard Moon, silversmith and jeweller, have transformed a local shop in their nearby town of Glen Innes into a spanking new workshop cum gallery cum what they term an “artisans’ marketplace”. I was invited there to be interviewed about my latest book in front of a full, friendly and highly engaged audience – the first of many similar events planned to take place over the coming months. For more details on this remarkable enterprise take a look at the Makers’ Shed Facebook page.

The second launch took place in the Hawkesbury Museum in Windsor – a daunting prospect, as I was fully aware the majority of attendees were long-term Hawkesbury residents who were many times more au fait with the region’s history than I could ever be. In the event, having declared my status as a London-based Pom who’d spent several years researching not just local but colonial Australian history in general, I received nothing but appreciation and generosity from the assembled audience.

Hawkesbury launch (2)
Author addressing the friendly audience at the Hawkesbury Museum

What I learned:

In advance I emailed the friendly people at ALLi for helpful hints for a successful book launch, and their responses proved very useful.

  • Make it entertaining. Crack a few jokes if possible.
  • If you are going to read from your book, keep it short. I read the opening chapter, two pages, and it seemed plenty long enough.
  • If you have to use notes, try not to keep looking down at them. Eye contact is so important when addressing a roomful of people. Make bullet points if necessary, otherwise try to speak off the cuff. It’s more important to connect with your audience than it is to include every single item you have on your list of Things to Say.
  • Show enthusiasm. Tell people what it was spurred you to write the book, what excited you about its subject matter – and hopefully still does.
  • Keep your talk on the short side, and if you can, elicit responses from the audience – either during and/or after the talk. The more they are invited to participate the more likely they are to pay attention.
  • If you are using PowerPoint, or projecting images in some way, remember their focus will switch from you to the screen. So if you want them to keep looking at you insert the odd blank page into your presentation.
  • Enjoy it, if you possibly can. If you feel nervous, don’t be afraid to say so.
  • Again, above all else try to make it fun, for yourself and for everyone else. If you forget something, or repeat yourself, don’t let it put you off your stride.

I followed these hints and it worked better than I thought it would. I was extremely nervous beforehand, but I started off on both occasions with a bit of a joke, and that set the scene and told the audience it was okay to laugh. I realised in both cases there were Important Things I forgot to say; but they were only important to me.

Thank you to Heather and Richard Gillard at the Hawkesbury Historical Society and to Michael Burge at The Makers’ Shed for giving me the opportunity. Here’s to the next time!

~~~~

Attention independent authors: The High Country Book Club is looking for high quality indie-published books to feature at The Makers’ Shed. Full details are on their Facebook page.

Patsy Trench
December, Australia

[email protected]

What is the purpose of family history?

Published on by patsywp

Why are so many of us devoting so much time and energy into researching our family history?

When I recently Googled ‘What is the purpose of family history?’ the most common responses that popped up were along the lines of ‘It helps me to understand myself’ or ‘I want the younger generation to understand their heritage’.

There are myriad reasons behind the family history addiction, as I call it, but I have to say those two above don’t quite fit mine. While we are all naturally curious about where we came from and who we think we are and why, my motivation stemmed from an emerging fascination with the context of my ancestors’ lives. The reason I decided to write about my four times great grandmother (The Worst Country in the World) was because she was one of the earliest free settlers to migrate to the colony of New South Wales, in 1801. It was the story behind her migration, and behind the colonisation of that far-flung country in the first place, that grabbed me.

Family history, broadly speaking, is about ordinary people.

Traditional historians tend to focus on the famous, the ones in the foreground of the picture so to speak. Family historians are more likely to be looking at the people in the background, whom nobody outside the immediate family has heard of. That doesn’t make them unimportant, or boring. It’s the ordinary people who keep the wheels of everyday life turning. Your ancestors needn’t have done anything remarkable to make them worth writing about.

Coorah c1907
My family, c1907

 In the blurbs of the two books I’ve written about my family I rather grandly claim I’m ‘looking at Australian colonial history through the lives of my [fill in appropriate ancestor/ancestress]’. I am unwittingly taking on the role of historian, and perhaps wittingly trying to avoid the term family history because who is going to read a book about my family except, well, my family? It wasn’t just because I wanted to sell more books that I broadened my sight lines; it was because I believe history told through the eyes of ordinary people is every bit as valid, and revealing, as history told about the heroes and the VIPs.

But what about the gaps?

The further back you go in time the less likely you will have access to images of your antecedents, or clues to their characters. Their legacy depends almost entirely on what they did, or more to the point, what they did that was recorded. (Which tends to balance things in favour of the men, needless to say.) Famous people may well be written about during their lifetime – you can probably get an idea of the kind of people they were by other people’s descriptions of them. With ordinary people this is less likely. So what do you do?

You can make it up. It’s generally easy to know when, where and how our ancestors did what they did; but what about the why? Unless they wrote letters or diaries (in which case lucky you), it’s down to guesswork. That’s guesswork informed, of course, by weeks and months and maybe years of exhaustive research, not just into your relative but into the world that relative inhabited.

For example I know when and how my ancestress migrated, but I don’t really know why, so I have assumed. I know who her offspring married but I don’t know how they met, so I’ve made it up. I’ve even invented characters in my latest book (A Country to Be Reckoned With) to represent the sort of people my convict ancestors may have worked for. Of course I go to some pains to explain what’s fact and what’s imagination, it isn’t hard to do. The purpose of the fiction is to throw a clearer light on the fact, to bring it alive; all with the ultimate purpose of creating a book that will appeal to a wider audience beyond my immediate family.

Over to you:

Why are you researching your family history and what does it do for you?

This blog post appeared first on the family-tree.co.uk blog in October 2018: https://www.family-tree.co.uk/how-to-guides/expert-blogs/what-is-the-purpose-of-family-history​

©Patsy Trench

A Country To Be Reckoned With

Published on by patsywp

My second book in the Pitt family history series is published on 11 August 2018.

The blurb reads:

In the 19th century Australia went from struggling penal colony to a thriving community with a glowing future.

George Matcham Pitt’s life spanned the greater part of this century. A larger than life character and a master of rhetoric, fond of quoting from classic poets, opinionated and generous to a fault, GM, as he was known, went from humble farmer to landowner, auctioneer and the founder of one of Australia’s first and best-known stock and station agents Pitt, Son & Badgery. He was also my grear great grandfather.

This is the biography of a man who helped to shape a country

And who played a small part in its transformation from what was once considered the Worst Country in the World into A Country to be Reckoned With.

For a glimpse at a sample chapter please click here.

The book was assisted by funds allocated to the Royal Australian History Society through the Heritage Branch of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage.

Available on Amazon, Apple itunes, Kobo & Nook
Paperback available at Amazon (UK & US)  & Booktopia (AU)

The family historian

Published on by patsywp6 Comments

She sits alone, in her kitchen, or her bedroom, or maybe even in her office. Just her and the computer, a desk and a pile of books. Shoulders ridiculously hunched, nose almost touching the screen, as if her breath alone can conjure magic out of those search engines. If she’s lucky she’ll have a relatively unusual surname, though thanks to the traditional family habit of naming offspring after themselves she’ll have a merry time figuring out James senior from James junior and James junior junior. She spends a good deal of time sighing, and occasionally swearing and muttering to herself, and wondering whose idea it was in the first place to set off down this endless, foggy path into her family history.

It doesn’t help to know it was her idea, and that no one ever forced her to do this, or pressured her to keep going, or let’s face it, gives a hoot one way or another.

The one thing she knows is she will never give up: despite the outside world’s indifference, the loneliness and the frustration and the thought of all those other things she could usefully be doing with her life, such as earning a living, or volunteering, or improving her house. This is not a hobby so much as an addiction.

On occasion,  as a treat,  she will don her hat and gloves and trot into town to visit the library. This is a real day out: lofty surroundings, special, even rare books, carefully selected and placed reverentially on the desk in front of her.

Hours later and they’re switching off the lights and metaphorically putting the chairs on the tables. She blinks into the daylight and forces herself with difficulty back into the 21st century. It’s not until she gets home and looks through her notes that she realises,  really, how little of value she’s managed to discover in all that time. Except. Except. You never know. Nothing is ever wasted, except time.

Now and again the miraculous happens. After hours rummaging through Trove, hunting, hunting, revising the search terms, ignoring the creeping feelings of despair,  the ticking clock and the rumble of a stomach deprived of nourishment, she has a Eureka moment: a genuine find, a nugget of new information, an explanation of a puzzle only she was ever aware of. This is her very own piece of solid gold. So what if her excitement is out of all proportion to the size of the piece of the jigsaw.  It is one small step on the way to the filling in of the puzzle, the lifting of the fog.

Now and again she will receive a message from a stranger, a distant relative who’s found her on the internet. And they will share their knowledge and findings, and the puzzle will become a little more complete and for a short glorious moment she will know she is not alone.

She is in her own way a hero. Unsung, unrecognized, but a hero nonetheless.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Coming soon:

A Country Kindle

Book two  in the Pitt family saga.