Memories of You

My mother, the youngest of thirteen children, was a scholarship girl. At the age of fourteen her parents told her they could no longer afford to keep her at school and that she had to leave and work for her living. She ran away from home - all the way to London where she got a job in a big house. After a while she left domestic service and found work as a 'Nippy' in a Lyon's Corner House. Helen, the heroine of my new book, 'Memories of You', is taken away from grammar school at the age of fifteen and eventually ends up in London. Helen finds work in a cafe in Soho and discovers a new and exciting world. She not only falls in love, she makes an entirely new life for herself. So did my mother, make a new life that is. For the difference is that mother came home for a holiday, met my father, and never went back to London. Helen stays and I'm pretty sure my mother would have approved of the way the story ends.