When 18-year-old Helen Ashton meets Joe McCarthy on the moors of Northumberland she instantly falls in love, certain that her humdrum life had taken a new turn. And for several years it did.On the eve of the First World War, Helen learns that she is pregnant with Joe’s child, but before she can tell him, he enlists in the army and is despatched to war. She never heard from Joe again, and believed him dead.When their son, Ben, was born, Helen, in mounting desperation, agreed to marry a retired police inspector with whom she had two children.In time, her husband of convenience leaves Helen for another woman, and she finds herself on her own in the coastal resort of Blackpool with three young children with only a penurious future to look forward to. But fate intervenes, and with growing confidence Helen turns their home into a holiday hotel and begins welcoming guests. From one she learns that her beloved Joe had not died, but had been discharged into a sanatorium where he languished, a shadow of his former self, depressed, uncertain, confused … and lost, lacking the courage to reconnect with Helen.By the time of Helen’s death, Joe is living a reclusive life, and his son, Ben, married with children of his own, takes over the Blackpool hotel. It is Ben’s wife, childhood friend Mary, who tracks down Ben’s father, finally persuading Ben to meet him … on the day Joe dies.
When Alice, a divorcee of five years, discovers a photograph among her late father’s possessions, she wants to know more. Her father’s handwriting tells her that the girl in the picture is her great-great-grandmother. The child on her knee, her son.
Set in the county of Lancashire, and in two time periods, the story of the girl in the picture, Mary Ellen, is of her time in domestic servitude. The contemporary story is an evolving love story between Alice and a genealogist, Duncan.
The story that unfolds in the past is one of Mary Ellen’s youthful dreams and fantasies, and the harsh realities of life where poverty and sexual tensions are a feature of daily life. When she meets the heir to the estate, a young earl with a playboy approach to life, she is drawn into a world of Victorian erotica. He is supported in this by his sister, a disturbed woman suffering the effects of long-term drug misuse, and who has a life-long incestuous fixation with her handsome older brother.
When Mary Ellen succumbs to his charms and falls pregnant, she is delighted; her dreams of living in luxury are coming true. But the earl is a rogue; his interest in the girl is to use her. Yet she subtly attracts him, and softens his intentions towards her.
In the present day, as Duncan Cooper and Alice unravel Mary Ellen’s story, they find themselves being slowly drawn together into an intimate relationship of their own. Theirs is a story of grief, uncertainty and indecision dispelled by a slowly growing love for each other and shared appetites.
While waiting for the publication of my first novel, I’ve been busy writing a sequel – ‘The Blackpool Landlady and Son’. It just needs a final edit.
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