The Girl Who Came Home by Hazel Gaynor Captures the Amazing Story of the Titanic

One hundred and three years ago today, fourteen people from one village set sail from Queenstown, on the southern coast of Ireland, aboard the fastest, safest, passenger ship in the world: Titanic, and their amazing story is told by Hazel Gaynor in The Girl Who Came Home.
I bought the book at the RNA conference last year after hearing Hazel give a talk about how she originally self-published her novel and how it was taken on by an American publisher, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Apart from feeling just a little envious at that, I have to say that The Girl Who Came Home is beautifully written, capturing the life of people in Ireland just over a hundred years ago; the life on board the magnificent ship, the like of which had never been seen before; the horror of the collision with the iceberg, and the life of a survivor, Maggie, and the later story of her great-granddaughter, Grace. Hazel has pulled all the threads together to give a very satisfactory ending.
One of the images that appears through the story is cherry blossom. Maggie used to meet her sweetheart, Seamus under the sixth cherry blossom tree in Ballysheen every Wednesday, and she carries a handful of blossom in her coat pocket as she boards the ship, and when Grace takes her great-grandmother out for tea and apple pie each week in Cass County, Illinois, they go to The Cherry Tree restaurant. It's a beautiful story with Grace's love for Jimmy mirroring Maggie's for Seamus, and I can thoroughly recommend it.

 I've always been fascinated by Titanic because A Night to Remember was the first film that I was ever taken to see!
Last year, I was also able to visit the Titanic, The Artifact Exhibition in Las Vegas.
That probably sounds a bit tacky, but actually it was as serious an exhibition as you would expect to see at any museum in London or New York.
It told the stories of the people who had lived or died on that fateful night. In fact your ticket, or boarding pass, bore a name and details of a passenger, and you didn't know whether they had survived, or not, until you went out afterwards and looked for their name on the lists, just as anxious friends and relatives would have done all those years ago.
So many passengers made a last minute decision to sail on the ship because of a miners' strike which had meant that other ships couldn't get any coal. Titanic, itself, used one pound of coal a second to move only sixty feet!
The entrance to the exhibition was through the third class cabins to the foot tapping sound of Irish tunes, then we waltzed through to the first class cabins to the sound of an orchestra. The ship was so luxurious that conditions were often better for those travelling third class than for those left at home, even though there were only two bath tubs for seven hundred third class passengers.
There were so many interesting artifacts like china and glass decorated with the distinctive White Star Line flag, and also personal papers and letters which were preserved in leather Gladstone or hand bags, and which had been brought up from the bottom of the sea.
One of the most chilling experiences was walking outside onto the reconstructed starlit deck on the calm, peaceful night of April 14th 1912, whilst music played behind in the salons. Hitting an iceberg and the resulting chaos would have been the last things that any passenger expected.
The most amazing exhibit was a big section of the actual ship that was brought up from a depth of two and a half miles from the North Atlantic ocean.
So if you are ever in Las Vegas, and you are interested in the Titanic story don't forget to go and see it.
Meanwhile, you could always read Hazel's book, The Girl Who Came Home!

Two Fabulous Summer Reads by Judy Astley: Just for the Summer and In the Summer Time

I love books that are set in the past and the present, showing how events then have impacted on people living today.
Judy Astley has gone one further, taking the characters and setting for her first novel, Just for the Summer, actually written twenty years ago, and writing a new novel, In the Summer Time, which brings their stories up to date.
In Just for the Summer, three families holiday in a Cornish seaside village each year. Clare's daughter, Miranda, has just got herself pregnant with local boy, Steve. Her husband, Jack, is trying to tell her that he wants to leave his lecturing job in Chiswick, and settle them all in Cornwall for good.
Meanwhile, Clare is daydreaming about Irish author, Eliot, who had made a pass at her (deliciously!) in the woods last year, and she's hoping that when he arrives with his wife, Liz, and daughter, Jessica, he may do it again.
The last couple are Archie and Celia with their son, Andrew, who, unlike the others, own their own cottage, and are members of the golf and sailing club which keeps them busy, whilst Andrew indulges in fantasies about Jessica.
Lastly, Jeannie, Steve's mother, represents the views of the local people as she cleans the cottages.
The story plays out about the relationships between the adults, and between the children as the summer progresses.
This is taken up in In the Summer Time. Miranda returns to Cornwall with Clare because Jack has died and wanted his ashes to be scattered at sea near their holiday home. Without giving too much away, eventually, many of the original characters arrive on the scene, and the summer proves to be just as memorable as that one twenty years before.
I thoroughly enjoyed these books which are perfect for holiday reading. I liked the way the stories carried through over the years and I was interested in how Judy's writing style had inevitably changed.
I did manage to speak to her briefly at the RNA Conference 2014, to tell her I was enjoying her books, but as she was due to take part in a panel discussion, I couldn't talk about them any further.
May be one day, I'll get another chance!

Happy Times at Harper Adams: RNA Conference 2014

One of the best parts of attending an RNA conference is the chance to meet new people. So far, I have always travelled alone and I always feel a mixture of fear and excitement at the prospect!
I needn't have worried though, because here are some of my friendly flatmates: Natalie Klenman, Elaine Everest, Elaine Roberts and Francesca Capaldi who all made me very welcome. There was also Melanie Heard-White who I met on the first afternoon and who decided to come with me to the first  session. It's always better than walking alone into a room where everyone seems to know everyone else, and you don't! We all spent sometime together at the Friday Night Drinks Party.

Here are some other friendly ladies at the Gala Dinner: Sally Quilford, who I knew from her column in Writers' Forum, Charlotte McFall, and Amanda Ward and her mother-in-law.
I also talked to Liz Harris, Jude Roust and Jules Wake who I know from the famous Ox Lunch, and people that I'd met at previous conferences like Deborah Swift and Jan Preston and online  writing friends like Rosemary Gemmell.

I enjoyed all the sessions I went to, including those by Janet Gover on making location another character in your novel, and Jean Fullerton on plotting using Pride and Prejudice as an illustration. Such entertaining and memorable speakers! However, the most entertaining was the talk by Jane Lovering and Rhoda Baxter on 'Writing Funny'. They made perfect foils for each other, with Jane taking the comedy role in her black onesie with penguin feet. Something to do with 'juxtaposition of thingamy', but their message was to have fun and enjoy what you're writing.

Even on the way home, I met some new friends waiting for the train to Birmingham: Gail Mallin and Jen Gilroy, and we talked as we'd known each other for years!
All in all, I had a very happy time!
Thanks to Jan, Roger and Jenny for all their hard work!