Daughters, granddaughters, great granddaughters, great-great granddaughters

Life has been so buy of late my writing has suffered,

I have spent the past week in Bristol looking after my two granddaughters, Katherine and Frances. That has been a full-time job !  Today I am going home for a rest !  I will miss those two fun girls until my net visit but normality may just possibly return.


What spare time these has been has been given over to my working on the OurRebekah project with very little time left for me to work on my book The Bridge House or indeed to write entries for this diary.

I have about two thousand words scribbled for Chapter Three of The Bridge House waiting to be typed up.  I have taken the story to 1944. The war is drawing towards its end. Much of the chapter is dominated by Billy, Lily's oldest son, who is now a Flight Sergeant in The Royal Air Force's Bomber Command.

Billy did not see the end of the war, his aircraft was shot down over Germany on 8th March 1945, weeks before the end of the war. I told his story in my book AN INTERVIEW WITH FLIGHT SERGEANT BILLY.

In the book Lily's second son, my father, is about to join the RAF. He did not see war service but was part of The British Mandate in Egypt and was part of the security force in Palestine at the time when the State of Israel was founded.

Here's my Dad, he is the one with the cigarette in the first picture and the one on the right in the second picture.

Dad is 91 years old, recently I spent time with him asking about his tine in Palestine and digging in to a time when he was part of history. I plan to take all of my notes from that chat and use them in Chapter Three.

Originally The Bridge House was to have just four chapters but I think I may split that final chapter into two or event three parts.

Lily had three sons and four grandsons. She had three great grandsons before my daughter, Rebekah, was born in 1983.

It has always been my intention to bring The Bridge House to an end when Rebekah was born but I have decided, while still keeping Beck's birth and the last part of the story, to give the end a totally different conclusion.

A kind cyber buddy who has been reading the draft story commented that chapter one had an

abrupt end.  That was simply because I did not want to spend time with cliché after cliché as RMS Titanic sank. I like the way the chapter abruptly ends. I gave a similar style of ending to chapter two when Lily's husband, William, died.
The way I am working towards the end of chapter three does not call for an abrupt end. I am going to have to change the style as a sudden end is called for.

All of these abrupt chapter conclusions will make sense when the final one thousand or so words of the book are written.

I think I am going to sit down in a day or so and write that ending then as I pen everything else I will be working towards it.


The OurRebekah Project is, of course, all about Rebekah, Nan's great granddaughter and the first girl in our family to be born for one hundred years. Today it is ten weeks since Beck died, I will never get over losing her. When The Bridge House is finished and published all royalties will go via the OurRebekah project to help families who have children sick in hospital.


Rebekah loved her two nieces, I am devoted to my granddaughters. Lily, I am certain would love her great-great granddaughters.