Going back in time…


Yes, that is a picture of a pile of rubble, but please, humour me because there’s a chance that things will start to make sense if you're patient. Once, that rubble was houses in the old part of Poole that had become slums, and where, as you may remember from Crazy for Death in my Amy Hammond series, there was prostitution in the streets outside the church because it was a sink of immorality. Once, they were crammed full of people, in the way they are in the Esther and the Professor books. In the early 1960’s they were rapidly demolished when Poole Council heard that they were planning to put preservation orders on them.

They wanted to build a posh new shopping centre, which is now being left behind in its turn because the world has moved on seventy years later. They built that on land that was given to Poole, and which had been used for rope making, so it had the rather more romantic name of Lady’s Walking Fields. If you want to know more about ropewalking and how the length of the field affected the length of the rope you could make, then there’s something here. https://www.britannica.com/technology/rope-walkhttps://www.britannica.com/technology/rope-walk If not, just take it as read that it was there, and it isn’t now!

That meant that the Council needed some more land to replace it, and they had a lot of rubble to get rid of, so they filled in the marshy channels that once delighted the smugglers. (So did the farms that were where our house is now. They produced the most amazing hay that was sold all over Dorset and up into Hampshire and Wiltshire. I like to think of it as being like one of those Kinder Eggs that had a surprise in the middle. Only in this case the surprise would be brandy or silk or laces or, indeed, letters for a spy.) Anyway, getting back to the point, they filled in the channels, and it became unloved until we got some lottery money.

Now it’s Harbourside and a site of special scientific interest because of the overwintering birds. You regularly see it on the BBC’s Springwatch, and the sluice gates that were originally built in 1890 and rebuilt in the late 1960s are being rebuilt again. I’ve said before how I can feel history in my beloved adopted home town, and watching the diggers at work gives me that feeling, along with a happy thought that I am part of it in a tiny little way.

It’s so easy to forget that we are all important and have a part to play, but Kim Kinsella from my Shadows series, which I write as Eleanor Neville, and I share a feeling (oddly enough) that we are all vital parts of a very, very large jigsaw puzzle. We are all needed, and finding out what we are needed for is part of what life’s about.

So too is reading and snuggling up as the nights draw in, which leads me smoothly onto this week’s special offers, which are on at 99p in the UK and 99c in the US.

There are three from my Amy Hammond series, which are Ghost of Christmas Past, The Past is Always With us and Sweet Revenge. My personal favourite of those three is Sweet Revenge because I had to research fudge for your benefit. We have an amazing sweet shop called ‘Truly Scrumptious’ which trades online as ‘The Pink Sugar Mouse’, and I feel I need more fudge in my books so that I have a reason to go back there.

Then, from the Eleanor Neville Shadows series, we have The Warrior’s Way and The Cynic's Way. These are both inspired by the way that it’s hard to see where a pressure group or religious organisation ends and a cult begins. I think you’ll like Graham Lennox, and next year I’m going to finish the book about him that I put on hold when Guy Stannard strolled in and took over. It’s hard to believe that that’s twenty years ago now.

So have a good week, and we’ll catch up on Sunday. Take care and have fun till then.