A Better End

A Better End

This is my debut novel, it is a story about women of a certain age and, I would love it if you felt like you wanted to read it. You can get it here on my website or you can get it on Amazon where it available as an e book or a paperback. Have a wee read of my blog, first one for years and see what you feel.

In my mid-20s, I was teaching at a girls’ school in Derbyshire, learning my trade. There were several women teachers who had worked there for their whole teaching careers. They were warm, friendly, knowledgeable and very supportive. They were respected for their knowledge and service, and they went home at night to their empty homes and prepared lessons dutifully for the next day. It was as late as 1944 that the law changed to remove the marriage bar for women, allowing them to continue their career in the teaching profession. The marriage bar may have been removed, but it cast a long shadow, so that even when I was starting my teaching career in the early 1980’s, many female teachers were still single. I remember vividly a conversation with a lovely teacher, a woman who had seen teaching as a vocation, who loved her subject and was quietly driven to share her passion and knowledge with generations of schoolgirls. The conversation, however, was not about teaching or her subject, but about how she perceived her position within the school to which she had given so many years of her life, so much energy, and so much love. She told me that she felt invisible and that her efforts were taken for granted. It didn’t matter how hard she worked, how good her students’ exam grades were; she was just an invisible part of a bigger whole. At the time, in my youthful ignorance, it didn’t resonate with me, but the conversation lodged itself in my consciousness. After a teaching career of well over 30 years and a bit more life experience, I understand how and why she felt that way.

A Better End is about women who have spent decades serving their work, family, or husbands. Used to putting themselves second, they are left with a gaping void when those roles disappear, and loneliness begins to creep in. Almost by chance, my characters are thrown together, bringing their pasts, their hurts, their fears and everything else which has shaped them into a new situation. This character-driven story explores loneliness, age, friendship, hope and dreams. By virtue of their age and circumstances, these characters have all ended up alone and lonely. They feel an emptiness in their lives, but somewhere inside, they know that although the working part of their life is over, they are not done with living and are open to new experiences. They all take a leap of faith and move to a beautiful Hebridean island to begin living again.

This, of course, is not without its challenges. Women who have lived on their own for any length of time have their own ways of looking at life and of dealing with others, and must learn to live as part of a lively, chaotic community that has not yet worked out how it will function. Each character brings their own personality, their fears and desires. Each character has been shaped by their past experiences and their secrets, and by being women in a time when they were used to being invisible and also worried about how society perceived them. This brings me back to the start of this, my dear colleague, and her feeling of invisibility.

When I took a redundancy from work, I went from being the oldest in company to the youngest as I moved into the world of the retired. I joined a bowling club and was the youngest woman member by a good decade. I was surrounded by women with such vitality and zest for life that it really challenged my perceptions of older women and pensioners. I found myself going to away matches and then having a good laugh in the pub where they shared their stories and planned their outings.

Many ideas have shaped this story and many characters. Strong women, brave women, funny women, little bits of all the memorable women I have met are woven into the characteristics of my characters. I hope you enjoy getting to know them and their individual stories, as well as the new lives they create in their chaotic new island home. A better end is all we can hope for.