Book painted vivid pictures
Diminishing eyesight and concentration compels me to prefer pictoral images and appropriately accompanying spoken news and commentaries on television.
But I have just read The Mill Girls by local author Tracy Johnson.
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Hide AdNostalgic, perhaps. My mother worked in the mills (Chatburn mill is mentioned in the book) and my father tended his allotment there.
I and my sister experienced some of the war time years there.
When she was 14, my sister danced in the fabulous Blackpool Tower Ballroom also mentioned in the book.
My sister and her family are now in America.
She is longing for the little country lanes and villages of England. Her husband became an Anglican vicar and they have celebrated 65 years of marital bliss.
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Hide AdI was a reluctant husband. I hankered for a celebrate priestly life in the Missions of the African Bush. My ex-wife is now back home in her native New Zealand.
My eldest daughter and her family reside in Darwin, Australia.
My youngest daughter and her family seek to make a new life near their mother’s antipodean home.
And I am stuck here – fortunately with a caring son and daughter-in-law.
Tracy Johnson’s readable little book encapsulates the vagaries of circumstances of four mill girls in their own fortunes – or misfortunes – of life’s destinies.
Robin Parker
St Chad’s Avenue,
Chatburn