As a writer, my days are filled with wonderful things. New things, exciting things, and yes, some days, worrying and dark things as I struggle to find my way through writing a novel. It's not easy, as I think you might know.
But today is a good day, a nice day, a happy day. For I'm incredibly proud to be able to announce that my debut novel Belle of the Back Streets is going on sale in the gift shop at Beamish Museum.
Now, Beamish is not just any old museum. It's the award-winning, outdoors, living museum of the North. It's the most incredible place and if you haven't been, you should go.
For writers and researchers, they offer a resource room where you can access documents, catalogues, pictures and items that aren't on show to the public. And so it was that I went along to research Belle of the Back Streets and the volunteers working in the stores couldn't do enough to help. I held in my hands documents that made me cry, notes from world war one, books that laid bare the horrors of life in a pit village, accidents, death, babies dying, men being killed.
But there was joy too - a funfair set up in Beamish grounds led me to think about a fayre on Ryhope village green and I included this in the book. The pit village in the grounds of the museum provided inspiration too as I walked the back lanes, trailing my hand along brick and stone walls, breathing in the coal dust from fires in the cottages, imaging life when the air was thick with coal smoke and the washing on the line in your back yard would never be as white as you'd like.
I've been back to Beamish again and again, for research for my second novel The Tuppenny Child and for my third novel Pearl of Pit Lane.
Indeed, in The Tuppenny Child it opens with a heart-stopping scene set in a ladies' waiting room in a railway station as the heroine of the story hides there to escape. My inspiration for the opening scene came while I was visiting the ladies waiting room at Beamish, here it is:
And in my third novel, Pearl of Pit Lane, clippy-mat making is integral to the story and I went on one of the clippy mat making workshops at the museum. You can read all about my adventures here. Also, for Pearl of Pit Lane, I spent a huge amount of time scouring the old Co-operative Stores catalogues of 1919 to find out what kind of food would be on the shelves, in tins or in packets. It's fascinating stuff indeed!
And so, to have my debut novel Belle of the Back Streets, on sale in the museum shop, really is a dream come true. Thank you, Beamish. Thank you.
Visit Beamish museum website.
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