Novels

FUTURE WORK:

THE DUKES OF CHAU KUNG.    A novel spanning twelve decades from the 1880s to Twenty hundreds; a tale starting with Queen Victoria’s Royal family, through Empire and the Orient, into the Twenty-first Century.

The fictional youngest son of Queen Victoria, Prince Robert, her ninth of ten children and fifth son, born in 1855, and leading a dissolute life, is sent in 1885 by his mother to be the ‘Regent Governor’ of the remote British trading colony of Chau Kung, an island off the South China coast.

The novel follows the lives and fortunes of Chau Kung, Robert’s descendants over five generations and many other residents and travelers through the colony as China builds its presence on the world stage. 

There are times of great riches, of social extravagance, of Japanese occupation in WWII, of rebuilding as a major trading hub and of the reality of the Peoples Republic of China as its dominant neighbour.

CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS

THE REGISTER OF JOE’S TREES.     In WWII wartime Bramlesham, Suffolk, teenage Alice Hallett’s affair with USAAC Master Sergeant Joseph Cornelius Carew, causes ructions at home. In 1943 Joe’s B-17 Flying Fortress is lost on a daylight bombing raid. Her mother tells her it is for the best. Alice runs away to London where her and Joe’s daughter, Jojo, is born in May 1944,

After Alice returns to her factory work in October 1944, a V1 rocket falls on Battersea destroying the area around her baby-minder’s house. Total secrecy is established around the bombsite and all casualties are buried in secret in a mass grave. Concealing her grief Alice runs away again to enlist in the Auxillary Territorial Service and serves as a driver of staff cars ferrying senior officers around the country. Her army career is cut short after Alice resists a senior officer’s sexual attack and he engineers her dismissal. Later Alice pursues a career in the Civil Service in London.

Over her working life, Alice nurtures and wild-plants saplings and tree shoots throughout the country as covert memorials to her American WWII lover Joe and their daughter, every tree recorded in her Register of Joe’s Trees.

Retired back to Bramlesham, Alice comes across a young American, the image of her Joe, researching his grandfather’s wartime service. By degrees, the story of her wartime affair and his pursuit of his grandfather’s war service record, weave an emotional tale linking Bramlesham, Suffolk, with Rapid City, South Dakota.

Then the mystery concerning her wartime daughter’s fate is revealed.