PUBLICATION DAY!

It feels like it’s been a very long wait, but publication day for my latest saga has come at last. The Cornish Girls Before The Storm is out now in ebook, paperback and audiobook. And the best news is, it’s been reduced for a short launch period to only 99p (for the ebook edition only).

I promised last month that I’d discuss how the origin for this book - and indeed the whole series - came about. So here goes…

My mother Sheila, also known as prolific romance novelist Charlotte Lamb, was born in Dagenham in the late thirties. She sadly passed away in 2000, but as well as giving me and my four siblings life, during her eventful life she also gave birth to approximately 175 published novels - mostly romance, though some also historical and suspense novels, as well as many short stories and even a few poems!

She grew up in a large, troubled family, with a mother who was often absent, and who by some accounts often turned up on the doorstep with a new baby before leaving again without it. I did not hear about any of this until after her death, as she never discussed her background with me, when my father gave me a few startling details in a letter, but then asked me not to make it public until after his own death, for reasosn of his own. (He also passed away a few years ago.)

My mother was the second eldest of this large family, as I understand it, and learned early on to be cautious and self-sufficient. She grew up sharing a bedroom with many siblings on a housing estate in Dagenham, but later was taken away by her father, by then estranged from his wife, to be brought up away from her many brothers and sisters, though still near his work at the Ford Dagenham plant. Sadly, she eventually lost touch with that side of her family. (Though in later years one of her siblings wrote a non-fiction book about their lives in which she got a chapter as the ‘lost’ sister!)

My grandfather was a foreman at the plant, and had great skill as a maker and carpenter - I still recall an elaborate fort and a dolls’ house he made for us kids one Christmas, back in the seventies. As a schoolgirl, my mother attended the nearby Ursuline Convent in Ilford, where her abiding love of books soon put her in conflict with the nuns, some of whom felt an obsession with reading could only lead to sin. No doubt their fears would have been realised if they could have seen later novels of hers, such as her infamously passionate tale of seduction, The Long Surrender!

After marrying, she and my journalist father eventually settled in Barkingside, near Ilford, after starting their married life down in Kent. I was born there in the mid-sixties, a child of the suburbs, and often visited Ilford and Dagenham with them. So, when I first started writing wartime sagas, I noted how many WWII sagas were based in the east of London and its surroundings, where residential bombing had been intense. My mother’s old stamping-grounds, in other words, and not too far from my own birthplace.

It was a natural choice, then, when I decided to open my Cornish Girls sagas in the same place - Dagenham - and it was my mother’s precarious upbringing and her experiences during the war years that I drew on for those first few novels. She was still only a toddler when the war began, but was almost eight by the time it ended. Children - especially evacuees from the East End - feature in my Cornish Girls books, as an affectionate tribute to my mother, and also my father, who was evacuated from the Dover area under heavy shelling.

But of course the series is called The Cornish Girls, and most of the action takes place in Cornwall, far from the Blitz and its aftermath, though we return there briefly at the end of ‘Brighter Days for the Cornish Girls’ (apologies for any spoilers).

So, for this new book, which is Book Nine in the Cornish Girls series, I chose to write a prequel, set in 1939, before the outbreak of war, and long before bombs started falling. And it takes place to some extent back in Dagenham, precisely where the first book in the series began with Sheila, Violet, Lily and Alice, but also visits sunny idyllic Cornwall, allowing readers an insight into my main character Sheila’s origin story, who was born in Cornwall but taken to Dagenham as a girl, as well as other characters in the story.

And yes, Sheila was also my mother’s name. And her boss at the caff in Dagenham, Ronald Coates? That was my maternal grandfather’s name!

These little nods to my own origin story make me happy.

With The Cornish Girls Before The Storm, I’m hoping that new readers coming to this with no prior knowledge will then start the series at Book One, and keep reading, while my lovely returning readers will get a fascinating chance to meet some of my characters - including Sheila’s eldest daughter Betsy - before the outbreak of war, after which their lives changed so radically forever.

I hope you enjoy the story and come away smiling.

Before signing off, I’d like to wish all my readers and subscribers a wonderful 2026, full of lovely books and stories, and fresh hope for the future. The world is a very troubled place at the moment, and sometimes it can help simply to escape into a story for a few blissful hours, safe in the knowledge that, even with darker days on the horizon, there will be happy endings for most.

Because for me, that ‘happy ending’ is what it’s all about.

Betty xxx