Blogger alert! Today, my novel, The Very White of Love, became available on NetGalley, another milestone on what has been a seven year journey from the first tentative sentences to publication on June 14th. So please do download a copy and write a review. Here’s a bit of background: A […]
France
I recently visited Whichert House, in Knotty Green, near Beaconsfield. This the house where Martin wrote many of the letters quoted in the book. He lived there with his Aunt Dorothy Preston, during the vacations from Oxford – and where Nancy spent a lot of time, during their whirlwind romance […]
Visit to Whichert House and Penn
After his mother’s death, Simon Worrall found a chocolate box full of letters in the attic telling the story of her love for Martin Preston.
Nancy Whelan met Mr Preston when he was a student in Oxford in 1938 and the couple were in love and engaged to be married when the Second World War broke out. Mr Preston enlisted, travelling to Northern France in January 1940, but within a short time his letters stopped and he was never heard from again.
The Second Lieutenant is thought to have died while manning a machine gun post in Hazebrouck, northern France.
Press For The Very White Of Love
I was honoured this weekend to be given the chance by BBC Radio 4’s great programme, From Our Own Correspondent, to tell the moving story of the death of my mother’s WW2 fiance, Martin Preston, nephew of the poet Robert Graves; and the heroic resistance put up by the Bucks […]
Journey to Hazebrouck: BBC From Our Own Correspondent
One of the most beautiful places I have found in Europe recently is the wedge of land between the city of Gerona and the Costa Brava, in Spain. In high summer, the crowds can be pretty odious. But off-season, it’s a magic place. We just spent a week at ” […]
Homage to Catalonia
This weekend marks the 70th. anniversary of the epic withdrawal from Dunkirk, in which 330,000 allied troops were plucked from the beaches after the collapse of the British Expeditionary Force’s campaign in France and Belgium. Many British soldiers did not make it home. One of them was my mother’s fiance, […]