The Story Behind the Story Being the youngest of all of her grandchildren, I spent a great deal of my teenage years with my grandmother in her later stages of Parkinsons Disease, and for the first time since the war years, she was able to speak to me not just of her own memories and experience, but also my grandfather’s war duties and experiences during the war, something that he was never able to do.
Wednesday’s Child, a work of historical fiction, is largely the story of my late grandmother, Dorothy Violet Massey. Abandoned as a child and brought up by an elderly neighbour, this was a common occurrence in post Great War Britain, with few men returning from the front lines and the perils of child birth, not to mention the poor state of the fractured economy. Violet’s harsh upbringing was also typical of the time, and it was only after her passing in 2001 that we, her family, found out that she had six aunties, none of whom knew of her existence and neither did she know of them. My grandmother had very few happy memories to speak of from her younger years, and, just like Violet in the book, only found her first real taste of friendship when she left school to work at a factory.
It was the experiences portrayed in the book, particularly those of my Grandfather’s and the loss of so many of his friends and comrades, that led to both of my grandparents dedicating their entire lives to the Royal British Legion, to raising money to support those affected by war. My grandmother attended her last remembrance day parade in her wheelchair with three of her fellow ATS friends, whilst my grandfather marched the mile and a half as Parade Marshall every year until he was ninety years of age. He always said that the day he couldn’t do the parade would be his time to go. He passed away four weeks after his last parade.
With the formation of the Auxillary Territorial Services in 1938, or ATS as it was known, my grandmother saw this as the taste of freedom that she had so desperately longed for, an escape from the gruelling mundane routine that she, and many others like her at the time endured on a daily basis to merely survive. For Violet, this would be her freedom. So, like many others, she lied about her age and left to join the army with her only possessions being the clothes that she was wearing.
I wanted to write this book from my grandmother’s perspective as little is said of the women that fought alongside the men, yet my grandmother’s experiences were synonymous of the time in which she lived.
I was born in Manchester and lived there until I left to attend Staffordshire University where I obtained my BSc Forensic Science. In 2006 I moved to the South Wales valleys where I worked until health dictated otherwise after the birth of my second child. I still reside in the beautiful valleys with my husband and three children, and am now lucky enough to be able to devote my time to writing, around family commitments and health issues.
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