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My name is Margaret Penfold. My first novel 'Struggling Free' is set between 1938 and 1942 in the land of my childhood memories, the British Mandate of Palestine, an area in the Levant that was partitioned in 1948 into two countries, Israel and Palestine. Struggling Free is intended to be the first of a trilogy. I have now finished the first drafts of the second and third novels. While I am waiting for them to marinade sufficiently to start on the next drafts I am editing my memoir and tweaking my online work
I was born in England in 1933, but travelled to Palestine with my parents three years later. As a child I was an inveterate listener-in to adult conversations so I was aware of the political tensions that were ripping Palestine apart. I followed the struggle even more closely after Jewish extremists, fighting to establish the State of Israel, blew up a wing of the King David Hotel and killed over 90 civilians. You can imagine how I felt as I waited to find out whether my father had survived. Our family was fortunate. My father was only slightly wounded.
On return to England I attended Walthamstow School and from there went to Leicester University College, where I took a degree in Latin and married a fellow student.
On graduating, I retrained as a primary teacher and,specialised, so as far as primary teachers can specialise, in drama, environmental studies, and later in my career, IT skills. My favourite time of the school day was always the end-of-afternoon story telling.
My writing developed from these oral stories although I soon learnt that I needed a different voice for the printed word.
After retirement, I discovered the Internet and became an enthusiastic convert to new media writing. I was a mentor for a now defunct International Community for On-line Writers and have kept a multi-faceted website since 1999. I now run three websites. This one is named after the trilogy I am working on and is now devoted to my writing. I have moved pages connected with gardens and gardening, to the Granny's Garden site. The third website, a freebie , I use as a portal site
My days are occupied with family, including two great grandchildren, WRVS books-on-wheels projects, organising a Neighbourhood Watch,being newsletter editor for the Leicester Writers Club that has given me so much help over the years, gardening, updating my web pages, especially the Garden Journal that I have maintained online since 1999, and of course, writing both for the computer screen and for paper. If you read my book I would love to answer any questions about it. You can email me at margaretpenfold(at)btinternet.com (the (at) in the middle of that address is of course really @ but if I were to write it like that horrible spam spiders would read it and flood my junk box. |