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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 second book and am halfway through the third.
Although I was born in England in 1933, I travelled to Palestine with my parents three years later. As a child I was an inveterate listener-in to adult conversations so, although only thirteen when my parents sent me back to England, I was very much aware of the political tensions that were ripping Palestine apart. I followed the struggle even more closely after my father was wounded when Jewish extremists, fighting to establish the State of Israel, blew up a wing of the King David Hotel and killed over 90 other civilians.
On my return to England in 1946 I attended a London High School and went to Leicester University College, where I took a London external degree in Latin and married a fellow student. I have lived in Leicestershire ever since.
On graduating, I realised a degree in Latin was not an ideal qualification for obtaining a local teaching job, so 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 in the nineties, 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 two websites, this one landofbrokenpromises.co.uk is named after the trilogy I am working on and is devoted to my writing. I have moved all pages connected with non-writing activities, to the grannysgarden.me.uk site.
Like most retired teachers, I now wonder how I ever found time to go to work. My days are occupied with my family, including two great grandchildren, WRVS emergency and books-on-wheels projects, organising a Neighbourhood Watch,being newsletter editor for 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 margaretatgrannysgarden.me.uk (the at in the middle of that address is of course really @ but if I were to write it like that on this page horrible spam machines would read it and my computer would waste its time filling my junk box instead of working for me. |