So, meet Ellen. She came from Devon, took up with a Japanese teashop owner (said he was Chinese... but he seems to have said a lot of things that weren't true...), & became a butler's wife just outside Salisbury. But then he found another woman too...

thewomenwhomademe.wordpress.com/2025/07/11/e...

To celebrate having finally finished the draft though, I thought I'd put up one of the chapters on the blog from earlier in the writing process.

Funnily enough, that chapter won't be appearing on The Women Who Made Me blog, as it's just too visceral to put up for general reading, so you'll have to find a copy of the book when it's published to see it.

The 3rd looked at 2 women who concealed illegally births, what led them to it & what happened afterwards. This involved reading long, lurid & macabre accounts of placing a dead child in a boiling saucepan. Wished I had someone to debrief with afterwards, & grateful of being able to compartmentalise.

This has meant writing 3 final chapters, and putting together another (admittedly strident) introduction. One chapter was on a woman from India forced to go to Warminster on marriage Another was on a district nurse from Amesbury, which took in advances in medicine in the 1920s & the marriage bar.

There was the SRA boxes, which had graded cards (by colour) on non-fiction topics, which you read and then answered a series of questions about as a reading comprehension exercise. There was a different box each school year, but had colours like lime, aqua, rose, silver etc.

Love that you know all their names

Rather inevitably, my other half (also a Cardiff student in the 1990s) and I have nicknamed him "Barnagoo".
And our daughter has picked it up.

It is such a niche joke that no-one else would get it. But it still makes me smile every time I hear the scrap van approaching.

Fast forward to today, and - 30 miles away from the Welsh border - there's a scrap metal man who comes around on a van, our rag and bone man, who drives around the streets with a loudhailer, yelling about any old iron in a very incomprehensible way.
He's from South Wales. With the accent to match.

One of the sellers had yelled "Western Mail and Echo" so many times over the years, it had become
"BARNAGOO!!!!"

As inventive students, we referred to him as Barnagoo Bloke. And it'd raise a wry smile when you went past and hear it. Can't remember the face, only the shout.

It does seem to be luck of the draw with which pieces come up.

I am really enjoying Volume Three. There's some great people in there.

I just finished a chapter on monthly nurses and maternal health. I shall ping it across to you shortly.