Annie Murray, author
The Bells of Bournville Green
The sequel to Chocolate Girls
Pretty seventeen-year-old Greta has never known a stable family life. With no father, and loathing her mother Ruby's latest boyfriend, Greta finds life hard at home and is happiest at work with her friends at the Cadbury factory in Birmingham where she is popular with the boys. Life takes a turn for the worse when her missing vixen of a sister Marleen turns up during the freezing winter of 1962. Greta soon decides that her only way out is marriage, but all too soon she discovers that life with her old class mate Trevor is not a ticket to freedom and happiness. She finds herself on the streets, pregnant and homeless.
She is taken in by her mother's old friends, Edie and Anatoli Gruschov. In Anatoli, Greta finds the father she has never had. Kindly Edie loves to mother people and is desperately missing her son David and his family who have settled in Israel. But the love and security of this haven is soon shattered by appalling tragedy, which affects all the chocolate girls and their children and changes life forever. Continuing the saga begun in Chocolate Girls, and set in 1960s Birmingham, this is a story of families whose lives are entwined, of belonging and loss and of a young woman’s search for love and belonging.
Read an extract from The Bells of Bournville Green
Writing the book
Writing about the next generation on is interesting and rather touching. Having written about the youth of Edie, Janet and Ruby in Chocolate Girls, in this story, set in the 1960s, we see the new era – the Pill, all sorts of social changes – and the woman growing older, living with their triumphs and mistakes, and as we all do, often making the same ones over again however grown up they’re supposed to be!. Now the next generation, Greta, David and the others are coming up to meet all their own challenges in turn.
I was interested, of course, in how things changed at Cadburys – modernization, new products coming off the lines and women able to work now after marriage. But even with all these changes coming, it still didn’t mean that someone like Greta wouldn’t still see marriage as her only choice to get her out of home.
Having grown up with Israelis myself I wanted to follow David and see how he experienced his new country and his own struggles with identity and where he belonged. And I wanted to follow the fortunes of some of my favourite characters like Ruby and Edie Anatoli and see where life took them.