Annie Murray, author
Chocolate Girls
This epic saga will have you gripped from start to finish. Birmingham Evening Mail
Delightfully innocent, filled with tenderness, perception and drama. Western Mail Magazine
When Edie marries young to escape her unhappy family home she thinks life can only get better. At the age of nineteen she is widowed, and after losing her child from the marriage, faces the Second World War grieving and lonely. Then one night during the Birmingham Blitz an infant, mysteriously abandoned during the bombing, is handed into her care.
Her lively friend Ruby, meanwhile, doesn’t want to be left behind in the marriage stakes and settles for marriage with Frank, a man much changed by war.
Finally there’s Janet, intelligent, kind-hearted and susceptible to male charm, who is hurt desperately by an affair with a married man and who assumes she will never love again.
David, the child who steals Edie’s heart as she brings him up through a time none of them will ever forget, is the centre of all their lives. And when David is old enough to remember who he really is, he leads Edie through struggle and heartache to a life and love she would never have dreamed of…
A spellbinding saga of three very different women whose lives become entwined by war and their work at Cadbury’s chocolate factory in Bournville – and their love for a child.
Writing the book
For a time I lived and worked just down the road from the Cadbury factory and sometimes you could smell the chocolate in the neighbourhood, when the wind was blowing in the right direction! When I worked, briefly, nursing at Selly Oak Hospital, there were often patients who were ex-Cadbury workers and they used to talk about how it was there. I had often thought I’d like to write about it but it was a few years before an idea presented itself.
Like many stories this one started small and seemed to stretch. The fact that Cadburys was a Quaker business originally led me to follows trails there, which led to refugees during the Second World War and so it goes on, leading outwards in concentric circles of connection. It often goes this way with stories as we are all so interconnected, and Birmingham as a city, very much so.
So I talked to people who had worked at Cadburys, visited the factory, researched….. And in the end, something happens when writing a story which means it turns into something by the end which is a little different from what you imagined.
So this book is the story of Edie, Ruby and Janet and the other characters who come to mean so much to each other and have connections which extend round the world. And I became so fond of these characters that I have written another story about them called The Bells of Bournville Green.