Annie Murray, author

The sequel to The Narrowboat Girl

It is 1942, and after a childhood of suffering in Birmingham, Maryann Bartholomew has built a life of happiness and safety with her husband Joel and their children, working the canals on his narrowboat, the Esther Jane. But the back-breaking work and constant childbearing take their toll on Maryann, and the tragic loss of her old friend Nancy, followed by a further pregnancy, leads her to commit a desperate act which nearly costs her her life.

The walls of her security are broken down when Joel suffers an accident and, to keep the boats working, Maryann is forced to allow Sylvia and Dot, two wartime volunteers, into the privacy of her life.

And when she discovers that someone keeps calling for her at Birmingham’s Tyseley Wharf, the dark memories of her past begin to overwhelm her. For that someone, who seems to be watching her every move, is becoming more dangerous than even she could imagine…

Writing the book

I enjoyed writing this book very much. It as the first time I had ever begun on a story when I already knew the characters, and it was very good to be able to go further with them in their lives.

Several things made the story a joy to write. For a start, some of the canals, like the Oxford cut, wend their way through the most beautiful of countryside and it was lovely to leave the city behind sometimes and be surrounded by nature in summer and winter.

Another thing was that circumstances on the cut changed with the Second World War. Since a number of the men had left the work to join the forces, Inland Waterways asked for volunteers to work the canals, which were much in demand as routes for transporting coal and materials for making armaments. The volunteers were both men and women, and some of the women were really quite posh! So I thought it would be interesting to introduce two other female characters, Sylvia and Dot, the volunteers who come into the rather closed world of the boat people, who are very different and of course have all sorts of things going on in their lives too!

The harder parts of the book are those which deal with Maryann’s past and the eruption of her stepfather back on the scene. Even I was taken aback by quite how menacing Norman Griffin becomes in the story!

I had planned to leave the story there and not turn it into a trilogy, as I knew that the canal trade, by the 1950s, was soon to be on its last legs. However, recently I met a man called Graham Jones who told me that he had been born on the cut and his family had had to leave. ‘I could tell you some stories…’ he said. And of course there is no more inviting thing that you could say to a writer. So perhaps one day there will be a follow up story.

Graham very kindly sent me some wonderful photographs of his family while they were still working the cut. You can see these in the Scrapbook.