Sing Them Home by Pam Weaver

• Military Saga
• Romance
• Fiction

| Synopsis |

With a song in your heart, soldier on…

Sing Them Home is a gripping wartime saga from bestselling author Pam Weaver

1943. A German aircraft crashes into a house in Worthing, and causes complete devastation to the local community. Three strangers meet for the first time that day – Pip, Stella and Lillian. Lillian’s little girl Flora has been hurt in the crash and is rushed to hospital. As she comes through her ordeal, she finds her mother and her two new ‘aunties’ by her bedside.

The three new friends quickly bond over shared experiences; all their husbands are overseas in the fighting forces. They also have the same love of singing and soon form The Sussex Sisters, Worthing’s answer to the Andrews Sisters, to boost morale in in dance halls and canteens all over the south coast.

When D-Day finally arrives, it’s the promise of a brighter future they have all been longing for. But the men that return home are altogether different from the husbands they waved off. How will they respond to their wives’ new-found fame? How will the women live alongside these distant, damaged men? With secrets, revelations and surprises on the horizon, the friends will need each other more than ever.

| Author |

 

| Guest Post |

LoveBooks feature by Pam Weaver (Using All The Senses)

There are five senses; see, hear, touch, taste and smell and most writers of historical fiction try to include these in the narrative to give a feeling of place and time.

Although I was born after the Second World War, some of the shortages and austerity of war time still existed. Things changed very little between the years 1945 -1960 so I can draw a lot from my own personal memories when I write and I believe the one sense which can tell us most about the era is the sense of smell. Ask anyone from the older generation what they remember and you’ll be surprised by the lovely memories they have tucked away and almost forgotten. Going to the pictures and watching the film through a haze of cigarette smoke. The musty, unused smell of the front parlour.

My granny’s best coat always smelled of moth balls. The pockets bulged with them when she hung it in the wardrobe. My Auntie Bet’s toilet, a galvanised bucket under a scrubbed wooden seat, smelled of Jeyes fluid and my father’s bed reeked of his lumbago cream which smelled a lot like the Deep Heat of today. Being a builder he was expected to lift heavy weights and climb ladders with a loaded brick hod well into his fifties which of course played havoc with his back. I remember the smell of damp washing hung over the clothes horse in front of the fire on a Monday, and the smell of hot buttered toast done on a toasting fork in front of the open coal fire. Like most children, I suffered with scraped knees when I fell over and I remember not only the terrible sting it gave you, but also the smell of yellow Iodine which Mum slapped on my leg.

In a time before the wide-spread use of ball-point pens, I can recall the smell of ink when I took my turn as ‘ink-monitor’ at school and I had to fill the ink wells in everybody’s desk.

Although I can personally draw on memory, the modern writer can invoke the idea of smell by taking a few seconds longer to think through a scene. Say for example you’ve got the milkman making his delivery. In a time before the milk float, it was done by a horse with a cart. You could start with the horsy smell of his body and other less pleasant smells he might leave behind, the buzz of the flies around his head, the sound of his hooves on the cobble street, the click of his reigns as he nods his head to shake up the oats in the bag over his mouth, the milkman’s call to ‘Walk on,’ and the reader is right there with him.  I’ve got three smells in that sentence to help paint the picture. (the horse himself, his droppings and the oats in his nosebag case you missed them) Of course, it’s better not to list them all because it makes heavy reading, but if the horse featured several times, there would be no need to repeat yourself. It’s a lot to think of as you’re trying to get words on the page, but when it comes to the re-write, you can take your time and pop them in. And at the end of the day, it makes for a richer story.

Sing Them Home by Pam Weaver is out now from Pan Macmillan (price £6.99 in paperback).

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/pam-weaver/sing-them-home

 

| Order Link |

|Publisher Info|

Pan Macmillan

Website: www.panmacmillan.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/panmacmillan

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