Moving Times trilogy

3 total works 3 total works planned

Bloom Of Youth

by Rachel Anderson

Published 20 May 1999

It is the late 1950s: teenagers have barely begun to be invented. Ruth and her older sister Mary struggle with the chaos of their parents' attempts to support five children by renting a rambling country house and running it as a holiday home for children of the rich. When their father dies, their increasingly desperate mother turns her efforts to the two hapless girls. Eager to marry them off, she plunges them into dancing classes and presentation at Buckingham Palace as phoney under-age debs. Instead Mary finds LIFE at art school in a nearby town, with beatniks, jazz poets and dancing in the river. When friends persuade their mother to take the family to a new start in London, Ruth finds that she, too, has other life-plans . . .

Grandmother's Footsteps

by Rachel Anderson

Published 18 November 1999

Grandmother's Footsteps begins on the day the Second World War ends, seen through the eyes of the bewildered young Ruth. Mesmerised and terrified by the break-up of the wartime world she is so used to, scared by her mother's disappearance to London in search of their absent father, she clings to the familiar world of her grandmother. Stick by me, Granny tells her, and you'll be all right. But already Ruth's exuberant mother has other plans for the family - a move to London and a succession of wild schemes that bring constant change and upheaval, opening and closing new horizons and leaving young Ruth feeling always - as the years go by - adrift.

Except, that is, in the safe, sure haven of her grandmother's life.

Stronger than Mountains

by Rachel Anderson

Published 15 June 2000

Throughout the years that Veritas has spent trying to rear me, there's one essential truth she's always stuck to. 'Love is stronger than mountains.' My mother's name meant truth. But could any of us trust her to tell the truth about our family?'

Can Ruth and her sister Mary discover lasting love for themselves amid the chaos of their large bohemian family? And what about their eccentric mother? Could they find a new love for her too? After the hardships of the 50s, how will any of them experience the new freedoms of the swinging 60s? As Ruth stands at the altar promising love to a young man till the end of life, under her breath she makes a vow: to set down everything of the past, the reality of a girlhood constantly touched by sadness, yet always profoundly secure.