Kitty Rainbow Trilogy
3 total works 3 total works planned
1946: For the widowed young mother Kay Fitzpatrick the return from the all-enveloping heat of wartime Alexandria to the chill of post-war England is both an alien experience and a homecoming. For Laurenz and Patrizia Gold, Jewish refugees scarred by their flight from Nazi-occupied Austria, the bleak repatriation camp outside Priorton represents a chance to establish new roots. While lonely Kay struggles to find an identity of her own in a town full of family history, Laurenz Gold's ruthless hunger will stop at nothing to make his new life a success. But, in a land slowly recovering from the exhaustion of war, will the tormented past which drives Laurenz so fiercely destroy the fragile hopes of those around him?
First World War. Pupil-teacher Mara Scorton's world is one of, ill-lit classrooms and the sight of unshod feet shining purplish in the cold winter light. And, though she is little more than a girl herself, Mara loves her job in the Hartlepool dockland school, despite the imperious ways of her headmaster Mr Clonmel. But her world falls apart when a German warship demolishes the school and Mr Clonmel is killed. Mara is handed a mysterious package by a dying Frenchman addressed to his children in her home town of Priorton. Mara returns home, accompanied by her annoying but seemingly harmless landlady, to her warm unorthodox family. And to the house of Jean-Paul and his deranged, damaged sister Helene, two French refugees who will have long-lasting effect on the stormy years to come...
When the soft-hearted, bare-knuckle fighter Ishmael Slaughter rescues an abandoned baby from the swirling River Wear, he knows that if he returns home with her his predatory employer will give the child short shrift - or worse. So it is to Janine Druce, a Scottish draperwoman with a dubious reputation but a child of her own that he takes the baby - whom he has christened Kitty Rainbow. Kitty grows up wild and stubborn in Janine's tough household but she is as fierce in her affections as she is in her hatreds. And she saves her greatest affection for Ishmael, the now ageing boxer who is the only link with her true parentage - apart from the scrap of blue cloth she was wrapped in when he found her. Eventually the cloth leads Kitty to her true origins - a discovery that shakes the very essence of her being - but eventually allows her to resume the life she so passionately embraces...