Our Polly [Paperback]

Little Billy is the light of Polly's life - it's for her son's sake that she puts up with an unkind mother-in-law and an isolated farm. Then Billy is knocked down by a car, his father killed attempting to save his life, and Polly, cast off by her husband's family, is left with a child who may never walk or talk again. Polly's own family, the Kershaws, provide all the support they can, but they are unable to outmanoeuvre the malicious Dr Browning-Baker , who is determined to have Billy taken away from his mother, depriving him of the exercises and stimulation that are his only hope. Forced to flee to the Fylde coast, Polly and Billy find that their future may lie with another damaged family - an ex-Army captain whose First World War marriage was a terrible mistake, and his daughter, who has never recovered from the hostility of the mother she loves. But danger threatens their fragile happiness...

I wanted to write about people whose lives are shadowed by the past - and my first title for this book was 'The Shadowed Path'. But then so much of the story took place in Weavers Lane, that I had to change the title.

I've always loved looking at weavers' cottages in Lancashire, stone-built, three storeys high, with a row of windows along the top floor to bring light in for the handloom weavers. But when this story takes place, the day of the handloom weaver is almost over, the last sporadic outbreaks of machine-breaking are disturbing the peace, but steam engines, cotton mills and railways are the way of the future.

Emmy, the heroine, has had a hard life. Her mother is a prostitute and is like a butterfly, fluttering here and there, with money running through her fingers all too easily. But Emmy desperately wants respectability, and resists attempts by her mother's protector to take advantage of her beauty. And when a rich man tries to buy her, she fights him as well.

She and Jack have so much in common - including the fact that neither feels able to marry. He has his mother and siblings to support. She won't bring her mother's shame to any man. But that doesn't stop them falling in love. Doesn't stop Jack from rescuing Emmy when the rich man tries to kidnap her. Doesn't stop her turning to him for comfort - and doesn't stop fate bringing them together.

Nigel Chamberlain has done another of his beautiful covers and the picture of Emmy is so like I imagined her, I'm amazed every time I look at it. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Anna Jacobs grew up in Lancashire and emigrated to Australia in 1973, but loves to return to England regularly to visit her family and soak up the history. She has two grown-up daughters and now lives with her husband in a spacious waterfront home. Often as she writes, dolphins frolic outside the window of her study. Inside, the house is crammed with thousands of books.