In Our Fathers' Footsteps

Jenny’s wartime memories were of a bleak childhood blighted by her father’s absence in the British Liberation Army. In stark, unfair contrast, her husband Paul’s top wartime memory was of the ducks laying their eggs in his father’s tin hat. Home Guard duties were zilch in the peaceful Northumbrian hamlet where he was the minister.

Why did his father ditch a promising science career for the ministry in that remote spot? Many years later painstaking research revealed the amazing answer to Paul’s boyhood question.

Follow Jenny as she retraces her father’s and Paul’s father’s footsteps – starting with her father’s journey from the Normandy Landings to the Liberation of Europe, to her father-in-law’s hair’s breadth avoidance of the Nazi nuclear physics machine, ending with a journey back in time, taking in two famous battles, to Paul’s ancestor, Walcher, made Bishop of Durham by William the Conqueror in 1071.

Sales proceeds to be donated to the Royal British Legion.

Jenny Martin witnessed, at close hand, the aftermath of war – mainly through family members’ experiences: three in World War I; five in World War II, one an RAF Bomber Command casualty; and three in the Normandy landings, one being her father. There was also a cousin in Iraq.

In 2007, encouraged by the leader of the creative writing group that she had recently joined, she tried her hand at poetry with several successes. A previous self-published collection of poetry, Dandelions: Growing Up in Cumbria with co-author Joyce Hurst, her cousin, sold well and raised several hundred pounds for charity as did Mining Memories, published by SilverWood Books, which was a runner up in the Arts and Literature Section of the 2011 Hunter Davies’ Lakeland Book of the Year Awards. Aftermath, a collection of poems and short stories marking the centenary of the start of World War I, which earned a foreword by Dame Vera Lynn, was published by SilverWood Books on Remembrance Sunday 2014 to raise funds for the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal.

She qualified in medicine, specialising in a diagnostic branch, chemical pathology, and retired in 1994. She is married with two adult children and three grandchildren and lives in Cheshire.

‘The pity of war is visited afresh, with an insight reflecting the author’s grasp of the poetic. Thoughts on the French Resistance blend with moving memories of the friendship forged between her father and a Dutch family. All in all, a journey worth spending with Jenny.’

J. P., Judge and writer

‘This book by the author of Mining Memories, runner up in the Arts and Literature section of the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year Awards, is a chronicle of war from - unusually - the perspective of ordinary people. An in-depth and emotive, yet easy and entertaining read.’

P.P., proof reader and English teacher

Download a copy of Jenny's Advance Information here.

Read this article from The Whitehaven News about In Our Fathers' Footsteps here.