Holes in the Ground: War and Ore

When Thomas Longois Lefoy is sent to Tangiers to investigate a German plot involving Moroccan phosphates, he uncovers a sinister Soviet Union involvement in the Asturias miners’ strike of 1934 and its unforeseen consequences for Andoni Arriola, a Basque metallurgist. As he delves deeper into the case, he finds himself caught in a web of intrigue involving the Spanish Civil War, the injury and death of British intelligence agents, and the protection of Britain’s interests in the iron and copper mining industries. As he travels from Tangiers to Gibraltar, Huelva, and Bilbao, he witnesses the devastating effects of civil war and the destruction of open-cast mining. Along the way, he encounters Heinrich Rathenau, a German industrial chemist seeking refuge, and becomes embroiled in a dangerous game of espionage and political maneuvering that reveals the high stakes of international trade and the human cost of war.

Letters to Doberitz

This unique and compelling story has laid dormant for a 100 years. Inspired by real events and based on my own family during the First World War, Letters to Doberitz is set between a German prison-of-war camp, the battlefields of France and family back in Bristol, as father and son endure very different wars. These were real people. They are my ancestors and family who left an extraordinary tale to be told. A lie is made in the name of love, with letters written compounding the deceit for years, all to protect the man that they loved. This is their truly unique story.

Let’s Go Sit Under the Mango Tree

Singapore in 1942 saw the greatest defeat of the British and Allied forces of WW2. Much has been written about the terrible time endured by the 85,000 troops who surrendered to the Japanese forces on 15 February 1942. Much less has been written about the circumstances surrounding the many civilians caught up in the fighting and subsequently interned or forced to endure occupation.

Such was the speed with which the Japanese captured the Island that little time was given to removing resources that may assist them in furthering their aim of creating an Asian empire. One example is the fact that the island had become the centre for all the gold reserves of the Malay States and Singapore. The Japanese knew this and for nearly four years searched the island for the gold. To this day some of this gold may still be at large as no one ever kept a record of what gold was on the island and how much was consumed in paying the cost of the subsequent guerrilla warfare.

Liverpool Kids of WWII - Part 1

The Liverpool Blitz is over…

The seven-year-old boy who was evacuated in The Green Gates Story, comes home after many months away, and is faced with changes to his life: house moves, new districts, new faces…

No sweets, because Mum’s used the coupons for sugar.
What are bananas?
What’s ice-cream?
White bread?

Upon his return to his home city and with his evacuation experience behind him, he views his life ahead as a series of hurdles, but the War is ongoing…

Toys? – Pretend games and a good healthy imagination.
Free-time? – Fun of collecting waste paper, scrap metal, bones and rags, in support of the war effort.

His first trip into town, shopping with Mum, and the surprising sight of big blackened shells, once shops, now dark spaces between buildings, which had suffered direct hits, torn apart innards and burnt deposits.  
Blast waves obliterating shop windows and doors of adjacent buildings, displaying:
Heaps of broken bricks
Shattered concrete supports
Splintered wood floors hanging drunkenly, with massive heaps of dust and debris deposited on the piled remains, awaiting attention and clearance.

How to cope with the unnecessary death of a classmate, killed at play, after accidentally falling through the blitzed roof of an unsafe bomb-damaged house?

When the supply and demands of shortages cause the theft of a family bicycle.

Kids discovering the incomprehensible: German POWs sitting smoking, chatting and laughing, employed in collecting and stacking usable bricks from a bomb site, watched by a grey-haired bespectacled British soldier sat in his parked army lorry when he was not reading a dog-eared copy of Lilliput magazine.  
Same kids, frowning and mindful of captured British soldiers packed into overcrowded huts inside barbed-wire enclosures, overlooked by machine-gun towers, in the Fatherland!

Liverpool Kids of WWII, Part 2

The boy was growing into youth – not yet a teenager – but was bright enough to know his country was in a war that it mustn’t lose, that his brother and uncles were also part of this deadly struggle…

Melodious harmonies and helmets were heard and seen at the impromptu Christmas party his mum and dad had arranged. He was as inquisitive as could be because it sounded like the Americans had arrived with Uncle Jim for the little house party he’d eavesdropped about over the last few days.

“Gosh a’mighty!” he heard one over-the-pond voice exclaim. “You got gas lighting but no electricity in the house, huh?”

The front room was alive with noise generated by adults, both seated and standing, in a happy conversation. Already, a smoky fuzz was forming from lit cigarettes, held firmly between thumbs and forefingers and used sometimes to emphasise a point or two in the friendly interchange of chit-chat.

The first thing he noticed was one policeman’s helmet and two American army white military police garrison caps grouped together at one end of his mum’s upright piano top. Railway policeman, Uncle Jim was in boisterous good humour with the two Americans.

Suddenly, his young eyes lit up as he spied a crumpled untidy mess of military equipment in the corner of the room, which drew him onto it immediately. He could see a US army belt with what looked like a brown wood baseball bat attached, as well as a set of handcuffs.

Stigmata of Auschwitz Part 2

The Stigmata of Auschwitz is the brief story of the life and love of Rebekah and Gabriel.

The two main characters of the story are a young Jewish couple whose lives bringing up their young child are cut short and sacrificed to an evil Nazi ideology.

The story takes place between March 1938 to September 1941, in the time of the Shoah (the Holocaust).

Gabriel is from Budapest in Hungary, where he is sent on a mission to Munkács in Western Ukraine. There he meets Rebekah. They fall in love, marry, and settle in Munkács, where the population is 42% Jewish.

In Munkács, Gabriel and Rebekah build up a successful business and public life: he becomes a councillor representing the Jewish community, while she is a member of the Union of Jewish Women. To complete their enviable lifestyle, they have a much-loved baby son.

But their dream is destroyed by the antisemitism unleashed at the outbreak of the Second World War; their life together is ruined by the ruling fascist elite. Consequently, they departed to Auschwitz, where they are murdered.

However, their two-year-old son is rescued and raised by their neighbour.

Survival: A Story of Friendship

It is a true story based on 13 years of research: the story of friendship between a Jewish boy, Freddy and his Christian friend, Helmut (who are separated by the political turmoil of the aftermath of the First World War in Germany), who obliged Freddy and Freddy’s family to seek refuge in France. It is also the story of friendship between Freddy and George, Freddy’s classmate whom Freddy meets in school in Paris. Moreover, it is also the story of Sigmund, whose patriotic blindness impacted his and his family’s life; the story of Nellie, who left Germany for Colombia before Nellie’s parents sought refuge in France and whose mission would be to reunite the family in a peaceful and friendly country.

Furthermore, the novel also emphasises the emotional costs of the First World War and its indirect result on the onset of the Second World War.

Spitfire Spies

Summer 1940 - Great Britain is in grave peril. With the ‘phoney' war turning into a very real war on the ground and in the air, Hitler's troops storm across an unprepared Europe towards the English Channel. Invasion looms. But the British have a weapon in their arsenal that may be a game changer and bring victory against all odds: the mighty Spitfire.So severe is the threat posed by this remarkable fighter plane that Germany sends two operatives - one a reluctant Englishman, the other a loyal Nazi - on an audacious mission to infiltrate and destroy. Will they achieve their goal or can MI5, with the aid of double agents and a brilliant female pilot, turn the tide of espionage to their advantage? With a literary adroitness reminiscent of an aviator in battle, author John Hughes weaves a tale of intrigue, love and betrayal in a fast-paced thriller of a debut novel which wends its way from the Fatherland via the beaches of Dunkirk to the skies over Southern England.

The Enemy at Home

After the funeral, as Jack Brown stood by the grave of his father, Bill, his eyes displayed different feelings, true feelings, of anger and disgust towards his father as he muttered, “Rot in hell you old bastard.”

Jack couldn’t forgive his father for the misery he had caused him and his friend, Harold, for their arrest as deserters during World War One, when he would have known full well the penalty for desertion was the firing squad. The same went for the death of their mothers, and his sister’s escape to Canada.

Will his feelings ever get resolved?

The Wartime Adventures of Harry Harris

The Wartime Adventures of Harry Harris follows a lieutenant in the Bartonshire Light Infantry, from the outbreak of World War II until it ends, and into peacetime.
He has many hair-raising adventures and emerges a hero, much admired by his soldiers and his girlfriend, Mildred.

Endless Mission III

This is a fictional plot, set in the period between the WWI and the WWII, as the third part to the espionage drama “Endless Mission” Trilogy.

Rally ’Round the Flag

“A timely reminder of how the past colours the future”

Mary Cleeves

Rally ’Round the Flag is a thrilling historical novel set during the American Civil war.

The story begins in the mid-19th century in a large, Lancashire cotton mill,

which never stops production for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Here a family with rich and privileged men controls the lives of the desperately poor men, women and children who are forced to work for them...or be turned out onto the street with no income nor roof over their heads.

In 1861 events move to the USA, where the first real battle of the Civil War started.

The history of the (first) Battle of Bull Run is told realistically until, close to its end, it takes on an alternative life as a result of just one military action, which historically changes the remaining years of war. Senior General in the Confederate Army Robert E. Lee at that moment speaks of how he now sees war in this new version of victory: “Once you get 'em on the run don’t stop. Never give up the pursuit.”

This fascinating account of the war, doomed to kill a quarter of the entire population
of the USA, leads the reader through many of the major locations and actions of the war. The grim reality of the five years from 1861 describes both the true historical characters, as well as the three imagined young Englishmen whose lives now lie in the USA. Here they are destined to see, and even to experience at first-hand, the appalling bloodshed, death and destruction of a war so often fought at very close quarters. Here a brother could find his father or his son aiming a rifle at him across a battlefield; a general could be responsible for the death even of his grandson.

The story roars faster and faster through the hell of shot and shell.

Cannons, and shells from these cannons, and also from mortars, were designed to slice through great swathes of human flesh, while at close quarters Bowie knives appeared to rip out the throats of an enemy fighting for his own life within an arm’s reach.

The bodies of the enemy lay scattered across innumerable battlefields

and became food for the crows. An observer of a huge battle recorded in his diary that he had seen: “Entire regiments disappeared in a few minutes. Legs, arms, knapsacks and rifles thrust high into the air and then scattered on the bloody grass.”

The reader may ask: “Can history be changed by the alteration of one small event?”

But is there more than a little similarity in the 19th century between slavery in the USA and the penury, desperate hardship and death from disease walking the streets of Oldham, as well as the lack of any security existing for all those working in the mills, factories and mines of Great Britain?

One part of the same American country wants to destroy the neighbour it has lived with peacefully for more than one hundred and fifty years.

An extraordinary read awaits you...if you rally ’round the flag, but which flag do you choose?