Welcome to Polly Heron's website.

I am a saga writer living on the North Wales coast, but I am originally from Manchester, which is where my books are set.

I am represented by Camilla Shestopal of Shesto Literary.

I also write as Susanna Bavin and as Maisie Thomas. I am on Facebook as Maisie.

Latest News:

I am delighted to announce that I have been asked to write more books for the Home Front Girls series. This is all due to you, my lovely readers, who have made books 1 and 2 such a success and who have pre-ordered book 3, which comes out at the end of September.

Book 4 will be published in May 2025 and book 5 will come out in September 2025.

Link to the Home Front Girls series page on Amazon.

A Wonderful Review

I'm delighted to share with you this extract of a review for Springtime with the Railway Girls, from Yvonne G, who is a prolific reader and reviewer who shares her reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Goodreads, Waterstones and other sites.

"As ever, the facts surrounding this multi-layered and totally immersive fictional story, are meticulously researched and detailed by an author who clearly knows and loves her subject with a passion and complete confidence in the imagery and emotions her words can evoke. This series is a social record of the war effort conducted from home soil, specifically focusing on the important part the railway network played in holding the country together and keeping everyone connected during those difficult years."

More Book News:

I'm delighted to tell you that there are currently over 1,000 pre-orders for book 3 in The Home Front Girls series, Christmas for the Home Front Girls, which will be released on September 30th.   Huge thanks to all of you who have placed your orders already.

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If any of you are writers and you're busy trying to find an agent, you may well be interested in my latest blog, in which I explain how I signed with my first agent back in 2016 - and I also offer an important piece of advice to everyone currently going through the querying process.

Books on Kindle Unlimited:

The Surplus Girls is on Kindle Unlimited....

.... and so is The Surplus Girls' Orphans.

Also on Kindle Unlimited is The Deserter's Daughter, one of my 1920s sagas written as Susanna Bavin....

.... and also my Home Front Girls book 1 and 2 written as Susanna, The Home Front Girls and Courage for the Home Front Girls.

Who were the Surplus Girls? 
 

The Great War wiped out a generation of young men and left behind a generation of young women who faced a life without the probability of marriage, at a time when any girl left on the shelf rapidly became an old maid and no working woman could hope to earn what could be earned by a man, even by a man doing the same job. These were the ‘surplus girls’ – young women who had grown up assuming they would get married, but whose dreams and assumptions were dashed by the War; young women who, unexpectedly and without preparation, faced a lifetime of work and spinsterhood.

In the Spotlight:

Lawrence Hesketh - the making of a character

This - written from Patience's viewpoint - is how Lawrence is introduced into book 1, The Surplus Girls:

"For Prudence and Lawrence to be in the same room without arguing was unprecedented. Lawrence had always thrown his weight around, ever since they were children, and over the years he had become increasingly condescending towards them. Because they weren’t married? Probably. The world looked down on spinsters. But it wasn’t just that. Lawrence had risen in the world. He was a successful businessman and Evelyn revelled in her role as his perfectly-groomed wife."

But Lawrence didn't start out with that name. He started out as... Anthony. Then, towards the end of book 1, the orphanage that plays such an important role in the series is introduced in to the story - and, guess what, I called it St Anthony's. An instance of me not playing close attention to names? Maybe. It took a considerable time for me to realise what I'd done.

Well, the obvious thing would have been to rename the orphanage. After all, I had Anthony Hesketh very clearly in my head - I knew exactly what he looked like, how he behaved, the way he spoke, and all about him.

But - and it's a very big but - it was really important for the orphanage to be called St Anthony's - as you will already be aware if you're familiar with the series. So I ended up having to find a new name for Anthony Hesketh.

And the name that appeared in my head, demanding to be used, was Lawrence. Great. Except for one thing. Lawrence didn't look the same as Anthony - he's a lot taller, for one thing. And his personality was different too - cleverer, more sarcastic. So I had to go back and rewrite all the old Anthony scenes to make them suitable to be Lawrence scenes.

I ought to make it clear that this change of character didn't alter the plot in any way - it simply changed the manner in which the scenes and conversations that included Lawrence played out.

So there you are: changing a name isn't always as simple as pressing 'Find & Replace'. It all depends on what the character needs you to do.

In the Spotlight:

Belinda Layton - heroine of The Surplus Girls

BELINDA LAYTON is from a large, impoverished family. The Laytons are pretty awful. They used to be respectable, hard-working working-class. But dad DENBY has gone from bad to worse where jobs are concerned and each job has dragged his family further down the social ladder. Mum KATHLEEN despairs of him and whenever she appears, you can smell the burning martyr. Denby is always trying to get money out of his three working children, much to Kathleen’s annoyance… but then she creeps after them and tries to wheedle money out of them herself.

Belinda moved in with her fiancé’s widowed mother ENID SLOAN and grandmother BEATTIE SLOAN when, aged 15, she got engaged; but her fiancé, BEN SLOAN, died towards the end of the Great War and since then Belinda has been a pretend-widow. She owes a lot to Enid and Beattie. Their cottage might be tiny but it is a big step up for Belinda, whose family is crammed into two rooms in a shabby house containing four families, all of whom share a stinking privy in the back yard. For Belinda, being invited to live with Enid and Beattie was a massive relief, but also a source of guilt, because she feels she shouldn’t be glad not to live with her family. Every week now, after she has tipped up for her bed and board with Enid and Beattie, and slipped Kathleen some money to help out, she has only a few coppers left for herself and she can’t see how to change this. Had Ben lived, it would have sorted itself out naturally once they got married, but now it feels like she is in a financial trap.

Belinda has received nothing but kindness from Enid and Beattie and is deeply grateful to them. Moreover, their shared grief has brought them extra close – but is she grateful enough to spend the rest of her life in mourning for Ben? For a long time she was happy to wear black and live in mourning, but now she wants to live a normal life again. She doesn’t expect ever to meet another man – she doesn’t even want to – but she is no longer content to live her life swathed in black. She wants to gain some skills so she can support herself and have a decent future, but Enid and Beattie struggle with the idea. Will Belinda rise above them in the world? They love her and don’t want to lose her, but above all, they believe Ben would want Belinda to stay with them.

The Home Front Girls

The Home Front Girls is the name of my new WW2 trilogy written as Susanna Bavin. It's also the title of book 1.

The two girls on the cover are Sally (in the green top) and Betty. The story starts in the summer of 1940 when the Battle of Britain is raging in the skies. Steadfast, hardworking Sally and gentle, well-meaning Betty are sent to work in a salvage depot (what we would call a recycling plant), but they have met before - when Sally caused Betty to lose her job.

The book is available in paperback and also on Kindle.

Courage for the Home Front Girls

Courage for the Home Front Girls is book 2 in the series.

Sally is thrilled to bits to have been promoted to the post of manager at the salvage depot. Betty is thrilled to bits because at long last she has a handsome, attentive boyfriend. And new girl Lorna is anything but thrilled to have been dumped in the salvage depot to hide her away from the newspapers.

Courage is available in paperback and on Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited.

Christmas for the Home Front Girls

Book 3 in the Home Front Girls series will be published on September 30th. h You can pre-order it by clicking here.

If you enjoy my Home Front Girls series, you may be interested in reading about the background to it:

“There’ll Always be a Dustbin…”

A Look at Salvage and Recycling on the Home Front

When I was invited to write the Home Front Girls series, I gave a lot of thought to its background. I settled on salvage – what we today know as recycling – because it played such a huge part in the nation’s ordinary everyday life.

Salvage was a massive part of the war effort on the home front. Everything was in increasingly short supply as items vanished from the shops, never to be seen again until after the war – ordinary things like hair-pins, paper-clips (a bag of paper-clips was once offered as a prize in a raffle), hair-pins, needles, pencils, coat-hooks… My grandfather described finding a coat-hook in the soil when he was digging for victory. Did he chuck it away? Absolutely not. It was given a good clean and put to use.

During the war, re-using was essential. Many items were re-directed into another purpose. Three or four layers of wool fabric for the soles, with a piece of old curtain, tapestry or even old carpet for the tops, and hey presto – a pair of slippers. The shirt-tails could be cut off a man’s shirt and made into a new collar and cuffs when the old ones wore out. Old shirts and blouses were turned into baby-clothes, and many a blanket found a new life as a winter coat. The WVS (Women’s Voluntary Service) ran clothes exchanges, where you could choose something ‘new’ in return for a good-quality donation. Women’s magazines were full of clever ideas for giving clothes a new lease of life, such as turning a full-length coat that was past its best into a hip-length coat and using the left-over fabric to make a smart new collar and pocket-flaps.

But it wasn’t just in the home that salvage and recycling worked wonders. ‘Saucepans into Spitfires’ was the popular and inspirational slogan for a national drive to collect aluminium throughout the summer of 1940, when the Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies. The housewives of Britain proudly gave up their pots and pans, vacuum-cleaner tubes, coat-hanger hooks, and anything else metallic they could find around the house.

In the words of Lady Reading, the leader of the WVS, speaking to women in a wireless broadcast in July 1940, ‘Very few of us can be heroines on the battle-front, but we can all have the tiny thrill of thinking as we hear the news of an epic battle in the air, “Perhaps it was my saucepan that made part of that Hurricane!”’

Throughout the war, everything was salvaged – paper, string, metal, glass, rubber, rags, wood, even rabbit fur after Bunny had been killed for the cooking pot, often to appear on the Christmas dinner table as mock-turkey. Food-waste went into the pig-bin, except for the bones, which went in the bone-basket (to make glue, explosives, soap, fertiliser and animal-feed). Silver-foil milk-bottletops were kept and given back to the milkman – or more likely to the milk-lady, who had taken over the job when the milkman was called up.

The Control of Paper Order 1940 stated that items bought in a shop should not be packed or wrapped if this wasn’t necessary. In the spring of 1943, it became an offence to throw away waste paper. At a time when few people had a telephone at home, the main way to keep in touch was by letter. Envelopes were re-used until there was no space left to write another address and people who had been brought up to write on only one side of the paper now wrote on both, with no margins. If young Billy had been off sick from school and his mother, or his foster mother if he was an evacuee, had to write a note to the teacher to excuse his absence, this was probably done on the reverse of a piece of paper that had already been written on – so it was probably a good idea to check what had been written on the other side, just in case.

A salvaged newspaper could be made into three 25-pound shell cups. One envelope could become a cartridge wad. A mortar shell carrier could be made from half a dozen books, while sixty large cigarette cartons could be turned into the outer container for a shell. One 9-inch enamel saucepan might become a bayonet. Even the ‘snippings’ of cotton or wool from a housewife’s sewing or knitting could end up forming part of a soldier’s winter coat or an army blanket.

As for the humble rag… maps and charts for submarines, bomber crews and tank crews; wipes for cleaning machinery; battle-dress; blankets; roofing-felt for army barracks.

The responsibility for the collection of salvage lay officially with the local corporations, but the work mainly became the job of local women, almost always the Women’s Voluntary Service. This was partly because in the early years of the war, corporation refuse-carts were often needed for clearing up the rubble after air raids.

Salvage also became a job for children. Hundreds of thousands of children joined the ‘cog’ scheme – each of them becoming a small cog in the mighty war machine. Schools, scout groups, guides and brownies competed with one another to collect the most salvage in their local neighbourhoods. Newspapers ran a ‘cog’ page each week for children and a special song was written called ‘There’ll Always Be a Dustbin’, which was sung to the tune of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Working towards earning their ‘cog’ badges was an important part of wartime life for many youngsters.

So the next time you’re sorting your recycling, preparing to put it out for collection in the various boxes, spare a thought for our salvage-minded wartime generation, who by the time D-Day came round had provided 1.1 million tons of waste paper, 1.3 tons of metal and more than 80,000 tons of rags to help fight the Second World War.

Heritage Railway Pictures

If you'd like to see some photos of the types of railway things you read about in the Railway Girls books, then click here to be taken to my blog.

Meeting Dot

If you enjoy the Railway Girls series, written as Maisie Thomas, you may like to look at this blog about Dot Green, a Railway Girls character who captured readers' hearts right from the start of the series.   Click here to see the blog.

Meeting Joan

And here is a blog all about lovely Joan, another reader favourite.

If you are on Twitter, you may like to know that I have an account for myself as Polly. Here it is - I hope you'll pop across and follow me. If you do, please say hello! My Twitter handle is @Polly_Heron - don't forget that underscore!

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  Wonderful neh y special to sha* *

Here is a quick link for you to my Author Page on Amazon UK.