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ABOUT ME. . .

 

    Margaret Callow was born during the second w.w. and grew up in north west London From an early age, she has written poetry much of which has been published by Poetry Now and Forward Press and she is a member of The International Society of Poets. . .  


        Fifty years working in healthcare, looking after a home and a family left little time for 

serious writing, but the idea to combine two of her greatest pleasures, the written wordnand history has always been in her mind. She trained and qualified as a registered nurse at the Westminster Hospital in London before moving to Potters Bar where she worked at Barnet General Hospital for a number of years. on moving to Finchley she attended North London Polytechnic and qualified as a district nurse working in the community of West and East Finchley, Hampstead, Cricklewood and Golders Green for eight years.  

 

After several holidays spent in East Anglia came the idea of moving to and working in Norfolk and in 1980 after buying Lammas Hall, a retirement home became a reality. She took it from a run down country house to a home with twenty two residents and twentyfour hour care that was open for seventeen years. With the onset of arthritis, she was becoming less than nimble and reliuctantly the Hall was sold in 1997. 

 

There was little she didn’t know about geriatric care, but progress in other medical fields had somewhat passed her by so the following years were spent in refreshing her knowledge on medications at Lawson Road pharmacy, followed by Field Supervising in North Norfolk for Carewatch and a further eight years spent working at a local nursing home in Horstead.  

 

Five years teaching Health and Social Care at Norwich City College followed before she settled for retirement at sixty seven. When she was twenty one, she found out by accident that she was in fact adopted and as time became more available, one of the first things she wanted to do was trace her roots. Piecing together her birth family led her to finding a sister and other relatives too.

 

On discovering her great, great grandmother was a pauper inmate at the Shrewsbury Union Workhouse in 1900, she was both interested and moved by her research which revealed, like  her own relative, so many who spent their final years in such an awful institution. In the workhouse register of the time, the names were unremrkable, ages variable and in many cases graves umarked and often unknown. 

 

There were so many stories in that register waiting to be told. Ordinary people indeed,but without them the people’s revolts throughout our past for better conditions may have quickly foundered and hard fought for change as we know it may never have come about. The more she has read about our social past, the more it has become her inspitation and Norfolk is a county with many tales to tell. So now she writes Historical Fiction based on true stories. 

 

Carefully researched, her debut novel A Rebellious Oak is a fictionalized account of a rising led by Robert Kett in 1549 and the march to Norwich of thousands of peasants. It was published by Running Hare Press in 2012. A further two novels followed completing a trilogy, yet stand alone stories about Norfolk's part in the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 and Cade's Rebellion of 1450.   

 

When a shocking crime in Norfolk in 1848 caught her eye, another story followed at the end of 2012 which is now called Rust. Based on the true story of James Bloomfield Rush, it was submitted to Holland House Books under their crime imprint Grey Cells Press and their editor Robert Peett . It is due to published early in 2015. 

 

 She lives in a village to the north of Norwich with her family and is a member of the Crime Writers Association. 

 

 

 

 

 

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