Well, that was the start of one story, and of course there have been many others. The idea for The Liverpool Rose came after visiting the Boat Museum in Ellesmere Port. It’s a fascinating place and touring the canal boats was a first for me. Then my friend Eileen and her husband Jim took Brian and me for a day out in their narrow boat and I couldn’t wait to put it all into a book.

But when I started A Christmas to Remember, it was because of a parrot. I was interviewing people for A Village with a View, which is a non-fiction book all about Everton, and I went to the home of a charming couple who owned an extremely intelligent parrot. Whilst I listened to his owners telling me about life in wartime Liverpool, the parrot stood on his perch, fixing me with a bright, compelling eye, and very slowly lifted his right wing as high as it would go. Then, making sure I was still watching, he lifted his right leg, also as high as it would go, and fell sideways off his perch, uttering a shriek of amusement as he did so. He repeated the trick over and over and by the time his owner shut him up by throwing a cloth over his cage I was completely sold on the idea of putting him in a book. He should have been in A Christmas to Remember, but somehow he didn’t fit. I was waiting for him to appear in the story and do his party trick, but he never did; instead Crippen, the pig, took centre stage, so the intelligent parrot will have to stay in my memory, awaiting his chance for stardom.

Hope you enjoy Crippen the pig, and A Christmas to Remember, of course.

All best wishes,

Katie Flynn

Chapter One

IT WAS ALMOST five o’clock on a dreary December day. Occasional snowflakes floated down and the puddles were rimmed with ice. Albert Payne stood behind the counter of his tobacconist shop and surveyed the almost empty shelves with a jaundiced eye, for his stock-in-trade was still hard to come by. He had sold all his cheap cigarettes earlier in the day, and although the sign over his window read Albert Payne, Purveyor of Fine Tobaccos he had had few customers for his more expensive products. The trouble was that money was short and what cash was available, he knew, would be spent on food for the festivities and toys for the children. Yet he could not help envying the hurrying crowds he could see through his window, with their shopping baskets bulging and their faces wreathed in anticipatory smiles. He thought, without bitterness, that they would be looking forward to a family Christmas, the first since the end of the war, which had been over for four months.

The holiday was fast approaching, however, and Albert would spend it alone. Furthermore, the shop four doors down from his own had been empty for weeks, and when it first came on the market he had promised himself that he would enquire about rent, rates and so on. He had planned to turn it into a nice little café, or a tea room, because even before the war it had saddened him that his customers were almost always male, save for the odd woman coming shyly into the shop to buy a present for her husband, and he longed for some pleasant female company. If he had opened a tea room he had intended his daughter Janine to be manageress. But he, who had been so active during the hostilities, had left it too late; Janine, ungrateful girl, had spurned his offer of a little business of her own – albeit one her father had every intention of visiting regularly – and had gone off to the States, chasing after some Yank who had promised marriage.