Unwanted childern can suceed

No two people are the same and I guess much of it is the way they’re brought up. Someone once said something like give me a child till he’s four and I will change it for life, whether this is true or not, I can’t say. But what of the unwanted child who is ignored or little influenced by their parents. It seemed to me that they might be doomed to live an unhappy and disappointing life and yet there may be exceptions. Fran Grainger was an exception. Normally I base my characters on people I have known or an amalgam of people who have faced the problems in the story, here again Fran Grainger is the exception.

I was brought up in a seaside town full of hotels and visitors, later on when I was married my husband and I nearly bought a hotel. In preparation for the purchase I attended a catering and hotel management course. It was these two facts together with the thoughts I had of a successful unwanted child that lead me to write ‘Evergreen Girl’. Fran, our heroine, is close only to her older sister but unsupported by her parents, thrown out of her home in her teenage years she develops a desire to improve herself. She changes from a rather weak uninteresting person to a hardnosed business icon both through luck and her work ethic.

That in essence is the story, of course there are many junctions where the wrong choice or reaction could have lead to an entirely different life for her. The development of her character is shown through the situations thrown at her, for example when she had an abortion it was because of her desire to progress in her career, rather than be held back by motherhood that gradually harden her soul. It is situations like this that occur throughout her young life which lead her to become aware of the worlds cruelties and further alienate her from her mother. Finally  she reaches the top of her business career only to fall in love with a farmer. However he has Victorian ideas of courting and made him initially reject her as she had more money than he had. His belief was that a man should be the sole support of his wife a new challenge over which Fran had to succeed. This is a most interesting problem for a woman with her experience and background to solve.

 Naturally as her creator I had to have a happy ending and in doing so compromised myself into writing another book in which a more rural life followed but being the person she had become it soon developed into a major business concern. This in turn lead to another book and finally ended up as Evergreen trilogy.