Blog Tour - The Children Of Lovely Lane by Nadine Dorries plus Extract!

The Children Of Lovely Lane By Nadine Dorries Publication Date: 1st December 2016 Publisher: Head Of Zeus Pages: 489 Genre: Historical, Drama Format: Hardback  Source: Publisher
Amazon UK / Amazon US

The nurses of Lovely Lane – Dana, Victoria, Pammy and Beth – are now in their second year and are about to face some truly harrowing and difficult times on the wards.

St Angelus needs a new assistant matron, but the members of the Liverpool District Hospital Board have overruled Emily Haycock and Dr Gaskell in their choice. Enter the mysterious Miss Van Gilder from somewhere down south.

The life of St Angelus is soon disrupted as her proposals turn the running of the hospital upside down and threaten the jobs of the domestics and porters. But Miss Van Gilder harbours a dark and dishonest secret, and the staff – who are used to looking after their own – set out to uncover it.

Will they do so in time, before her meddling begins to affect the morale of the nurses and put the lives of their patients in danger? For one very sick little boy, especially, it will be touch and go.

Ever since I read The Angels Of Lovely Lane, I couldn't wait to see what happened next. For me that one and this book stuck in my mind, I am not sure if it is the characters, the storyline or the author's words but it has really touched my heart.  After reading the first couple of chapters, I was so pleased to see the familiar characters and places. The nurses of St Angelus are thriving in their careers and everyone is routing for them to do well. (I know I was!) I loved Sister Therese, she is such a unique character. While she is representing God and his views, she is also trying to help those's in need as well. She even has a few tricks up her sleeve to do so. (You will see what I mean when you read it!)  There are quite a few changes happening at St Angelus, not all of them are good. Especially when a new assistant matron is hired and she is about to make all of the staff's lives harder than they need to be. The St Angelus girls (Dana, Victoria, Pammy and Beth) are just the way I remember them from the first book. All different, all have their own hardships and stories that lead them to St Angelus but it is those reasons that make them such likeable and passionate characters to read about.  This book is no different in that sense, although along with their stories is a couple of others now as well. Each heartbreaking and tragic yet it is the people who help them when they need it most, they are the ones who show them what real decent human beings are like.  I have already said how much I loved Sister Therese but I loved all the main character. Each one is unique in their own way and to me, I could imagine and picture them as real life people and not just characters in a book.  The Children Of Lovely Lane is simply amazing. I really don't think any words I use will do the book justice. Although I will say you have to read it, it will warm your warm and make you see the real angels in the world. 

Captivating, Phenomenal and Touching. 

Chapter three 
If there was one thing Lily Lancashire hated more than anything else in the whole world, it was the sound of children playing.  Home for Lily was Clare Cottages, situated on the bank of the River Mersey on the Old Dock Road. She thought that the person who had named the ugly, four-storey, soot-blackened redbrick tenement buildings had either been drunk or cruel, giving the cottages such a pretty name. ‘We only agreed to move here because it sounded so nice,’ she often heard the neighbours say. ‘What a joke. Someone in the corpy was ’avin’ a right laugh there.’  ‘The corpy’ was the Liverpool Corporation, the landlord of Clare Cottages. It was the corpy that had decided to move the bombed-out residents of Scotland Road, where there had been up to four large families to every house, to the already overcrowded Clare Cottages.  Those who complained about the condition of Clare Cottages were the ones who took pride in their homes, who washed their net curtains and scrubbed the step, who borrowed dolly blue for their laundry from each other when they’d run out. Lily’s mother, much to Lily’s shame, was not one of those women. Her mother never jumped out of bed on a bright and breezy day, eager to get the nets on the line, never helped other women on the same landing to bounce a pram full of wet washing down the steps to the courtyard, was never one to pop in and out of their neighbours’ homes.   Lily wished her mam could be more like Mrs McGuffy, who installed herself in the courtyard as self-appointed guardian of the washing lines.  ‘I’ll watch the nets don’t blow off,’ Mrs McGuffy would shout when the weather was fine. ‘You just send our Billy down with the chair and me fags. Me bleedin’ leg ulcers will only let me do those stairs once a day.’ And there she would sit, all day long, surrounded by a plume of blue smoke, her face turned to the sun, the hot metal of her curlers burning into her scalp, the black tar on the top of the bin sheds melting.  As soon as the nets were dry, she’d round up the cottage kids and instruct them to return the curtains, sun-bleached and folded, to whichever home they’d been sent from, and to bring out the next batch for the lines and a fresh cuppa for herself. There was always a chipped and brown-stained cup on top of the metal bin beside her and when she finished the tea, she used the dregs to extinguish the last of her cigarette. Mrs McGuffy was a demon for cleanliness and objected to anyone throwing a ciggie butt on to the concrete floor of the washing yard, even if it was in the middle of the worst housing in Liverpool. ‘Chuck that stub down the sink, would you, love, before you fill the cup up,’ she would say to whichever kid she sent for a refill. The kids didn’t always remember, but it didn’t matter, the tea was so strong and sweet, she drank it anyway.  There were two distinct types of families in Clare Cottages. There were those with mothers like Mrs McGuffy, who scrubbed children and steps with equal vigour and regularity. They cleaned windows, baked biscuits, visited the wash house on the same day every week and took their children to the public bath house on Saturday nights, ready for church on Sunday. Such families were free from lice and scurvy. Their children did not stagger around on rail-thin legs or rub at weeping eyes. Their hair was not lank through lack of food and their skin was not permanently darkened as a result of ingrained dirt. They were rarely cold.   Families such as Lily’s, on the other hand, had parents who shunned Mass at St Chad’s, preferring to worship at the bar in the Red Admiral public house. They lived in homes where there was no routine of orderliness or cleanliness. Where a trip to the public bath house came rarely, usually when a visit from the welfare inspector loomed or the lice had become too numerous to bear; homes where food came, not always, but usually once a day. No one asked these mothers for a loan of the dolly blue. The nets and bedding in these homes were the colour of a miserable winter sky. 
Another day, another book,