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This work is a labour of love by the writer Mary Thorpe as a tribute to her much loved Granny O'Rourke (nee Nolan) in an attempt to place the stories she heard and was told into a true and historical context. As a social worker who came across many cases of social deprivation in modern times, in the various Social Work Departments in which she worked in the South East and North West of England, Mary had the dawning realisation regarding what her own Grandmother had been through in even harder times in the late part of the Nineteenth Century and early part of the Twentieth Century in Ireland and sought to record this.Mary felt the driving need to record her much loved grandmother's story as recognition of Bridget's harsh life and also as a tribute to her and the millions of others like her who made the best of things whilst still retaining a sense of pride, of the worth of education as a ticket out of poverty and of the importance of retaining one's dignity and commitment to family through good and bad times.Mary acknowledges that Bridget possessed the old Irish good luck as well, in marrying a 'good man' and in gaining the "sponsorship" of her patron-N. Stanislav Murphy.Within the telling of Bridget's story however, Mary is also writing about an era of tough times and she acknowledges 'these roots' as the make-up of her own resilient, Irish character. She is proud of her grandmother's achievements especially with regard to the life chances Bridget was able to create for her family, and rightly so!Mary uses the life of Bridget to celebrate the achievements of other women in Dublin and Bray, in fact from all over Ireland, in this era, and as such, this story will be of interest to anyone with Irish ancestry. Mary hopes her readers will enjoy the mix of history and biography as an authentic record of times past and that this will be an addition to Celtic history from an empathetic and homespun point of view. Mary clearly believes that 'our roots' are as important just as 'our word is our bond'.

Jan Prebble was for 42 years the mistress of John Prebble, the writer acclaimed in Scotland for his histories of Glencoe, Culloden and The Highland Clearance, while elsewhere his best known work is the block buster film, Zulu for which he wrote the script. This is not an autobiography written in chronological order but a series of snapshots of a great hot-fired love affair, portraying with humour and feeling some of the difficulties of being a mistress in the days when unmarried couples were not acceptable, the ruses they had to adopt and the extraordinary situations they found themselves in. More than that it takes in not only Jan's own celebrity-interviewing life as a Fleet Street journalist, DJ-protecting days as PRO to Capital Radio and finally her time working for the Prince of Wales, but also fascinating examples of John's unpublished letters, serious and flippant, historical and romantic. It includes untold stories behind his many books and a vivid description of how an author feels when he finishes writing one. The whole story is enhanced by tales of John's sense of fun unexpected perhaps in a man who wrote so eruditely about history.