Please welcome friend and author, Maggie Cobbett...

...to the blog this week.  Maggie, hi, and thanks for being here.  So, tell me a bit about yourself and then I really want to hear about your book, which is set in France - my favourite place to visit!

MC  Thank you for inviting me, Angela.  I’ve been fortunate enough to combine my love of travel with studying and teaching modern languages – French, German and EFL – all of which are reflected in much of my fiction.  Methodology has changed immensely over the years, I’m glad to say, with far greater emphasis now given to conversational skills than was the case at my Leeds grammar school.  A top ‘O’ level grade was of very little use, I found, when first struggling to get directions on the Paris Métro!

The three English schoolgirls whose unsolved disappearance is at the heart of my novel Shadows of the Past face a similar dilemma, and I’ve just brought out a short prequel to explain the background to this.  Foreshadowing, which is free to download from Amazon or Smashwords, explains just why they felt it so necessary to spend time in France before facing their ‘A’ level oral the following year and what enticed them to choose that particular area.  It also goes into some detail about the love lives of teenagers just before the Swinging Sixties, when fear of public condemnation still kept most girls on the straight and narrow.

Shadows of the Past began life as a memoir of a very strange summer my friends and I spent at an international youth work camp in a forested area just outside Paris.  The dormitories were in tunnels deep underground and the food was atrocious, but that wasn’t the worst of it.  Our sketchy French meant that we had little idea of what was going on most of the time.  The ‘patron’ had an explosive temper, the work he demanded of us seemed largely pointless and he had frequent visits from sinister individuals who might have stepped straight out of a ‘film noir’.  He allowed us to go down into the nearby village in the evenings, where we were often cornered by old (to us) men wanting to regale us with their tales of derring do in the French Resistance.  They also spoke with much relish and frequent resort to sign language about the savage treatment meted out to collaborators, especially women who had slept with German soldiers.  Much of it went over our heads, but it was evident that wartime memories were still very fresh.  Nothing had been either forgiven or forgotten.

The gaps were filled in for me when I revisited the area decades later (with greatly improved French) and re-established contact with the one village boy I’d always remembered with fondness.  All traces of the work camp had disappeared by then – the fearsome ‘patron’ had been jailed for a variety of criminal activities – and the tunnels were blocked off, but Jean-Claude, his family and their friends spent many hours telling me about the history of the region.  It was then that the idea came to me of writing a novel spanning three time periods.

In the 1980s, a stranded traveller called Laura makes a gruesome discovery in the forest and, ignoring warnings to leave well alone, begins to unravel the mystery of the English schoolgirls’ disappearance.  The older inhabitants of Saint-André-la-Forêt have many secrets that they are determined to keep, come what may.  A double flashback follows, first to the1960s and then to the dark days of the Occupation before Laura has all the answers.  But will she live to tell the tale?

...about the author  Born in Leeds, Maggie studied at the University of Manchester and then spent more years than she cares to remember teaching secondary school pupils and adults in England, France and Germany.  Now retired and living on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, Maggie makes the occasional appearance as a ‘village regular’ on ‘Emmerdale’ and continues to write long and short fiction, articles on a variety of subjects, ‘fillers’ and even the occasional poem.

...about the book  Not far from Paris lies the village of Saint-André-la-Forêt, where three English schoolgirls disappear without trace during the summer of 1965.  Twenty years later, a stranded traveller stumbles across a skeleton in the nearby forest and ignores local people's warnings to leave well alone.  The secrets she uncovers, some dating back to the darkest days of World War 2, are more than enough to put her own life in danger.

You can follow Maggie on her website  on Amazon  Twitter  and  Facebook or by Email on : maggiecobbett@gmail.com