Book launch by Bridget Gubbins goes ahead in Morpeth despite bad weather

At Morpeth Library, guests including Morpeth Mayor Betty Bawn arrived with water dripping from their raincoats.

Writers, businesspeople, friends and family all contributed with short readings.

Writer Sue Reed could not manage the one-mile walk to Bardon Mill station from her house in the gale force winds and Fiona Hall was obliged to turn back as she drove south through the floods on the A697.

Fiona was standing in for author Barbara Fox, whose book Is the Vicar in, Pet? tells of her life as a child in Ashington.

Fiona had prepared to use Barbara’s words: “Bridget captures beautifully the now-vanished world she grew up in, to create a book that is both a memoir and a fascinating piece of social history.”

And she would remind those in attendance: “Barbara Fox puts her finger on something important here.

“We like these books not just because they are about Bridget and her adventures, amazing though those adventures are, but also because they stir up memories of our own, from the dim and distant past, about ways of life that are long gone.”

Bridget’s new trilogy Hay Girl is available on Amazon, written under her childhood name Bridget Ashton. It combines the following books – ‘Hay Before the Bookshops or The Beeman’s Family’; ‘Hit the Road, Gals’; and ‘Cold War, Warm Hearts’.