Stories Rooted in Place

1. From Melly Strikes Back — “Bring your ignorance”

Liverpool, 1970. Sixteen-year-old Melly Maguire has been writing about a dock strike for a local paper. Kudzai Moyo, a nurse, sends her to Granby Street to meet a woman who has been waiting to be asked. Published by Dock Road Books, 2026.

Kudzai presses the letter into my hands on Tuesday morning, two precise folds, sealed with a brittle strip of brown tape that crackles under my fingers. Her eyes bore into mine. “Granby Street. Number forty-one. Mrs Adebayo’s expecting you.” My pulse jumps. “What does it say?” She sighs, almost pitying. “That you’re Bridie Maguire’s daughter and you have a notebook.” She holds my gaze. “That should be enough.”

I ride the rattling bus alone into Toxteth, through streets thinning into Liverpool 8. The terraces huddle closer, storefronts splashed with new colours; calypso drums throb through a crack in a hairdresser’s upstairs window. My heart hammers. I copy “Granby Street” three times in my notebook, an anchor against getting lost. At forty-one, the doorstep gleams as if freshly painted, so stark it hurts my eyes.

Before I can lift my knuckles, the door swings open. Mrs Adebayo stands framed in darkness, arms folded, measuring me like a verdict. She says nothing and beckons me inside. A corridor thick with frying plantain smoke—sweet, heavy, almost choking—leads to a kitchen where the table’s set for two. “Sit,” she orders. My legs tremble as I obey.

The tea is so dark I could stand a spoon upright in it. The cups are blue-and-white china; the saucers don’t match. Between us, a plate of chin chin—pale gold, knotted like small torpedoes. She studies my notebook as if it’s a scalpel. Finally: “You’re writing about the strike.” No question mark. “Yes.” “About the men at the gates.” “And the women—the kitchens, the food parcels…” She tightens her grip on her cup. “But not about Dayo. Not Solomon Moyo. Not Winston Clarke.” “I didn’t—” “You didn’t ask.” Her voice is calm. Ice in the bones. “Nobody asks. That’s exactly the problem.”

She exhales and launches into Dayo’s story—Lagos to Liverpool docks in 1959, trapped in the casual labour system, doors slammed, places denied: “Insufficient experience. No vacancy. Backlog.” Meanwhile, every month a white man with half his years walked through the gate with registered status. She kept the letters. In a box upstairs—evidence where memories should live.

“Why didn’t the union?” “The union,” she repeats, voice low. “Is for its members. Casuals aren’t members. Registered men vote. The rest wait in the cold.” I scribble furiously. She watches without pity.

“And now this strike.” She leans forward. “Dayo stands on the picket line with Tommy Brennan and your father. I cook for Bridie at St Augustine’s. We’re side by side in the cold drizzle. But when the strike ends and the gates creak open, how many jobs come back for Dayo? For Solomon?” My pen hovers. I write the question: How many?

She refills my cup. Silence roars between us. Then: “Kudzai said you have a good ear.” “I try to listen.” “Listening is not enough.” She rises, smoothing her apron like armour. “You must ask the right questions. Go where the answers burn, not where it’s safe.” She lifts the plate of chin chin. “Come back. Talk to the women—Dayo’s sister Comfort, the Okafors. But arrive knowing you don’t know. Not with your truths—bring your ignorance.”

2. From Red Dress — the house on the canal

Bootle, the present day. DI Jack Byrne comes home on the first night of a case in which a fourteen-year-old girl is missing. Published by Dock Road Books, 2026.

His house stood on the Leeds-Liverpool canal side in Bootle, blonde brick and big windows, one of three built to look more expensive than they were. It was about the only thing he had got out of the divorce, though at the time he had thought of it as more liability than asset. He and Louise had struggled to pay the mortgage when they were together, aspirational and all that, two people pretending a view over water meant they had outrun the bills. But the place had grown on him. He would make whatever sacrifices were necessary to keep it now. The boiler had been threatening to give up since October. He let himself in without putting the lights on, out of habit more than economy, though the economy was real too.

Rebecca’s old bedroom door was open at the top of the stairs. He had meant to make the bed before the weekend, because Rebecca was due Saturday and Louise had asked twice now whether the arrangement was still the arrangement. He had said yes both times, once on the phone and once by text, too quickly in both cases, as if speed could make the answer more reliable. The room still kept little bits of her without quite knowing what age to be: a faded sticker mark on the wardrobe, two paperbacks on the sill, a plastic bracelet in the top drawer that neither he nor Louise had ever thrown away.

There was milk in the fridge, at least. Bread too. Cereal she pretended not to like and ate anyway because it was what he had remembered to buy. On the table, beside the file, his phone showed a message from Louise sent three hours earlier.

Is Saturday still all right? She wants to bring the harmonica home this time.

His first thought was no.

Not that one. Not Tommy Byrne’s harmonica, not the one his father had carried through dock shifts and pub corners and Sundays in parks where men played because talking cost more than music did. He could buy her something new, something with no dead man’s breath held in it. He had treated himself to a new Lee Oskar for his birthday. She could have that one.

He stopped himself.

This was absurd.

Then he looked at the words again.

She wants to bring the harmonica home this time.

Of course she did. That was the point of a thing like that, wasn’t it? Not to sit in a drawer gathering the kind of importance that made it useless. To pass through hands. To pick up breath from someone still young enough to make a noise in the world without apologising for it.

He had not answered until now. Not because the answer was no. Because answering yes meant making another promise to a fourteen-year-old girl while another fourteen-year-old girl was somewhere in the cold without her coat.

He typed, Yes, if she’s careful, then looked at it for a moment and deleted everything after the comma.

Yes. I’ll show her properly.

3. Research journal — “Who decided which doors a home help still knocked on?”

A working note from the research for Sisters of the Struggle, the second Melly Maguire novel, set in Sefton and Liverpool in 1978–79. It shows how a single historical question decides a scene, and how a library session can be built from it.

Research journal, 15 September 2026

The question for Sisters of the Struggle is narrow. When Sefton’s home helps took industrial action in January 1979, who decided which houses still received a visit: the council, the area officer, the union branch, or the woman on the round?

I have been reading Colin Hay’s “Narrating Crisis” and Tara Martin’s “The Beginning of Labor’s End?” Hay examines how the Winter of Discontent became a story about crisis. Martin examines working-class women’s activism through oral histories and archival evidence.

What changed my understanding was Martin’s account of women maintaining essential care while taking industrial action. In a South Wales care home, staff followed NUPE directives and their own commitment to patients by continuing medication, food and other essentials while withdrawing selected activities. In Prescot, also on Merseyside, Lorraine Donovan and a colleague alternated between covering the hospital switchboard and joining the picket line (pp. 56–57). Going out did not mean walking away. It meant arranging who stayed.

These accounts sharpen my question. The local example concerns a hospital switchboard, not a home-help round. Martin records that NUPE directives on essential services existed, but her examples do not establish how they applied to Sefton’s home-help rounds. Did emergency lists exist? Who compiled them? Could a home help nominate a client, challenge an omission or make an exception?

The novel turns on this. Bridie Maguire is a Sefton home help, rehoused from Scotland Road to Netherton. Albert Cronin, eighty-one, is her Tuesday and Friday, and he dies during the strike. Her responsibility depends partly on what she knew and what choices she had. She might have helped draw up a list, followed an instruction or relied on a message that never reached its destination. Each possibility changes the woman asking her daughter to look in on him at five in the morning on the day of the march.

I need to establish those possibilities before settling the scene. The history goes into why she does not turn left at the end of her own road, not into anything she says.

My next step is to locate Sefton’s home-help and social services records, rehousing papers, local newspapers and existing oral histories, alongside relevant Liverpool hospital and union records. I will seek the library service’s guidance on what survives. My experience as a full-time NUPE official gives me a starting point, but cannot settle these local questions. Fiction mentoring will help me turn the findings into scenes. If no record answers the question, I will distinguish what is documented from what I choose to invent.

For a library session, the question becomes: what would we need to know before judging a home help’s decision to knock—or not knock? Readers could respond through the fictional situation without being asked to disclose their own experience.

Sources consulted: Colin Hay, “Narrating Crisis,” Sociology, 30(2), 1996, pp. 253–277; Tara Martin, “The Beginning of Labor’s End?”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 75(1), 2009, pp. 49–67, especially pp. 56–57. Both accessed through JSTOR, 15 September 2026.