Band of Angels

I'm excited because my first book, THE WATER HORSE, is about to be published in the U.S. with a new title, BAND OF ANGELS and a new and beautiful cover.

The story, which stayed in my notebook for years, began in 2003 when I set off on a retired show jumper, Fred, to ride across Wales. On my way home, I stopped at a village called Pumpsaint in mid-Wales where I saw a church plaque commemorating a woman called Jane Evans who, in 1853, ran away with the Welsh cattle drovers in order to nurse with Florence Nightingale in Scutari. I tried to find out what I could about Jane Evans, but drew a complete blank for the very simple reason that few of the nurses wrote anything down because most were illiterate. I decided then with great trepidation to try and write a novel. That lead to a number of walks and long distance rides across Wales, to explore the drover's tracks and later, a trip to Turkey with my then 80 year old mother - who was always game for a laugh.

It was snowing when we arrived, and on the first day, I took a ferry ride to check out what was then called the Barrack Hospital at Scutari on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus where Florence Nightingale and the nurses lived. The hospital - gaunt and terrifying even today - is now a military installation, but amazingly, when I asked if I could look at the tiny rat infested tower where the nurses had first slept, it was still there. Florence Nightingale's room was below. Her green chaise longue and her writing desk and her pens were all laid out as if she'd popped out briefly to tell the nurses off for being noisy, (they were an uruly gang) or to supervise the feeding of some beef jelly to a patient.

When I joined my mother again she was having a ciggie and a glass of wine in the lobby Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul the hotel where Agatha Christie is said to have mysteriously fled to when she found out that her husband had been unfaithful to her. Somehow, my mother had got us invited to a Turkish wedding that night, by a friend of the bridegroom, a boy with magnificent dark eyes.

The wedding was great fun: tables groaning with food, lots of cymbals and wailing instruments and men dancing like Zorba. Late in the evening we were dragged onto the dance floor by a portly man who reminded me of the P.G. Wodehouse toff who'd ' been poured into his dinner suit and forgotten to say when .' He bowed low and proudly announced,' I Madame am the Commissioner of Istanbul, this,'he turned to the smiling woman by his side, 'is the Commissioner's wife, the Commissioner's car waits outside and will be happy to escort you home.'

http://books.simonandschuster.com/Band-of-Angels/Julia-Gregson/9781439101131