Monklands Memories - Airdrie & Coatbridge areas

Synopsis of
Stories When You’re Dead

By William Kerr

 

Set in the last decade of innocence, rural Lanarkshire in the late 1950s was a place of ambition for the young, as the war babies realised that they never had it so good. The young people of Faskine had the dreams to move on from the life of misery found on the miners’ rows to the glitzy, real and vibrant life that was seen and heard of not so far away.

 

Two teenage girls, on their ‘own can’ full of compassion, laughter and zest for the human condition take their sisterhood to the boundaries and over, tailored by a heartrending transcript of their lives. Shaken by their own families’ ambitions and secrets Mary Francis Connelly and Mharie Burns challenge friendship to the core, will it survive? Their paths were to be broken by want, despair and abuse, pushing them towards a life they never expected or wanted to follow. Would love be found or lost? Two families, two neighbours, too far apart in their love for their daughters would push friendship to the limit.

 

A concoction of characters that are no strangers to the reader are to be found with the reader being able to associate someone or scene from their past and place them into the narrative, we have all come across them at some point in our lives. Two girls, one becomes societies tag while another is determined to hide her own label. An escape from scorn and gossip is sought; how can you support a friend while trying to move on with your own selfish life?

 

Society in the 1950s had its own view of their young. Mothers and Fathers would differ, some did not care. Stories When Your Dead’ depicts the lives of realistic characters that we have all come across at some point in our lives. The Faskine village is a walk down memory lane – revisiting those places that are long overgrown or desolate and ravaged by time. For the reader the story is a pictorial description of a landscape and life style, set in a bygone time. Full of sectarianism and the hatred that follows it, can love and concerns win through? A drama unfolds for a recipe of characters that are no strangers to you when you reach the final page after visiting some Lanarkshires’ darkest corners.

 

The Author

 

William Kerr was born and raised in Calderbank but now lives in the neighbouring village of Chapelhall. He is married with three children and can say he knows the people and the society that compels these Monkland villages with his own families roots traced to Faskine and Calderbank over the past two hundred and fifty years.

Contact; williamkerr8@yahoo.com