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Secrets: In the shadows lurks the truth.
Ashford, home of the Howarth family,is a gritty northern mill town, a community of no-nonsense Lancashire folk, who speak their minds and are quick to judge. But how many of them are hiding secrets that wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of others?
Judith Barrow's Howarth Family trilogy, Pattern of Shadows, Changing Patterns and Living in the Shadows, along with the prequel, A Hundred Tiny Threads, published by Honno Press, is peopled with just such characters. Here are some of their secret stories - the girl who had to relinquish her baby, the boy who went to war too young, the wife who couldn't take any more...
"Judith Barrow has surpassed herself in writing this great family saga... There is such a wealth of fantastic characters to fall in love with and ones to hate!" (Brook Cottage Books)
Judith Barrow's Howarth Family trilogy, Pattern of Shadows, Changing Patterns and Living in the Shadows, along with the prequel, A Hundred Tiny Threads, published by Honno Press, is peopled with just such characters. Here are some of their secret stories - the girl who had to relinquish her baby, the boy who went to war too young, the wife who couldn't take any more...
"Judith Barrow has surpassed herself in writing this great family saga... There is such a wealth of fantastic characters to fall in love with and ones to hate!" (Brook Cottage Books)
55 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2017
2 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Judith Barrow
8 books67 followersJudith Barrow, originally from Saddleworth, a group of villages on the edge of the Pennines, has lived in Pembrokeshire, Wales, for over forty years.
She has an MA in Creative Writing with the University of Wales Trinity St David's College, Carmarthen. BA (Hons) in Literature with the Open University, a Diploma in Drama from Swansea University. She is a Creative Writing tutor and holds private one to one workshops on all genres.
She has an MA in Creative Writing with the University of Wales Trinity St David's College, Carmarthen. BA (Hons) in Literature with the Open University, a Diploma in Drama from Swansea University. She is a Creative Writing tutor and holds private one to one workshops on all genres.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 17, 2017
4.5*
This is a wonderful collection of short stories, focussing on characters from Judith Barrow’s Howarth family trilogy and giving a brief but heartfelt glimpse into some of their lives, pre saga. Including situations and misfortunes, some of which were brought about by the restrictions and expectations of the time, unmarried women who have no choice but to give up their baby and the cruelty meted out to a conscientious objector to name just a couple. Others which are sadly still relevant today, namely the victims of incest and rape.
All are well written and filled with emotional reality, but these are the stand outs for me.
Edith Jagger’s Secret tells of an abused wife and the desperate measures she took to escape.
In Stan Green’s Secret, Stan, desperate to leave home, signed up for the army with his friend, Ernie. Both boys were underage and despite slight misgivings, they were unaware of what horrors awaited them or the enormity and terrible consequences of their decision.
Gwyneth Griffiths’ Secret means a life on the run from an abusive husband.
Judith Barrow has done a great job, giving a good sense of each character and their situation in just a few pages. The grim reality for working class people of the era is shown to great effect. I’m looking forward to the saga prequel which is due to be published next month.
This is a wonderful collection of short stories, focussing on characters from Judith Barrow’s Howarth family trilogy and giving a brief but heartfelt glimpse into some of their lives, pre saga. Including situations and misfortunes, some of which were brought about by the restrictions and expectations of the time, unmarried women who have no choice but to give up their baby and the cruelty meted out to a conscientious objector to name just a couple. Others which are sadly still relevant today, namely the victims of incest and rape.
All are well written and filled with emotional reality, but these are the stand outs for me.
Edith Jagger’s Secret tells of an abused wife and the desperate measures she took to escape.
In Stan Green’s Secret, Stan, desperate to leave home, signed up for the army with his friend, Ernie. Both boys were underage and despite slight misgivings, they were unaware of what horrors awaited them or the enormity and terrible consequences of their decision.
Gwyneth Griffiths’ Secret means a life on the run from an abusive husband.
Judith Barrow has done a great job, giving a good sense of each character and their situation in just a few pages. The grim reality for working class people of the era is shown to great effect. I’m looking forward to the saga prequel which is due to be published next month.
June 9, 2018
We’ve all read epic family sagas—sweeping multi-generational tales like The Thorn Birds, The Godfather, Roots, the Star Wars franchise, and anything remotely connected to the British Monarchy. So as I read Judith Barrow’s Howarth Family trilogy, I kept trying to slot them into those multigenerational tropes:
*First generation, we were supposed to see the young protagonist starting a new life with a clean slate, perhaps in a new country.
*The next generation(s) are all about owning their position, fully assimilated and at home in their world.
*And the last generation is both rebel and synthesis, with more similarities to the first generation made possible by the confidence of belonging from the second one.
But the complex, three-dimensional miniatures I met in the first three books of the trilogy stubbornly refused to align with those tropes. First of all, there’s Mary Howarth—the child of parents born while Queen Victoria was still on the throne—who is poised between her parents’ Victorian constraints, adjustment to a world fighting a war, and their own human failures including abuse, alcoholism, and ignorance.When Pattern of Shadows begins in 1944, war-fueled anti-German sentiment is so strong, even the King has changed the British monarchy’s last name from Germanic Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. Mary’s beloved brother Tom is imprisoned because of his conscientious objector status, leaving their father to express his humiliation in physical and emotional abuse of his wife and daughters. Her brother Patrick rages at being forced to work in the mines instead of joining the army, while Mary herself works as a nurse treating German prisoners of war in an old mill now converted to a military prison hospital.
Mary’s family and friends are all struggling to survive the bombs, the deaths, the earthshaking changes to virtually every aspect of their world. We’ve all seen the stories about the war—plucky British going about their lives in cheerful defiance of the bombs, going to theaters, sipping tea perched on the wreckage, chins up and upper lips stiff in what Churchill called “their finest hour”. That wasn’t Mary’s war.
Her war is not a crucible but a magnifying glass, both enlarging and even inflaming each character’s flaws. Before the war, the Shuttleworth brothers might have smirked and swaggered, but they probably wouldn’t have considered assaulting, shooting, raping, or murdering their neighbors. Mary and her sister Ellen would have married local men and never had American or German lovers. Tom would have stayed in the closet, Mary’s father and his generation would have continued abusing their women behind their closed doors. And Mary wouldn’t have risked everything for the doomed love of Peter Schormann, an enemy doctor.
I was stunned by the level of historical research that went into every detail of these books. Windows aren’t just blacked out during the Blitz, for example. Instead, they are “criss crossed with sticky tape, giving the terraced houses a wounded appearance.” We’re given a detailed picture of a vanished world, where toilets are outside, houses are tiny, and privacy is a luxury.
The Granville Mill becomes a symbol of these dark changes. Once a cotton mill providing jobs and products, it’s now a prison camp that takes on a menacing identity of its own. Over the next two volumes of Howarth family’s story, it’s the mill that continues to represent the threats, hatred, and violence the war left behind.
Unlike the joyful scenes we’re used to, marking the end of the war and everyone’s return to prosperity and happiness, the war described in these books has a devastatingly long tail. When Changing Patterns takes up the story in 1950, Mary and Peter have been reunited and are living in Wales, along with her brother Tom.
But real life doesn’t include very many happy-ever-afters, and the Howarths have to live with the aftermath of the secrets each of them has kept. The weight of those secrets is revealed in their effect on the next generation, the children of the Howarth siblings. The battle between those secrets and their family bonds is a desperate one, because the life of a child hangs in the balance.
Finally, the saga seems to slide into those generational tropes in Living in the Shadows, the final book of the Howarth trilogy. Interestingly enough, this new generation does represent a blend of their preceding generations’ faults and strengths, but with the conviction of their modern identities. Where their parents’ generation had to hide their secrets, this new generation confidently faces their world: as gay, as handicapped, as unwed parents, and—ultimately shrugging off their parents’ sins—as family.
But I didn’t really understand all of that until I considered the title of the prequel (released after the trilogy). 100 Tiny Threads tells the story of that first generation, their demons, their loves, their hopes, and their failures, and most importantly, their strength to forge a life despite those failures. That book, along with the novella-sized group of short stories in Secrets, gives the final clues to understanding the trilogy. As Simone Signoret said, “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.” And it’s both those secrets and those threads not only unite them into a family, but ultimately provide their strength.
This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that each of these wonderful books can be read alone. But no, don’t do that. In fact, if you haven’t read any of them, you’re luckier than I am, because you can start with the prequel and read in chronological order. I chose to review these books as a set, and I believe that’s how they should be read.
Every now and then, I come across books so beautifully written that their characters follow me around, demanding I understand their lives, their mistakes, their loves, and in this case, their families. Taken together, the Howarth Family stories are an achievement worth every one of the five stars I’d give them.
*First generation, we were supposed to see the young protagonist starting a new life with a clean slate, perhaps in a new country.
*The next generation(s) are all about owning their position, fully assimilated and at home in their world.
*And the last generation is both rebel and synthesis, with more similarities to the first generation made possible by the confidence of belonging from the second one.
But the complex, three-dimensional miniatures I met in the first three books of the trilogy stubbornly refused to align with those tropes. First of all, there’s Mary Howarth—the child of parents born while Queen Victoria was still on the throne—who is poised between her parents’ Victorian constraints, adjustment to a world fighting a war, and their own human failures including abuse, alcoholism, and ignorance.When Pattern of Shadows begins in 1944, war-fueled anti-German sentiment is so strong, even the King has changed the British monarchy’s last name from Germanic Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. Mary’s beloved brother Tom is imprisoned because of his conscientious objector status, leaving their father to express his humiliation in physical and emotional abuse of his wife and daughters. Her brother Patrick rages at being forced to work in the mines instead of joining the army, while Mary herself works as a nurse treating German prisoners of war in an old mill now converted to a military prison hospital.
Mary’s family and friends are all struggling to survive the bombs, the deaths, the earthshaking changes to virtually every aspect of their world. We’ve all seen the stories about the war—plucky British going about their lives in cheerful defiance of the bombs, going to theaters, sipping tea perched on the wreckage, chins up and upper lips stiff in what Churchill called “their finest hour”. That wasn’t Mary’s war.
Her war is not a crucible but a magnifying glass, both enlarging and even inflaming each character’s flaws. Before the war, the Shuttleworth brothers might have smirked and swaggered, but they probably wouldn’t have considered assaulting, shooting, raping, or murdering their neighbors. Mary and her sister Ellen would have married local men and never had American or German lovers. Tom would have stayed in the closet, Mary’s father and his generation would have continued abusing their women behind their closed doors. And Mary wouldn’t have risked everything for the doomed love of Peter Schormann, an enemy doctor.
I was stunned by the level of historical research that went into every detail of these books. Windows aren’t just blacked out during the Blitz, for example. Instead, they are “criss crossed with sticky tape, giving the terraced houses a wounded appearance.” We’re given a detailed picture of a vanished world, where toilets are outside, houses are tiny, and privacy is a luxury.
The Granville Mill becomes a symbol of these dark changes. Once a cotton mill providing jobs and products, it’s now a prison camp that takes on a menacing identity of its own. Over the next two volumes of Howarth family’s story, it’s the mill that continues to represent the threats, hatred, and violence the war left behind.
Unlike the joyful scenes we’re used to, marking the end of the war and everyone’s return to prosperity and happiness, the war described in these books has a devastatingly long tail. When Changing Patterns takes up the story in 1950, Mary and Peter have been reunited and are living in Wales, along with her brother Tom.
But real life doesn’t include very many happy-ever-afters, and the Howarths have to live with the aftermath of the secrets each of them has kept. The weight of those secrets is revealed in their effect on the next generation, the children of the Howarth siblings. The battle between those secrets and their family bonds is a desperate one, because the life of a child hangs in the balance.
Finally, the saga seems to slide into those generational tropes in Living in the Shadows, the final book of the Howarth trilogy. Interestingly enough, this new generation does represent a blend of their preceding generations’ faults and strengths, but with the conviction of their modern identities. Where their parents’ generation had to hide their secrets, this new generation confidently faces their world: as gay, as handicapped, as unwed parents, and—ultimately shrugging off their parents’ sins—as family.
But I didn’t really understand all of that until I considered the title of the prequel (released after the trilogy). 100 Tiny Threads tells the story of that first generation, their demons, their loves, their hopes, and their failures, and most importantly, their strength to forge a life despite those failures. That book, along with the novella-sized group of short stories in Secrets, gives the final clues to understanding the trilogy. As Simone Signoret said, “Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.” And it’s both those secrets and those threads not only unite them into a family, but ultimately provide their strength.
This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that each of these wonderful books can be read alone. But no, don’t do that. In fact, if you haven’t read any of them, you’re luckier than I am, because you can start with the prequel and read in chronological order. I chose to review these books as a set, and I believe that’s how they should be read.
Every now and then, I come across books so beautifully written that their characters follow me around, demanding I understand their lives, their mistakes, their loves, and in this case, their families. Taken together, the Howarth Family stories are an achievement worth every one of the five stars I’d give them.
October 1, 2017
This short but engrossing read introduces us to some of the characters in Barrow's Pattern's trilogy. These juicy tidbits reveal some of the secrets in backstory of some of the characters we'll come to know in Barrow's books. These secrets revolve around the family saga of the Howarth family in wartime England and continue into following decades. We get a sneak peak into what some of these characters endured, encompassing issues such as: An abused wife in Edith Jagger's Secrets, Nelly Shuttleworth's Secret about how she tried to save her baby from being taken at birth by fleeing a nun's adoption home, Gwyneth's Secret and about how she met the patriarch in Changing Patterns, a man we'll love to hate.
All these stories leave us hanging and have us wanting to discover what happens next with a wonderfully written cast of characters who suffer tough times. If you love Family Saga stories you'll love this series.
All these stories leave us hanging and have us wanting to discover what happens next with a wonderfully written cast of characters who suffer tough times. If you love Family Saga stories you'll love this series.
November 20, 2020
‘Secrets’ That Judith Barrow shares in this book are heart wrenching and shocking but that’s why they become secrets! It is their succinct nature that makes them so effective. Each character in these short stories stands out to the challenges of life in his or her own way.
The wife who couldn’t take any more gave me goose bumps, Ted’s chilling conviction that his “granddad has not gone to heaven, he is only dead,” and Hannah’s “bloody good riddance” distressing cry for her “wicked old” father are poignant. Ernie’s punishment boiled my blood but those were hard times and people probably didn’t care for any emotions.
Judith handles the emotional aspect of her characters in a superb manner.
The wife who couldn’t take any more gave me goose bumps, Ted’s chilling conviction that his “granddad has not gone to heaven, he is only dead,” and Hannah’s “bloody good riddance” distressing cry for her “wicked old” father are poignant. Ernie’s punishment boiled my blood but those were hard times and people probably didn’t care for any emotions.
Judith handles the emotional aspect of her characters in a superb manner.
January 16, 2018
These are well-written, powerful short stories. They give readers glimpses into the lives of characters from the author’s Howarth Family trilogy. I haven’t read the other books in this series but that in no way detracted from my enjoyment of this collection.
The stories all reveal dark secrets—horrors the characters were forced to endure, choices they made, and the consequences of those choices. Most stories leave readers wondering what will happen and I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the book. I particularly liked the stories of Hilda Lewis, Edith Jagger, and Nelly Shuttleworth. Gripping read.
The stories all reveal dark secrets—horrors the characters were forced to endure, choices they made, and the consequences of those choices. Most stories leave readers wondering what will happen and I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the book. I particularly liked the stories of Hilda Lewis, Edith Jagger, and Nelly Shuttleworth. Gripping read.
January 2, 2018
A short spin-off book with some stories about the minor characters from the Howarth family saga - It was a wonderful way to add some context to the characters we learned a little about in the three book series.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews