Lockdown gave NI pensioner the focus to finish her second novel

As normal life ground to a halt last spring with the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, Pheme Glass, 75, from Omagh, used her time at home to complete her tale of two local men fighting in the First World War.

Her latest book is the sequel to her debut novel The Blossom Or The Bole and focuses on the journey of friends from across the divide.

Although the books are fictional, they include archived newspaper reports from the Tyrone Constitution and the Ulster Herald.

Mrs Glass said she has had inquiries from readers about a follow-up since publishing her first novel in 2017.

“I was about a quarter way through the second book in 2019 but I’d got a bit lazy and wasn’t focusing on it, then lockdown happened,” she told the PA news agency.

“It’s a macabre thought, but I thought if I die this will never get finished, so I thought I’d better get on with it.

“I got up every morning, had my breakfast and had a day’s work to do, and I stuck to that every day in my wee study.”

Completing the research initially stumped the pensioner, but a journalist at the Ulster Herald and a local librarian stepped up to help.

While some may wonder how writers get ideas, Mrs Glass mused: “Half the time when I was writing I just couldn’t control my characters, they seem to take on a mind of their own and things would happen, maybe not what I wanted to happen.

“It’s been a journey, and I’m still on the journey. I might be 75 but I’m far from finished.”

She received her new books on Monday.

“It’s been a dramatic year and to be honest it (the novel) was a very good diversion for me. I have three daughters who were worried what I was going to do after the book’s finished because I was very enthralled with it over the last year,” she said.

“But I’ll just find something else to write about. It’s an ongoing process of just scribbling, that’s how it happens.”

Mrs Glass worked in the health service, starting as a cleaner and working her way up to contracts manager.

While she had written poetry across her life, the inspiration to write her first novel came after attending a historical talk in Plumbridge about local men from the area who had died in the First World War.

Mrs Glass also visited the battlefields and graveyards in Belgium

“I was totally blown away by the size of the graveyards and the names on the headstones, if there was a name. It was an eye-opener for me,” she said.

The story focuses on two young friends, a young Catholic boy and a young Protestant boy who grew up together in rural Co Tyrone and went off to war.

“Being of the two different faiths, their parents had different ideas about what was going on. The Protestant boy’s father was very much into the home rule bill, and the second boy’s father was a leading member in the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood,” she said.

“There was a clash and that effected what happened in the story without spoiling it.”

Mrs Glass said she was “completely dumbfounded” by the number of people who contacted her after the first instalment was published.

“They were saying things like, this is fantastic, when is the second one, what is going to happen next?” she said.

Mrs Glass described self-publishing as expensive, but after selling hundreds of copies she was about to recoup those costs.

However, she said it is incredibly challenging to sell books at this time, with fewer book shops, and then those that survive closed due to lockdown.

“I am depending very largely on selling book by mail, and at some stage the second book will go on Kindle like the first one,” she said.