Why a Booktrail?
Family is the best thing in your life. And the worst.
Eighteen Seconds
What you need to know before your trail
My mother once said to me, ‘I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.’
I thought about it. Realised we could all learn from being in another person’s head for eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds inside Grandma Roberts’ head as she sat alone with her evening cup of tea, us girls upstairs in bed. Eighteen seconds inside one-year-old Colin’s head when he woke up in a foster home without his family. Eighteen seconds inside the head of a girl waiting for her bedroom door to open.
Writer, Louise Beech, looks back on the events that led to the day her mother wrote down her last words, then jumped off the Humber Bridge. She missed witnessing the horror herself by minutes.
Louise recounts the pain and trauma of her childhood alongside her love for her siblings with a delicious dark humour and a profound voice of hope for the future.
Locations
Reset- UK - Yorkshire - Bristol
- A: Humber Bridge
- B: The Cliff
- C: Stockton on Tees - High Street
Travel Guide
The Humber bridge and Stockton on Tees
The setting in my non-fiction was obviously based on a very real and very now place. One of the main locations is the River Humber and the Humber Bridge, in Hessle, East Yorkshire. This is where I take my daily walk, along the churning water of one of the most dangerous estuaries in the world, and beneath the metal expanse of the bridge that was where my mother jumped, and miraculously survived in 2019.
Part of my childhood I also spent in Stockton-on-Tees when we lived with my grandma, and this nostalgic place is painted in strokes coloured by religion and simplicity.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Eighteen Seconds
Destination: Hessle, Yorkshire, Stockton on Tees Author/guide: LouiseBeech Departure Time: 2000s
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