Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

        A Song for Jenny. T.V. Drama. Based on the memoirs of Julie Nicholson. "I am no bird and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will." Jane Eyre was Jenny Nicholson's heroine so it was fitting that quotations from Charlotte Bronte's classic novel and Shakespeare should be printed on the funeral pall of this beautiful 24 year old whose life was tragically destroyed in 2005. The drama was based on Julie Nicholson's memoirs bearing the same title, written in 2010 as a tribute to all of the 52 victims as well as her eldest daughter Jenny who was killed in the Edgware Road suicide bombing incident ten years ago on the 7th July 2005, a day permanently etched in the dark recesses of the Nicholson's memories. Adapted by Frank McGuiness, it's a deeply emotional journey in an attempt to come to terms with the tragic loss of such a young life for a family that would be permanently traumatised by it. "Our family is a

                                    Smile by Deborah Moggach. "Through a fog of early morning sickness I'd carry out the plates of scrambled eggs."Cheer up," he said. "It might never happen." "I thought it has." This collection is composed of 11 short stories examining marriage and modern families, insecure and generally unhappy. In some cases freedom and divorce are feasible alternatives to an empty and unfulfilled life. In Smile imagine the workers in a hotel having to wear badges that simply read Smile. The hotel was American so perhaps this explains it? Sandy, the narrator was 19. Formerly known as Alexandra, we learn that she changed her name when she was 12. She has been in and out of care homes since her dad walked out on her at the tender age of 4. A damaged young lady. She seems attracted to older men, one in particular "who never turned up, married and based in Huddersfield." We learn of her pregnancy when sh

                        My Gentle War. Memoir of an Essex Girl by Joy Lennick . Alien birds gargantuan/Spewed fire-sent seagulls/Scattering to hover low-Chilling their white underbellies/On the grey, choppy waves.    In a Village Sky.1941 . Joy Lennick makes it clear that her temporary stay on Mountain Hare and its ominous coal slag, looking down on Merthyr Tydfil was a treasured time in spite of being separated from her family. Her childhood memories were ones of kindness, curiosity and hostility: " as the years multiply, it seems to spin like a giddying, gaudily colourful tin top from my childhood." The 1930s were eventful years probably for all the wrong reasons. Regarded as the grimmest years since the end of WW1 “unwept, unhonoured and unsung” it is a naive statement to say that this was a wonderful time to be born. It wasn’t. Remember the Hindenberg disaster, Hitler as German Chancellor, the Japanese invasion of China or the Spanish Civil War, an unendin