bradfield – Page 2 – A. L. Lester

Victorian Nurses in the British Army

The Quid Pro Quo is the second in the Bradfield trilogy, although it will stand alone. It’s set a few months after the end of The Fog of War and stars Sylvia’s friend Walter Kennett, and Simon Frost, a detective who comes to Bradfield to investigate a murder. It’s a gay, historical, paranormal, romantic murder-mystery with a m/transm couple set in rural England in 1920.

One of the things I researched when I was beginning to think about Walter’s background was exactly what training he’d have had as a nurse (or an orderly) in the British army. The answer to that question was ‘not a great deal’ in that Victorian army nurses seemed to have been expected to pick things up as they went along. Before the advent of Florence Nightingale and her cohort during the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, nurses had all been men and they had been attached to individual regiments.

Outrage at the terrible conditions in the Crimea led to the development of a Medical Staff Corps in 1855, which recruited ‘Men able to read and write, of regular steady habits and good temper and of a kindly disposition’. This was renamed the Army Hospital Corps in 1857 and reverted back to being the Medical Staff Corps again in 1884*. Confusingly, the medical officers were known as the Medical Staff…and in 1898, the Medical Staff Corps and the Medical Staff were combined into Royal Army Medical Corps.

This is where Walter comes in.

In my head, he joins up as the two organisations are being merged together and he sort of slips through the gaps, staying hidden as a trans man with the help of the doctor who did his medical when he recruited him and possibly with a bit of a blind eye being turned by his army mates. He serves in the Boer War in South Africa and subsequently all over the British Empire before ending up at Sylvia’s hospital in France in World War One. By the time we meet him 1920, he’s forty and had served in the army for twenty-one years.

That brings me to a really interesting blog post about male nurses in the 1920s I found at This Intrepid Band-a blog dedicated to the history of military nursing. Nursing regulation was pretty slapdash until the end of the First World War. Hospitals trained nurses for between one and three years and gave them a certificate. But…anyone could call themselves a nurse even without that training.

After 1919, that changed. I won’t replicate all the qualifying criteria here, you can read it at This Intrepid Band if you want to…but Walter would have fallen under the ‘three years military experience’ criteria. However, as a man, he would have been singularly alone. Even in 1928, although there were forty thousand women on the new register, there were only two hundred men.

I don’t know whether there were any male nurses working at village practices in the early twenties; but I suspect it’s very unlikely. Most of the nurses in 1928 were in prisons or mental hospitals, presumably dealing with men who were considered dangerous and perhaps unsafe for women nurses to care for. Walter’s like Sylvia though, in that he feels that he’s done his bit keeping other people safe and looking after strangers. He wants to be part of a community and part of family as much as he can. So a small village, with his friends, suits him fine.

I hope you like his story!

The Quid Pro Quo

Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found family in tiny Bradfield. However, when a body is found floating in the village duck pond one midsummer morning, danger arrives too.

Between his attraction to detective Simon Frost, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to reveal about the paranormal possibilities of the murder, Walter is torn all ways.

The Quid Pro Quo is a 50,000 word romantic historical paranormal murder-mystery set in 1920s rural England where nearly everyone is queer and the main couple is m/transm.

Amazon : JMS Books : Everywhere Else

(Some of this post was published as a guest post at Addison Albright’s blog in November ’21)

New year, new stories

I’m not usually the sort of person who celebrates New Year’s Eve and this year it was a bit peculiar anyway, because Mr AL spent it in a hotel near the airport so he could collect Talking Child from her Big American Adventure. I had an early night and woke up to find TC’s flight had landed and they were on their way home. It was the best New Year’s present I could have had, really.

This is the first morning I’ve got up to write in the office for a couple of weeks—I had a horrible cold in the week before Christmas and it knocked me completely off track. I have been having serious problems with the third Bradfield book that my editor and I finally tracked down to the fact I don’t actually like my main character; which is a bit of an issue. I have decided to put it on the backburner for a bit and try and reframe her in my mind whilst I write something else in the interim; but I’m still not sure what.

This year I have in my mind that I am not going to write any series. It’s going to be the year of the stand-alone story. And I want to write something new. I’ve been dealing with monsters and the border and all that for six years now and whilst I love my magical world it’s time to try something different, even if I come back to it in a while. That’s why I wanted to write Bradfield #3 early this year and be able to draw a line under it for a bit.

I want to write the companion novel to The Flowers of Time and expand the mm romance between Edie’s brother Hugh and his friend Carruthers. That involves immersing myself in the 1780s again and is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. And I have another idea I’m calling Space Gays that I haven’t fleshed out yet…I thought it might be a trilogy though, so that’s a no-no for a while under my current rules!

In my half-started folder I have a post-pandemic dystopia I began well before covid hit. I really want to finish it; but since covid I haven’t been able to even look at it…too close to home. I thought I might try and finish it; but I have serious doubts about anyone wanting to read that sort of thing at the moment. Last week’s newsletter poll more or less confirmed that! And I want to write some more Celtic myths. I’m really enjoying them and people seem to like reading them. They’re very satisfying to write.

In among all these ideas, JMS Books has some interesting submission calls this year; particularly one for time-travel romances. I am now wondering about that…but time. I need a way to fold time.

So. That’s my vague writing plans for the new year. I also have more audiobooks on the backburner—I have a lovely person lined up for The Fog of War and I’d like Callum to voice The Quid Pro Quo for me if he’s available.

I do have a spreadsheet that I’m putting things in to so I don’t overwhelm myself; which is basically what happened toward the end of last year. I tend to fill my coping mechanism up to the top and then when something unexpected happens there’s no room and everything overflows. Leaving myself some headroom is definitely a better strategy.

Among all that we have been shielding Littlest again against Omicron. She’s had two jabs and hopefully clinically vulnerable children in the UK will be able to have a third soon, which will put my mind at rest.

I wish you all the very best for 2022. Let’s hope it’s a bit less stressful than the last couple of years.

English Villages

Let’s talk about English villages today!

Most of the action in The Fog of War and The Quid Pro Quo takes place in Bradfield…it’s a fictionalised version of a small village on the Quantock Hills. The dead body at the beginning of the story is found in the duck pond on the village green.

aged houses located in countryside — Photo by Olga Lioncat on Pexels.com

When I talk about the village green, you probably see the same mental image I do…a green space in the centre of the village, with a big shady tree and a bench, maybe a pond. It’s used for cricket on Sunday afternoons, Maypole dancing, maybe a bonfire and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night.

However the actual evolution of the village green is much more practical and it actually wasn’t always at the centre of the village. They served as places to graze or gather stock, with the pond to water them or to protect them against thieves or for market trading. The Inclosures Acts of the nineteenth century and finally the Commons Registration Acts of 1965 formalised what was left of English Common Lands into what we have today, including Village Greens. New areas can be designated Greens if they’re used for recreation for more than twenty years, but otherwise the pattern is static. You can read about it here.

I envisage the Green at Bradfield to be about the size of a football field. It’s bounded by lanes and by houses that have clustered around the edges—the church, the shop, the Post Office, the blacksmith and the Police House. Since the inception of regional police forces in the mid-nineteenth century, rural police forces had place constables in tied housing in country villages and they were very much a part of the community.

I think the English have always had—and continue to have—and idealised idea of their countryside. Here’s a piece of 1930’s footage of a drive through rural England. No poverty or damp housing to be seen.

Bradfield is a very rural community and my characters are mostly middle and upper class. I think that’s because I started off with an Agatha Christie but make it gay sort of vibe. Walter is from the East End of London and is working class. But his particular situation and the vagaries of the war have separated him from that. Simon is working class but has worked his way up in the police to a position of authority and relatively good wages—watch out for another blog post about the police service before too long.

If you want a realistic account of English rural village life between the two world wars, I recommend Laurie Lee’s autobiographical Cider with Rosie. It’s beautifully, bucolically written, a moving memoir that takes you back to Slad in Gloucestershire.

I leave you with a clip of haymaking in 1904. These days the hay is made into bales and stacked by machine…but it’s still hot, heavy work. I can remember playing in the drying hay like these Edwardian children.

Trans people in history

This morning I want to talk a little bit about trans people in history. Transgender is a word that can only be traced back to 1974, but that didn’t mean trans people didn’t exist before that date! Walter, one of the main characters in The Quid Pro Quo is transgender—he’s caused me all sorts of plot issues, but has sent me off to do lots of really interesting reading, which I’m delighted to share here!

One of the things that gender studies academics all agree about is that it’s almost impossible to know how people in the past that we now see as trans would have seen themselves. The records are very sparse, often sensationalised and are usually other people’s view of the person rather than their own. Who wanted to put that sort of thing down in writing when it would get you prosecuted or put in a mental hospital? So it’s hard to tell whether past figures were transgender; or whether they were passing as a man or woman in order to access spaces and privilege they would be otherwise denied. This is particularly true of people who were assigned female at birth and lived the bulk of their lives as men.

The most famous of these cases is Dr James Barry, who after his death in the mid-nineteenth century was revealed to be AFAB (assigned female at birth). I won’t write much about him here because this is the article I would write and Rebecca Ortenberg has already done it better than I would. Suffice to say that after he began his medical education at Edinburgh, Barry never presented or referred to himself as female again. He was only discovered to be AFAB after the person laying his body out for burial spoke about him. In recent years he’s been absorbed by the ‘plucky girl breaking the glass ceiling by putting on breeches’ narrative, which I personally feel is wrong.

This article at the British Library about Transgender Identities in the Past is fascinating. It focuses on two people, Eliza Edwards, who on her death in 1833 was discovered to be AMAB. And in 1901, someone we’d now understand to be a trans man who at the age of sixty and after several marriages and a career as a cook on P&O liners was revealed to be AFAB. The newspaper article calls them by a woman’s name. It completely erases the life they lived. The article has audio clips of a 2018 discussion between E-J Scott, curator of the Museum of Transology; Dr Jay Stewart, the chief executive of Gendered Intelligence, and Annie Brown, an activist, artist and GI youth worker. It’s worth your time.

In The Flowers of Time, my story set in the late eighteenth century, Jones the non-binary character eventually decides to present as masculine because it makes their life with Edie easier. They fudge the record, more or less blackmail close family into accepting them and that’s that. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that as time went on, communication became quicker and easier and records of births and marriages became more common it became much more difficult to pass. British army records mention Phoebe Hassel, who was discharged in 1817 when she was flogged and discovered to be a man (bottom of page seven, you have to register, but it’s free). We don’t know whether she was a passing woman for financial or social reasons or whether she was what we’d understand today as trans. Her male name is not mentioned. However, she must have passed well enough or had enough support by her peers to have concealed her natal gender for some years.

However, The Quid Pro Quo is set a hundred and fifty years later than Phoebe’s flogging and The Flowers of Time. By the time Walter joined up in 1898, there were medicals for army recruits. This was such a sticking point for me that I bottled it and I honestly tried to write the book with him as cis. However, he just wouldn’t play…he’d been trans in my head as I was writing The Fog of War, right back as far the planning stage of the trilogy. But when I came to write it, I couldn’t make the story work with him as trans because of the army regulations; and I couldn’t make the story work with him as cis because he’s not cis.

I threw the question to some of my lovely friends at the Quiltbag Historicals facebook group (join us, we’re cool!) and they immediately began working out ways I could fudge the story. So Walter begins his army career as his twin brother and has a little help from the people around him to keep his origins concealed. And I reassured myself that if people are prepared to suspend disbelief about the paranormal aspects of my stories then they can allow me this tiny (enormous) stretch of possibility to get it off the ground!

I love Walter. He’s so very pragmatic about his life and his place in the universe. He’s just getting on and doing his thing. I wanted him to have a happy ending so badly all the time I was writing The Fog of War and I was very pleased to be able to give him one here in The Quid Pro Quo.

I like to think of my stories as realistically historical first and paranormal second. My characters are just getting on living their lives—which have greater or lesser levels of complexity—and the paranormal comes and whacks them round the back of the head with half a brick in a sock. I try and make the history as accurate and the paranormal as twisted as I can! I think I’ve done Walter justice, as he’s one of my favourite people. I hope you like him too.

Lastly, here is a brilliant collection of books about trans history and trans issues, curated by Christine Burns and available from independent bookshops.

The Quid Pro Quo

Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found-family in tiny Bradfield. However one midsummer morning a body is found floating in the village duck pond, dead by magical means.

Detective Simon Frost arrives in Bradfield to investigate a inexplicable murder. The evidence seems to point to Lucille Hall-Bridges, who lives with doctor Sylvia Marks and nurse Walter Kennett at Courtfield House. Simon isn’t happy—he doesn’t believe Lucy is a murderer but he’s sure the three of them are hiding something. In the meantime, the draw he feels toward Walter takes him by surprise.

Walter is in a dilemma, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to tell Frost about the paranormal possibilities of the murder. He isn’t interested in going to bed with anyone—he’s got a complicated life and has to know someone really well before he falls between the sheets. He’s taken aback by his own attraction to Detective Frost and angry when Frost appears to twist the spark between them to something transactional in nature.

Will Walter be satisfied to stay on the periphery of Lucy and Sylvia’s love affair, a welcome friend but never quite included? Or is it time for him to strike out and embark on a relationship of his own?

Add The Quid Pro Quo on Goodreads

Tea and Suffrage in early twentieth century England

This week, let’s once again talk about tea. If you’ve read any of my books, any at all, you know my characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking it. And in The Quid Pro Quo, Simon also spends a lot of time having sandwiches or steak and kidney pie at the ABC Tea Rooms. I haven’t written them into stories before–I’m usually a Lyons Corner House sort of historical writer!—but I thought why not ring the changes?

food wood dawn coffee — Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Tea rooms and cafes are such a banal part of our existence now…but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they were actually part of a quiet social revolution, because–shock! horror!–women could use them unaccompanied. Nice women avoided pubs, and restaurants were off limits-women without male companions would be turned away.

The ABC tearoom phenomena began in London in the 1880s. ABC stands for Aerated Bread Company. The business was founded in 1882. They made bread without yeast, using compressed carbon dioxide instead to make the bread rise (it sounds yukky). They rapidly expanded with bakeries selling to the general public all across London in the next couple of years and one day someone had the bright idea of also selling tea and snacks to the customers. The first Lyons was opened in 1894 and to keep their market share, ABC began selling home-cooked meals.

By 1923, ABC had 250 tea-shops all over the world and Lyons had 240 in the UK. They both sold light meals. Both establishments were popular with clerical workers at lunch time and theatre and cinema goers in the evenings. However, the really extraordinary thing about them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was their connection to the women’s suffrage movement.

It was a momentous thing for women at the time, to simply get out and meet each other over a cup of tea and not be harassed or accused of soliciting. And this new freedom of movement and opening up of public spaces they could access brought great strides to both their social existence and their political one. You can read more about the connection between the suffrage movement and tea-rooms here. There were many smaller, independent establishments as well as ABC and Lyons, but the point of a chain is that it’s familiar and comfortable. And that must have made those early women adventurers into the world of unsupervised public expeditions more confident when they ventured out.

The suffrage connection to the teashops must have also impacted the tea-shop staff, because there was obviously a sense of comradeship between them. ABC employees worked a sixty-two hour week and pay was low. Lyons women went on strike to protest their own low wages in 1895. This is newsreel footage of striking Lyons employees from the 1920s. They apparently went out in support of someone who was dismissed for wearing her union badge at work. (Look at the hats—this was obviously just before the advent of the cloche!)

The final thing I should mention is that the Lyons Corner House at Coventry Street, London, was a well-known meeting place for gay men during the first three decades of the twentieth century. (From Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London). The waitresses seated women and families away from The Lily Pond at the far end of the room.

So, remember, when you pop in to a tea-shop for a cuppa whilst you’re shopping–you’re actually visiting what began as a radical space!