East End Girl

This is my 'E' post for the Spanking A-Z Blog Challenge. "What's that?" you ask. Check out my page here for more information and a list of all the wonderful bloggers taking part.

E is for Etta! E is for East End Girl! You have to buy this book

The title of my Corbin's Bend book East End Girl refers to the East End of London. I was determined that if I was going to write a story set in Colorado with a whole bunch of American characters, I was at least going to make life easy for myself by making my heroine English.

You're all aware of Eastenders, I take it? It's one of the two most popular soap operas in the UK. Eastenders and Coronation Street (set in, you know, The North somewhere) battle against one another furiously during the annual soap awards. There's probably fisticuffs.

"You can't tell me what to do, you ain't my muvver!"

"Yes, I am!"

That's the world where our heroine, Kirsty, comes from. Although with fewer explosions in her life, hopefully. I always suspect that Americans consider all British people to be super-posh types who talk like Mary Poppins*. I wanted to create a heroine who was the antithesis of that. In fact, during the course of the story, Kirsty's late father's decidedly criminal career path comes back to haunt her.

There was a man standing by a parked car just outside the shop. Kirsty didn’t immediately recognize him but thought he looked both familiar to her and wrong in the current setting. 

He looked about fifty, wore a large overcoat and had short black hair shaved at the sides. When he saw Kirsty his face broke into a smile. It wasn’t a friendly smile. He looked like a predator about to attack. 

“Well, well, well. Little Kirsty Beale. I’d heard you’d moved out this way. I want a word with you about your old man.” 

As soon as she heard the man’s east London accent, Kirsty recognized him. Jack Catch a ‘business’ associate of her late father’s. No wonder he looked out of place in their current location. She had only ever seen him in her dad’s flat back home. There he would arrive with stolen goods for her dad to fence and a negotiation style that was always vaguely threatening even when he was pretending to be friendly. 

“What are you doing here, Jack?” she asked. 

“That’d be Mr. Catch to you. Anyway, don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m just passing through. Had some business to attend to in Denver and someone told me you’d move to this little pervert village nearby and I thought ought to come and say ‘hello’.” 

“You’ve just come to say ’hello’?” Kirsty asked. 

“Nah. Don’t be daft. Like I said, I want a word with you about your dad. Me and Vince had some unfinished business when he snuffed it. He was looking after some money for me.” 

“Was he now?” Kirsty stiffened. She had no idea where all the money in her dad’s bank account had come from but she wasn’t about to let her uncertainty be apparent to Jack Catch. 

“We’d just done a job, me and the boys and Vince was selling on the goods. Didn’t have a chance to give us our cut did he before he croaked it. So I’m here to collect.” 

“Bollocks is it yours. You’d have asked for it a fuck of a sight quicker if it had been. You’d have shown up before Dad’s body had even gone cold.” 

Jack strode forward and grabbed Kirsty’s neck. “I don’t like your fucking tone, miss,” he said sharply. “Don’t they beat women in this place? Isn’t that what it’s all about? How about my boys here give you a beating you won’t forget in a hurry, see if that makes you a little bit more cooperative?”

Although Kirsty misses her London life (dodgy criminal acquaintances of her late father notwithstanding), she totally learns to love her life in Corbin's Bend. It takes a while and it definitely involves some spankings but she gets there in the end.

* I'm not from the East End of London, incidentally. I live in Surrey** and I do sound a bit like Mary Poppins. Please don't let that get in the way of any kind of point I was trying to make.

** I think Surrey is only really internationally famous for being the place where Harry Potter's uncle and aunt lived***

*** They didn't shoot those scenes for the movie in Surrey, by the way. Outside shots for the Dursley residence were shot in Berkshire. I know this because it was just down the road from my friend's house. When she told us they were shooting the Harry Potter film in the next street, we were all "Oh my god! That's so exciting." Then she said it was for the Dursley's house. Cue lots of lacklustre "Um, that's still good" responses.. 

Note: This book is now available as part of the Box Set Return to Corbin's Bend