Poison Glen

Reaching across time, this book follows the lives of two women, their families, and their generations that followed. People from entirely different walks of life, their lives are inexorably joined together by love, hate and the hand of fate. Beginning in the late 1800's, the northern England town of Wigan, due to its industries of cotton mills and coal mines, was permanently shrouded in a cloud of poisonous black smog, her rivers running with the ooze of industry. The county of Yorkshire was just sixty miles west of Wigan, but it might have been a world away. Here the countryside was lush and green, with rolling ridges of woods dipping down to broad valleys, where farms nestled in rich fields. Even though there were coal mines in the county of Yorkshire, they had not yet scarred the landscape or polluted the sky with their great clouds of grime. Mary Ann Oxley was born into poverty in the town of Wigan, where the booming Industrial Revolution, while bringing wealth to some, brought only misery and abject poverty to others. She lived her life in the shadow of the cotton mills and, in that age of indifference, was put to work at the tender age of six to supply the demands of a fast growing nation. Her older brother Tommy was sent to the coal mines. Wigan's coal mines, at that time, had some of the deepest shafts and worst safety records in the country. A miner's life hung daily by a thread. If he didn't die in a mining disaster, he was destined to live out his life underground, choking on lungs filled with coal dust and skin permanently stained black as the coal he pulled from the earth. Eliza Jane Skelton, born into a privileged family, was sheltered from the harsh realities of life. Living a spoiled and pampered existence, she took for granted her place in society. That would leave her little with which to combat the hardships that would come from the tragic results of wrong decisions. This story will take the reader to England, through the dreadful working conditions of child labor in the late eighteen hundreds, and on to the harsh realities of War. You will travel across India, into darkest Africa, and to the prisoner of war camps of Nazi Germany, and eventually find yourself on the shores of the United States of America.

Reaching across time, this book follows the lives of two women, their families, and their generations that followed. People from entirely different walks of life, their lives are inexorably joined together by love, hate and the hand of fate. Beginning in the late 1800's, the northern England town of Wigan, due to its industries of cotton mills and coal mines, was permanently shrouded in a cloud of poisonous black smog, her rivers running with the ooze of industry. The county of Yorkshire was just sixty miles west of Wigan, but it might have been a world away. Here the countryside was lush and green, with rolling ridges of woods dipping down to broad valleys, where farms nestled in rich fields. Even though there were coal mines in the county of Yorkshire, they had not yet scarred the landscape or polluted the sky with their great clouds of grime. Mary Ann Oxley was born into poverty in the town of Wigan, where the booming Industrial Revolution, while bringing wealth to some, brought only misery and abject poverty to others. She lived her life in the shadow of the cotton mills and, in that age of indifference, was put to work at the tender age of six to supply the demands of a fast growing nation. Her older brother Tommy was sent to the coal mines. Wigan's coal mines, at that time, had some of the deepest shafts and worst safety records in the country. A miner's life hung daily by a thread. If he didn't die in a mining disaster, he was destined to live out his life underground, choking on lungs filled with coal dust and skin permanently stained black as the coal he pulled from the earth. Eliza Jane Skelton, born into a privileged family, was sheltered from the harsh realities of life. Living a spoiled and pampered existence, she took for granted her place in society. That would leave her little with which to combat the hardships that would come from the tragic results of wrong decisions. This story will take the reader to England, through the dreadful working conditions of child labor in the late eighteen hundreds, and on to the harsh realities of War. You will travel across India, into darkest Africa, and to the prisoner of war camps of Nazi Germany, and eventually find yourself on the shores of the United States of America.