40 for 40 - Liz Fenwick

There have been a  lot of my guest posters that I met at the RNA conference - not surprising really.  As anyone who has attended any of the RNA Conferences, will tell you, this association is a\ warm and friendly group who welcome newcomers into their midst without hesitation.  So RNA  conference was where I first met  Liz  Fenwick.

And it's at the RNA that I have a chance to keep up to date with her. Not an easy matter because so much of the time Liz is in Dubai where she lives.  If she's not in  Cornwall, that is. And Cornwall is the setting for her two books.  That sounds like a  glamorous life  doesn't it?  Like Liz herself . 

Liz's post is on the blog today  for a very special reason - as you'll see from her first sentence.   So


Happy Anniversary Liz!  Thank you for sharing it with me - and all my readers.

(Oh and Liz - Can I enter your giveaway contest?  I could tell you about the day the Babe Magnet   looked at a Welsh craft ring he’d bought for me and pushed it on to my engagement finger saying ‘Well I suppose this will have to do till I can get you a better one’! Cue stunned silence and then I said ‘was that a proposal’ and he said of course it was!  40+ years later   . . .)

Here's Liz -
On July  21^st, I will be married twenty-two years.  Not a patch on Kate and the Babe Magnet but beginning to be serious! 

I can’t think of those twenty-two years without remembering about my husband’s wonderful proposal. It was the August Bank holiday weekend and miraculously the sun was shining. We were staying with his parents in Cornwall in their wonderful house set above the Helford River. I don’t remember where the rest of the family were but Chris and I went for a walk along Frenchman’s Creek.

It’s a circular walk and as we began we met some acquaintances coming the other way. About half way around we sat on a bench and admired the view over the river and looking out to Groyne Point.  I sat there swinging my feet (yes they didn’t touch the ground) and leaning against Chris and said, ‘I guess you’ll never make an honest woman of me.’

Chris turned to me and said, ‘Will you marry me?’

Being the romantic I am I replied, ‘Are you serious this time?’ (He’d asked twice before but that’s another story altogether!)

‘Yes.’ He looked at me and then the view.

‘Then yes.’  My heart flipped for I’d believed he wasn’t ready to get married!

He kissed me and the rest of the walk is a blur of happiness . We must have looked like grinning idiots when we met the acquaintances again. Of course we couldn’t tell them our news, family needed to be told first, but it was so difficult as both of us were bursting with excitement.

I will give a copy of my latest book A Cornish Affair (which is a bit autobiographical about an American running away and falling in love with Cornwall) to the best proposal story left in the comments….

Liz's latest book A Cornish Affair is out now…

Running out on your wedding day never goes down well. When the pressure of her forthcoming marriage becomes too much, Jude bolts from the church, leaving a good man at the altar, her mother in a fury, and the guests with enough gossip to last a year.

Guilty and ashamed, Jude flees to Pengarrock, a crumbling cliff-top mansion in Cornwall, where she takes a job cataloguing the Trevillion family's extensive library. The house is a welcome escape for Jude, full of history and secrets, but when its new owner arrives, it's clear that Pengarrock is not beloved by everyone.

As Jude falls under the spell of the house, she learns of a family riddle stemming from a terrible tragedy centuries before, hinting at a lost treasure. And when Pengarrock is put up for sale, it seems that time is running out for the house and for Jude.

You can find out more about Liz here.