Valerie Hoadley

Valerie Hoadley is a retired teacher and lecturer spending most of her working life first in Secondary Schools and then in a Further Education College.  She was born in the Lake District and after a period running her family business in partnership with her husband, the couple returned to their chosen profession, teaching , and moved to Norfolk where they spent the rest of their working life.  On retirement they went to live in Spain, a country she came to love,  describing her time there as “living in Paradise.” However, in 2007 they returned to England and, looking forward to a new phase in their lives, settled in an area unknown to them, Launceston, Cornwall. It was not to be. Within 6 months, out of the blue, her husband was diagnosed with cancer and less than a month later he was dead. Suddenly, without children, she found herself alone in an area she had scarcely begun to know; her few relatives and many good friends far away. She was urged to record her experiences as she fought to deal with her loss and make a new life. Once started, the work took on a life of its own and this book is the result. She has now decided to publish it for two reasons. First in the hope that it may be a sharing and perhaps of some small comfort or help to anyone who has to face the death of a spouse and secondly she wishes all of her net proceeds from the book to go to Marie Curie Cancer Care, the charity which helped her and her husband when they most needed help.

Valerie News

You can keep up here with any news about Valerie!

Click here to sign up to the UKUnpublished and UKBookland Newsletter

A Time of Change
by Valerie Hoadley

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84944-078-3
Paperback RRP: £7.99

UKBookland Price : £6.99 including FREE Standard UK Delivery - available here.

A Time of Change records a journey lasting some three and a half years. It begins with a physical journey; a return to England from Spain where the author and her husband had lived so happily for 15 years and then, following his sudden and unexpected death just a few short months after they arrived in Cornwall, continues with the author on a further journey - a sea change in her life - recording her experiences, emotions and attitudes over a roughly 3 year period as she battles to come to terms with her loss and build a new life. She tells her story in an intermittent diary form in both prose and verse and also, here and there, she has quoted poets who have touched her in dealing with similar experiences and others who have made comments she has found relevant. This is a book of great general interest dealing, as it does, with the death of a loved one, an experience we all have to face at some point in our lives. The author shares with us a journey from the darkness of death and despair to the light of life and acceptance. The way is hard and she stumbles and falls but, clinging to life and to the support of love and understanding offered by many friends, old and new, she perseveres until she learns to live again. She will always mourn and always remember but she finds the strength to move on and through her poetic approach and the quotations she uses, she weaves her experience into a wider canvas of a universal human experience of deep emotion. In the book's opening words she says "Every loss of a spouse is different depending on so many factors but although mine was a single unique and very private experience, just as a raindrop falling into the sea becomes indistinguishable from it and one with it, so my drop of pain is also a small part of the ocean of a universal human experience of loss. I hope therefore that this work might be a sharing; and a sharing that might even be a small consolation or comfort to those who have to tread the same stony path. If it could be such to even one person I would be content." This is a moving and inspiring book.