Hidden Lives

Hidden Lives begins in Bristol in 1869 with the death of a young married couple. It ends in South Wales in 1925 with the birth of their great granddaughter. The years between belong to their daughter Charlotte and her family who left Bristol in 1907 to join the great Coal Rush to the Rhondda Valley. They became part of that warm diverse community whose courage and compassion in the struggle for survival Charlotte came to value. For in the Rhondda men and women’s lives were shadowed by the strikes and lock-outs of Disputes with the Management and dominated by the reality of pit accidents, the inevitable result of the coal owners’ greed. The lives of the Callows cast a beam of light into a past way of life and a vanished but not forgotten world, a world poor in worldly goods, supremely rich in spirit. Chosen by Susan Hill in The Guardian as one of her top seven (of 3741), described as “A delightful book about a Nineteenth Century Welsh family.”