I first ‘met’ Helen through the pages of her diary, which she wrote in a notebook while in hospital in her early 20s in 1975. She gave it to my husband, one of Helen’s doctors, to read and he brought it home and I spotted it, lying on our dining room table. This document with its stylish writing and quaint illustrations looked too good to resist so, rightly or wrongly, I picked it up and read it. It revealed the anguish of a patient, in mental and physical pain, who was clearly looking for answers beyond the life she knew. My husband recognised her spiritual need and gave her a copy of St Luke’s Gospel, which she read reluctantly, but there was not much else for her to do in her isolated hospital room. The result was a realisation that unconditional love does exist, shown in the life of Jesus and that she could begin to understand it and receive it. ‘When the Bough Breaks’ is Helen’s autobiography, describing her difficult, complicated early years, the great transformation that took place in her life when she first ‘met’ Jesus in the pages of St Luke’s Gospel and her accounts of the many adventures that followed. It promises to be a ‘page-turner’ and I recommend it for its brave honesty, ‘warts and all’. It is an opportunity for readers to ‘meet’ this amazing Christian woman who has known extreme swings in the ups and downs of life and a ‘Damascus Road’ conversion. Having read the first few chapters of this true account, I found that Helen’s writing reveals a sensitive, artistic, multi-talented, adventurous, irrepressible personality and I eagerly await the opportunity to read the completed volume. This will be a book to be read and shared and I do not doubt that Helen’s intention in writing her life-story is that it might be an inspiration to us all.

I have just finished reading the first six Chapters. You have done a spectacular job writing about the early part of your life and I am looking forward to the second half (if I am allowed to read it ), in the hope things are going to work out as the chapter headings imply they might! Those six chapters were a hard read, in the sense that you take us through some truly tough times, my reaction was to pray for you time and again. You have been unbelievably frank in the details you have revealed and sometimes I wondered if you needed to give yourself quite such a rough time but those in similar circumstances to you will no doubt find it helpful that some else has experienced what they too have been through. Is that perhaps one of the purposes of your book?
You have an amazing memory, recalling events in great details all these years later. God bless you