Shrewsbury author takes 90-year-old mother on a trip she will never forget

The heat, the flies, the traffic, the tummy bugs. ...especially if she had never been abroad before.

But for the former director of a Shrewsbury arts centre, teacher and writer, the trip to the Punjab did not seem so daunting.

Instead Neil Rathmell used the experience of taking his mother thousands of miles from Shropshire to the northern Indian city of Chandigarh as the basis of a new book - although he admits it has been a real labour of love to write, one that has taken seven years.

An Englishman (and his mother) Abroad tells the remarkable tale of the 67-year-old author's previously untravelled mother's visit to India to celebrate her 90th birthday.

"Taking my mother, Dorothy, to stay with friends in India was quite an adventure," said Neil, who was married but divorced after 30 years and has two daughters and four grandchildren.

"I decided soon after we came back that I wanted to write about it.

"But with other writing projects to get on with too, it has taken a long time.

"She was widowed in 1974, and left Yorkshire for Shrewsbury, where she lived in a house of her own for 30 years until, at the age of 89, she suffered a stroke and, no longer able to live independently, sold her house and moved in with me.

" A Punjabi friend invited us to celebrate her 90th birthday with him and his family in Chandigarh.

"Now 97, she is still living with me in the house we share in the middle of Shrewsbury.

"Above all, the book is a tribute to her.

"She's had a long and sometimes difficult life, but she's a survivor and, in an unexpected way, the visit to India helped her to come to terms with a lot of things. I hope I've succeeded in capturing some of that in my book."

Neil, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and one of the first teachers at Stirchley Upper School, now The Lord Silkin, has led a varied life himself.

He left his post in Telford to work for Shropshire LEA as an adviser for drama and the arts and set up an arts exchange programme between young people in Shropshire and Punjab, in which around 50 students from Shropshire took part over a five-year period.

He then helped to set up Belmont Arts Centre, which is now The Hive, as a charitable trust, saving it from closure by the local authority, and was its first director.

But writing was his first love and before taking it up full time, he wrote and directed many plays for schools and youth theatres during the course of his career in education.

He now concentrates on fiction and a collection of short stories will be published in the autumn, two novels lined up for next year and he is working on a third.

He also started 'Neil Rathmell's Literary Blog' in February 2013, since when he has posted more than 50 weekly blogs which also features a selection of his plays, poems and essays as free downloads.

The blog has an international readership, with 4,500 hits so far from over 80 countries.

* An Englishman (and his mother) Abroad is published by Southernwood Press priced at £7.99