Gilwern-based author Shirley Phillips in her latest novel ‘The Wanton Angel’ returns to the trials and tribulations of the fictitious Brown family at Top Farm on Sugar Loaf Mountain.

Now in her eighties, it is Shirley’s second novel and fourth book in less than four years.

With over thirty years’ experience as a nurse, ward sister, teacher and carer, Shirley’s first two books - ‘Times to Weep, Times to Laugh’ and ‘That Good Night’ - drew on her experiences of nursing and care provision, exposing both the shortcomings and the successes.

Having seen these two ‘memoirs’ in print, Shirley submitted a novel which she had ‘pushed to the back of a desk drawer’ to her publishers Austin Macauley and was thrilled when they accepted it.

‘Charlotte Aurora’ centred on the lives of mountain sheep farmers and town market traders during the years of the Depression.

The sequel, ‘The Wanton Angel’, now follows the central characters through the1940s where readers find that Isobel and Owain Brown after many years are blessed with a daughter, Angela.

Dubbed her father’s ‘little angel’ and given everything she could ever want, the spoiled child grows up to despise her lonely, isolated farm home and makes quick work of shaming her family…

While the characters in Shirley Phillips’s novels are fictitious, they’re based on people she’s encountered in her lifetime. One of her first jobs after leaving school, for example, was with a large open market – and Monkford Market in ‘Charlotte Aurora’ is how she imagines Abergavenny Market would have been in the 1920s.

Shirley was born into a coal-mining family, one of five children. From extremely poor beginnings, she worked her way up to the highest levels of the nursing profession.

She initially applied to train as a nurse in the 1950s but was rejected as being unfit for the heavy tasks involved because she has a spinal curvature.

Seventeen years later, however, she was accepted for training at the old Nevill Hall Hospital. Between times she had met and travelled widely with her husband Derek, who was then an army officer.

She worked as a voluntary nurse in numerous overseas countries including Ghana, Aden and Kenya and occasionally lectured in the RIPAS hospital in Brunei. Later she helped her husband with a UNESCO project in Paris and Nigeria to aid disabled children.

Having gained ten years’ experience as a nurse, Shirley progressed to become a nurse tutor in 1981. She retired from the NHS in 1993 but continued to train nurses in the private sector until 2002.

Derek, having retired from the army, had meanwhile worked as a consultant psychologist.

Shirley says she had always written stories as a hobby but it was Derek, who sadly died in 2013, who had encouraged her to take it to the next level.

“I actually started ‘Charlotte Aurora’ 15 years ago. Derek was a published author and storywriter for the BBC and I asked him to read it in its rough form while I took my mother shopping one day.

“On my return, almost two hours later, he was still reading it. He said I should try to get it published but I was dedicated to my work at that time, as was he, and it was pushed to the back of my desk drawer until a year ago, by which time I’d already had my two nursing memoirs published. “

Shirley will be signing copies of ‘The Wanton Angel’ this Friday (April 28) from 2.30pm at Abergavenny Library.

She’s already working on another novel which this time combines her story-telling skills with her inside knowledge of care provision.

It’s all about an elderly, disabled women living in a nursing home who wins £20m on the lottery and how she goes about spending the money…