The Four Streets by Nadine Dorries - extract

A taste of the MP's first venture into fiction

Jerry and Bernadette Deane lived across the road from Maura and Tommy in number forty-two. Like many of the men on the four streets, Jerry had arrived in Liverpool from Mayo, hungry for prosperity and advancement that weren't to be found in rural Ireland, where levels of relative poverty remained almost unchanged since the sixteen hundreds, and where, right into the winters of the nineteen-sixties, children still walked to school barefoot through icy fields. It was as though the land of his birth were caught in a time warp. The outside privies on the four streets were a luxury compared to the low stone-and-sod houses of Mayo, where an indoor toilet of any description was mostly unheard of in many of the villages.

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