Now living near Didcot, local author Kath Crew was once president of the Cambridge Footlights in the early 1980s before she went on to spend her working life as a schoolteacher. However, a move to North Moreton in 2017 to the house her in-laws bought in 1960 - her husband‘s childhood home – left her not having to plan each day on how to get her children around London on public transport. Moving to the countryside also highlighted her ignorance of the natural world around her.
Local author Kath Crew was president of the Cambridge Footlights in the 1980s before she went on to spend her working life as a schoolteacher. With a love of creating stories since early childhood and writing them down as soon as she learned how to hold a pencil, Kath decided to use time she had following retirement to realise her ambition of writing at greater length.
Her first novel, ‘A Cactus Called Ironside’ was published in 2024, followed by its standalone sequel, ‘A Feather Between the Lines’ in October 2025. Kath hopes to have written what she enjoys reading herself - humorous fiction which is character and story based but which also may cause the reader to think about the implication of the themes contained. Although pigeonholed as Women’s fiction or Book group reads, Kath has had many male readers enjoy the books and they have been appreciated by all age groups. Both books have received page turning good reviews and are available to order from local bookstores, including the Wallingford Bookshop, and online too.
‘A Cactus Called Ironside’ (ISBN 978-1-0687637-3-1) follows protagonist, Roni McNamara, a girl from an ordinary home who gets a place at Cambridge University. It embraces a sixties and seventies childhood as well as university in the 1980s – which turns out not to be the Brideshead Revisited experience Roni was expecting and hoping for. Roni has left behind her bookmaker father and hairdresser mother, her Nan whose dementia causes her to think the war is still going on and her zealous Irish Catholic Gran, hoping to find a Hooray Henry with a large home miles from her native Barking. Things are never what they seem. Roni eventually discovers a different tribe and also aggressive, blunt Yorkshireman Webster Ferris. In the background, Charles and Diana are married, Mrs Thatcher is Prime Minister and the Miners’ strike plays out. Both in Cambridge and back home, it is obvious that many people are economical with the truth: not exactly liars but curators of what they tell others. A college re-union in the present-day forces Roni to confront her own secrets and lead her to an admission she cannot ignore.
‘A Feather Between the Lines’ (ISBN 978-1-0684468-9-4) finds Roni married with three grown-up children and living near Oxford. The story takes place around the time of the Coronation in 2023 as the repercussions of Roni’s time in Cambridge 40 years earlier reappear. Looking back over the intervening years she wonders where the time has gone and what has happened during that period. She is involved in an over-ambitious Isis Mummers Am Dram society, as she was at university; their latest production, Still Life (a play by Noel Coward that was the forerunner of the film Brief Encounter) is part of a Coronation celebration. The ironies of its plot are not lost on her. She would prefer to keep the truth from her kindly but dull husband, her children who seem to inhabit a different world, the eccentric Isis Mummers, her ghastly in-laws, and even her old university friends, but it becomes obvious that this is not an option. Her past has caught up with her, and she is forced to confront it. Above all she has the opportunity to rekindle a relationship she has been thinking about for nearly forty years but whether this is wise or even achievable given the truth she has been concealing is not obvious. And, despite her best endeavours, coming clean is not so straightforward as she had imagined.
To find out more about Kath Crew’s talks in Oxfordshire take a look at her Facebook page Kath Crew and instagram @kathcrewbooks
