A 79-YEAR-OLD York woman has just published her first novel.

Mary Florence Jackson’s wartime romance is called Out of Limbo, and she published it under the name Mary Florence.

Miss Jackson, of Bedale Avenue, Osbaldwick, who grew up in wartime York, said the story, published by Pen Press, was about the limbo a woman experiences after she meets and falls in love with an RAF pilot and becomes pregnant before his plane is shot down over France and he is presumed dead.

The novel brings in the work of the resistance in saving the lives of those the Nazis want dead and helping them to escape from France for safer shores, she said.

“People who have read it have said they can’t put it down,” said Miss Jackson, who worked as a civil servant for the Ministry of Defence after the war, working in military intelligence at one stage.

She said she started writing the book some 20 years ago when she was looking after her poorly mother, but had redrafted it more recently and then decided to self-publish it.

The book is available at amazon.co.uk