Trish Vickers, of Charmouth, Dorset, had written 26 pages of her novel, Grannifer’s Legacy, when her son realised that her pen had run out of ink and that the pages were blank. Opting to salvage the work she had put in they took the manuscript to the police who used a system of lights to read the page impressions left by the nib of her pen. Five months later and her work had been recovered.
“We battled with various ideas until we thought of the police. We rang them and asked to speak to their fingerprint section,” Mrs Vickers said.
“They said if there was anything they could do they’d be happy to help. I was gobsmacked!”
Mrs Vickers lost her sight seven years ago through of diabetes and opted to write to keep the grey cells ticking over. She uses a system of elastic bands to keep her writing straight across the page and has a volunteer call in once a week to type up her work.
She intends to send her novel, about a woman whose life implodes when she loses her job, her boyfriend and her great-grandmother, to a publisher once it is completed.
Photo: Getty
