Rambles With My Family: (Starting in China)

RAMBLES WITH MY FAMILY is a personal memoir that begins in China and Burma with the experiences of a small child growing up among English missionaries during the Japanese invasion. The story continues as war grips both countries and the family flees for their lives, stumbling from one calamity to the next, before escaping to India where they take refuge until the second world war ends and they can return to England. They arrive in post-war Britain on a wave of optimism for new prospects in a world restored to peacetime, but their hopes are shattered in various ways as plans unravel and the anchorage 'back home' that had been relied on as a guarantee of stability, comes adrift. Led by their headstrong father, they embark on a restless, adventurous life that races along in these pages, going from country to country, with more prosperous times spent in Malta and Kenya. In each new place, their resourceful mother tries to establish, once again, the settled home she longs for. Despite often lacking basic essentials, wherever they go she takes her piano with her (even to China), and later, whenever it gets left behind, she finds another one. Her four children are born along the way in different countries, and with their very different personalities they adapt in different ways to being transplanted at every turn. The events and diversions that accompany each uprooting are described in vivid detail by the eldest daughter, who steered a course through the family's vicissitudes by adopting an observer's view, storing memories and images to illustrate the telling of this story with wry humour in later years, as historical context becomes a theme.