Survival

The ’farm school’ system, jointly sponsored by the Australian and British governments, encouraged World War II orphans to be sent by ship to Australia to start a new life under the now-notorious Assisted Passages scheme. Survival is the shared mantra of the disparate collection of characters who inhabit this novel. From Brigadier Giles Perbright (a latter day Wackford Squeers) to Jack Cooper, a Sapper who made it back from Normandy; diminutive 8-year-old Betty, a Birmingham war orphan who could run a McDonalds restaurant single-handed, and her side-kick, the itinerant Jackeroo Kiwi Lewis. Then there’s ex-public schoolboy and cycle racing enthusiast Nick, his widowed Belgian refugee mother Mimi, and the cheerful dog-race-loving Doreen, running a secret underground munitions factory. Plus the octogenarian gambling grandmother Nana Belle, the solitary inhabitant of an Edwardian mansion worthy of a Philip Marlowe thriller. All intend to survive.