''Why didn’t you and Daddy want people to give you any presents?' I used to ask. But my mother could never be drawn into talking about the wedding. I assumed it was because she did not wish to be reminded of the ghastly mistake she had made in marrying my father.
'AS a child, Nadia Wheatley had a sense of the great divide between her parents, who had met and married while working in Germany on the front line of the Cold War. Growing up in 1950s Australia, the child became a player in their deadly contest. Was she her mother’s daughter, or her father’s creature?
'At the age of ten, the author began writing down her mother’s stories: her Cinderella-like childhood, and her escape into a career as army nurse and refugee aid worker. Fifty years later, the finished memoir is not only a loving tribute but also a social history of twentieth-century Australia, told through the lives of a mother and her daughter.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication:
i.m.
N.I.W.
3/4/1906 - 13/11/1958
'When John Norman Wheatley met Nina Watkin in Germany in 1946, he would have regarded her as a lesser being on all fronts: woman to his man, forty to his forty-eight, Australian to his English, nurse to his doctor. They met as fellow employees of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working with wartime refugees from an assortment of European countries.' (Introduction)
'When John Norman Wheatley met Nina Watkin in Germany in 1946, he would have regarded her as a lesser being on all fronts: woman to his man, forty to his forty-eight, Australian to his English, nurse to his doctor. They met as fellow employees of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working with wartime refugees from an assortment of European countries.' (Introduction)
