From the Esk and the Usk

Criss-crossing the globe, this compelling family history, which starts in Burma and ends with a recent visit to Myanmar, includes descriptions of lives spent in many countries around the world from Burma, India, Thailand, Iraq and Egypt to Papua New Guinea, Australia and Greece, as well as the UK.

The time spent in many of these countries coincided with major world events, described as each story is told. These include, among others, WWII in Burma; insurrections after the assassination of Burma’s leader, Aung San; the Armenian genocide; the Smyrna “Katastrophi”; bloody revolutions in Baghdad, the Suez Crisis and the 1968 Paris riots.

There is a wealth of stories spread over 150 plus years. In the 19th century, some members of the family were astonishingly rich, powerful and influential. Some, however, went bankrupt, resulting in a son being sent to sea aged 13; a brother and a sister emigrating to Australia, where they lived in caves mining for opals (one of them writing a book about it); and the black sheep of the family being imprisoned in Italy for smuggling at sea – a story splashed across the UK newspapers.

The second part of the book is autobiographical and covers the author’s life from her childhood in the tea gardens of northern India, to boarding school in the UK at the age of seven, and her own travels and experiences - with time spent in France and Australia and years spent in Papua New Guinea and Greece.

Her marriage to a doctor, (who only on his mother’s death, discovered that he was partly Armenian as well as partly Greek) led to the arrival of her two beloved children. After the sudden death of her husband at the age of 51, at the same moment as his bankruptcy, she and her children were left without a house and very little money, and were officially declared ‘Homeless’ by the London Borough of Haringey. They were fortunate and were provided with local authority emergency temporary accommodation, in which they lived for four years. After a rollercoaster of a life, including major financial and legal battles (all of which she fought hard and won), and major health problems for her children, she managed, with the help of her children, good friends and a good job, to do much better than just survive, and the family (now extended) lives a settled and happy life.