Wrong Parting

Many are innocents and misfits, others are outcasts and the object of society's admiration, curiosity and fear. There's the mother and daughter of Paradise Road, forced to make a nail-biting midnight escape from the home of their noxious host; in Cobra Woman, a child discovers the 'Basket Case' she's warned about is, after all, her saviour! In Hilda and Hugo, a
>Upstairs to Insanity portrays the messy aftermath of a teenage actress's suicide attempt: when surviving a 70-ft fall from the Rome Hilton, she is threatened with imprisonment. The victim unwittingly finds aid from famed psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who upheld that insanity is a normal response to a world gone mad.

The narrator of Sam Alone is left dangling from another cliff-edge. Despite both parents living, she lands at a remote home for stateless orphans in Sri Lanka, when she fails the skin-tone test for emigration during the notorious 'Keep Australia White' policy: saved from desertion by her own mother, she forms a touching alliance with 'Sam' whose family ditch their dark-skinned adopted daughter to emigrate to Brisbane.

Back in England in Behind the Scenes, a young wife meets John Betjeman and his beloved teddy bear, with no clue of his status. In Princess on a Shoestring, a young woman takes her driving test for the eighth time, helped along by the examiner's fascination with her faux-aristocratic credentials.

In The Curd Maker, a brother and sister in an ashram wait with longing for their mother's return. The titular piece Wrong Parting written in dialect, follows two young sisters eager for the annual holiday of their mother and only relative - a victim of the islands (undeclared) export - female labour to the Middle East. A stranger leads them to find their Mama, unprepared for the horrible reality which awaits.