A wartime love story. A conscientious objector. Two disasters. A boy left alone.

This wide-ranging memoir tracks the author's childhood through happiness to the depths of sadness, understanding his sense of loss and the impact on his life and personality.

In later life, he delves deep into his parents' past and finds a love story for the generations. It is a tale of separation, yearning and determination as his father is sent, as a pacifist, to India during the war, leaving behind his prospective fiancée and his aspirations to become a minister in the Methodist Church. His diary documents travels that are long and fraught with danger and his experience as a medic in the Royal Army Medical Corps exposes him to the brutality of war.

The author's research reveals not only the parents he knew only briefly as a child, but also how their love and care impacted his life and led him to understand more about his own sense of purpose.

Full of pen portraits of a child's life in the '50s and '60s, this heartwarming memoir and its associated wartime diary tells the tale about a troubled youngster who grew into an adult, trying to find some meaning in life and coping with the fallout of bereavement and loss.