Bővebb ismertető
One
We didn't know we were an odd family.
I'm including myself in that statement, although strictly speaking I wasn't one of them. I was a Conway and not a Win-stanley.
But I did my growing up with them; I laughed and, later, suffered with them. Their ways were familiar to me. They were my family.
I was orphaned in 1929 at the age of eight, just like a child in a storybook. The Reverend Harold Conway was a missionary firom the zealous Victorian mold, and as his daughter it was my fate to be born in a tent in the bush on the continent of Africa. A few weeks later my mother died from a particulaily virulent strain of malaria and I was dispatched back to England like a parcel. My destination was our Lincolnshire rectory and the bosom of Mrs. French, who had been hired to supervise my upbringing in the way that a land agent might be hired to manage an estate for an absentee landlord. __
Mrs. French was a kind, friendly person. The usual adjecdve, I realize now, is "motherly," but since I had no experience whatever of mothers, I didn't know this at the time. It was Mrs. French who broke the news—shortly after my eighth birthday— that my father, too, had succumbed to the fever. This time it was the sinister-sounding "denghi fever."
I remember feeling deeply disappointed. All I knew of my