When Shelagh Bell was sorting through her mother's possessions after she had moved into a nursing home, she came across a pile of typescript, clumsily typed on one finger, many of the pages screwed up or out of order. She had found her mother s memoirs, covering the years from her birth in 1900 to the death of the husband she worshipped, Shelagh s father, in 1970. Shelagh devoted all her spare time to sorting them out and typing them up properly, and the result is this book; a beautifully-written, moving and often very funny story of a family who lived through two world wars and were constantly on the move, thanks to his career as a sea captain and her passion for house-hunting."