Publisher's Synopsis
Cicely Mayhew had an extraordinary childhood. Born in England, at four she went to South Africa, where her father had successfully prospected for copper. There she and her brother led carefree lives until he was sent away to school and she went with her parents to Tanganyika. Here they moved around, looking for gold in the rivers and building a new grass house wherever they went. Paradise was suddenly lost when she was sent to school in England. Cicely went first to live with kindly spinster aunts in Sheffield, then to Cheltenham Ladies College and from there to Oxford. The intervention of the Second World War made her separation from her parents a long one: it was more than 20 years until she saw her father again. Written with charm and skill, this memoir ends enticingly with her years at Oxford and a spell in Naval Intelligence at Bletchley Park.
