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Thursday 24 February 2022

Lotus-Eating Days

Lotus-Eating Days is a memoir written by Caroline Repton.

It tells the true story of two very different people who came from vastly dissimilar backgrounds who, however, met and married.

Geoffrey Christopher Tyrwhitt Repton was the eldest child of a middle-class English family.

Whilst Theresa Repton (nee Pang Kim Lui) was the 13th child of a family of Chinese immigrants living in the British colony of Singapore.

In her fascinating and extremely well researched book she tells their stories. How, although they grew up on different sides of the world and had very different backgrounds, the common bond they found was that they had both survived the Second World War in the Asian warzone.

Christopher had been a prisoner of war forced to work on the Burma-Siam railway, whilst Theresa was a young woman working in Japanese-occupied Singapore.

Caroline Repton brings to life a whole variety of characters from witty former prisoners of war, loving siblings, cousins who were in the armed forces, idiosyncratic spinster aunts, ex-girlfriends, chipper colonials.

The story is told in their own words by means of a wide range of letters and diary entries from the 1930s to 1959. And Theresa's tape-recorded memories put to tape in 2000.

As well as being very well written the book is profusely illustrated with a delightful array of intimate family photographs and wartime postcards.

It's published by The Book Guild at £16.99 in hardback.

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