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Maureen Baird-Murray tells her story with astonishing, but convincing, recall and with a childlike freshness which vividly recaptures the time and place. THE SPECTATOR This wholly delightful book belongs on the shelf beside that other classic of childhood, Mi Mi Khaing's Burmese Family. COUNTRY LIFE Stationed in Burma in the early 1930s, young Edward Rossiter, Assistant Superintendent of Lashio, married a beautiful peasant girl. When their daughter, Maureen, was only four, she was left at an English speaking convent school. The child, bewildered and lonely, spoke no English. Maureen was shuttled between the idyll of her peasant grandparents' bamboo house and the fierce discipline of the Italian nuns at school. At the end of one term no one came for her. Gradually almost all the children disappeared from school until only three girls and the ten nuns remained. When the Japanese arrived, the Mother Superior was dragged out at bayonet point. Maureen's book describes life under Japanese occupation as seen by a nine-year-old; the arrival of the British; and, with the war's end, the devastating news that she is an orphan. The final twist to the story is as unexpected as it is heartening. This is a completely captivating narrative. Cover designed by Justinia Baird-Murray

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9781478395959

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Maureen Baird-Murray was born in Burma (Myanmar) in the early 1930s to a colonial administrator from Ireland and a beautiful Burmese peasant girl. Orphaned during the war, she finally left Burma aged 13, to live in Dublin with her grandmother and sister, Patricia. She went on to marry a young Naval officer, Neil Baird-Murray, and raised five children, before writing this memoir to answer their questions about her past life. Never expecting it to be published, her book came to the attention of Constable publishers, who printed the first edition in 1998 to critical acclaim. Following her death in 2005, the book became a treasured memory for her children and grandchildren, who published this new edition in December 2012. A touching and personal account of a young girl's struggle in difficult and tragic circumstances, her autobiography is a unique and valuable record of life in Burma under the Japanese occupation and possibly the only account written from a child's point of view.

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