This is the biography of an ordinary Englishwoman and the extraordinary experiences she was privileged to have during a period that spans the 1920s to the 1960s.
Born in Earlestown, Lancashire, Joyce Edwards volunteered to become a nurse at the outbreak of World War Two and trained at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, where she tended many civilian victims of German attacks on the city. She was herself almost killed when the hospital was hit during an air raid, surviving with nothing but the clothes she was wearing.
She later joined the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Services Reserve (QARANC) and volunteered for work overseas, which soon took her from the blazing skies of the Blitz to blazing skies of a different kind ~ in Punjab in India during the last days of the Raj, Khartoum in the Sudan and Cairo in Egypt ~ where she visited the Pyramids, attended an Arabic feast in the desert and even stayed at King Farouk’s Palace. During this period she also visited Jerusalem and almost became engaged to a White Russian aristocrat.
After a brief stay back at home in England when the war was over, she decided to return to Africa, meeting her husband-to-be on the outbound voyage. In time they married and set up home in South Africa but, after the birth of their daughter, they were soon off on their travels again, emigrating to Cabramurra in the Australian Alps, where they lived for a while before deciding to take up permanent residence in South Africa ~ but not before Joyce and her daughter had undertaken an eventful voyage half way round the globe, via Malaysia, Ceylon, Aden, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, Italy, Gibraltar, Portugal and home to England to visit her family.
All this and more is described with humour and style in this warm-hearted and nostalgic book.
