The Ventricle Of Memory

Description

In 1940 at the age of five, Shelagh Duckham was evacuated with her family to North Wales where she spent the war years. They moved to Washington D.C. in 1945 when her father was offered the post of British Agricultural Attache to the U.S.A. The family was repatriated to England in 1950 and Shelagh’s teenage and university years were lived in a land of post-war austerity. In 1966, as ‘ten-pound Poms’, she emigrated with her husband and three small children from the city of Oxford to the small town of Levin, New Zealand.

Her first thirty years were lived against a background of remarkable events. Describing the idiosyncratic characters of her parents and the many other interesting people in her life, Shelagh writes beautifully and insightfully about her childhood and early adulthood. She weaves historical events into her personal narrative and remembers the frequent loneliness and struggle in her own life, while observing the world around her with the eye of both a writer and a sociologist.

Author description

Shelagh Duckham Cox was, in later life, a sociology lecturer at Massey University in Palmerston North and published a wide range of short stories and magazine articles. She was contributing editor to Public and Private Worlds: Women in Contemporary New Zealand and a co-founder of the literary journal New Zealand Books.