In the Shadow of the Cotton Tree
A Diary of Second World War Sierra Leone
Jack Rillie author Alasdair Soussi editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Zeticula Ltd
Published:11th Dec '14
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In 1940, John Archibald McKenzie Rillie - serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps and newly married to Betty - was posted to the African city of Freetown in Sierra Leone. This is the first publication of the writing and the poems, drawn in the main from his diary and the notebook in which he collated much of his war-time verse, that mark his experiences in the sixteen months that followed. In the words of his editor, and grandson, Alasdair Soussi, it is an 'expressive, outspoken, sometimes raw and uncomfortable account of a bygone age'. The later reflections of Jack Rillie, the by then greatly admired and influential university teacher, on this period - and on his life prior to the war - are presented in a brief introduction, "A Young Life Recalled". With a foreword by Andrew Hook and an afterword from Marshall Walker; reproductions of photographs and letters; and even a list of books Jack read while in Sierra Leone, the man who inspired so many is revealed both for his formidable scholarship and his love.
'The diary and poems written by Jack Rillie in Sierra Leone, in 1940-41, give a candid, shocking expression of the terrible necessity of war, futility, valour, stripped of romantic gloss; above all, Rillie's hope for the future sustained by love of his young bride left behind in Scotland. Alasdair Soussi has edited sensitively, with great skill, his grandfather's diary and poems, as a tribute to the early work of a crucially influential figure; an unsung hero of Scotland's post-war literary scene.' Alexander Maitland, author of 'Wilfred Thesiger - The Life of the Great Explorer'.
ISBN: 9781905021130
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
190 pages