YANKEEDOODLEDADDY

Frail and elderly, the wartime years were now but a fading memory for Mary Evans.

However, a visitor from the past evokes many memories, some of them bitter sweet, and Mary is forced to mentally re-visit the home and area of her childhood, of her teenage years, and finally come face to face with the dreadful secret that she had kept hidden for so long.

The visitor is Mary's eldest son, Mike Leighton, who was born in war-torn Britain and then grew up in a country trying to re-build itself after the horrors of war.

He had grown up being told by his mother and elderly grandparents that his father was a soldier in the US Army, who had been stationed in the area during the war years. Mike had left the area, and his family, when he was in his teens and never returned home, eventually making a tiny town in New Zealand his home. And then Mike is told he is terminally ill. His nights are punctuated by dreams of soldiers marching the roads and lanes of his former home town in England.

Finally, he decides he must return home to find out the truth about his father before he dies, decides he must find out the truths, secrets, his own family had kept from him during those early years of his life.

The book follows Mike as he returns to the area of his birth, recalls childhood incidents and then to the book’s denouement as he once again meets his mother, now herself seriously ill.

It is through his mother's eyes, and words, that he finds out the real truth about his father, and the dreadful realization that for years he had himself been seeking the son he had lost. It is a poignant story, set on two continents and against a backdrop of a world at war, with a real twist in the tale.