Only Child

In this highly personal memoir, Christopher Meyer tells the story of the father he never knew and the impact this had on him as an only child growing up in post-war Britain. His father, Flight Lieutenant Reggie Meyer, an RAF pilot, was shot down and killed over the Greek island of Ikaria a few days before his son was born in 1944. Through his mother’s diary and family papers Christopher Meyer pieces together a wartime story of love, tragedy and sacrifice. Almost like a detective story, Only Child describes how Reggie’s family discover the circumstances of his death and how, years later, they recover the ring taken from his body. In 2011, thanks to a chance encounter on the internet, the author goes to Ikaria to meet surviving witnesses of the crashing aircraft. In a stunning climax, Only Child takes us to to the remote and beautiful island with its harrowing details of his father’s death and a moving ceremony of remembrance at the little mountain-top church where the islanders had buried him under the noses of German occupying forces.