Do not be misled by the ‘Childhood Memories’ of the subtitle. Self-indulgent nostalgia is nowhere to be found in this book, which is a richly novelistic saga of a war-time family in Britain. It is Rodney Hall’s genius that his story evokes strong personal memories in the mind of the reader: in my case of a North Queensland childhood during the 1950s, punctuated by destructive cyclones and deadly marine stingers, rather than by German air raids. To read this book is a double pleasure: we enter both the world of young Rod and our own childhood at the same time.

In common with many wartime childhoods, Hall (or ‘Rod’) was profoundly affected by the absence of a father, though in his case this was also a cause for shame, as his father died before the war began. This paternal absence is a significant feature of several other notable Australian autobiographies, and autobiographical novels, including those of Barbara Hanrahan, Unreliable Memoirs (1980) by Clive James, and Life Rarely Tells (1958) by Jack Lindsay, who lost touch with his father, Norman, for a number of years.