Media: BOOK - paperback, 124 pages
Author: H. Richardson, edited by I Richardson
Year: 1991

The lights of Adelaide! Home! As the plane taxied into the runway I savoured every moment of the exultation of my safe return after two years. Britain, Europe, and that other world, India, had stretched my horizons and deepened my insights. Yet I had turned toward home with the unswerving certainty of a migratory bird. Why? I had no immediate family waiting for me.

Part of the answer lay with the group of friends who were at the airport to greet me. Through mutual discoveries about living and common goals, over the years they had become as family to me. My little home in the hills was warm and welcoming and the friends who had kept it that way were there to share our mutual experiences of the past two years.

But my home was also inseparable from the fertile soil of memories, and beneath that soil lay roots. Inevitably there came the day when I lifted the lid of an old trunk and began to rummage. First I found a moth eaten Australian flag which Boy Scouts of the Melbourne Y.M.C.A. troop had presented to my father when he left for U.S.A, in 1914. With it lay the American flag which he had brought back. Oblivious of time I dipped into his neat piles of letters, written from the front line in France in 1917. Many were to his mother and some to his young nieces and nephews. But in my guilty intrusion into the correspondence between him and my mother, then just a friend, I sensed the nuances of two lives in their cautious journey of discovery toward each other.

Over succeeding days I re-read Dad’s life story as he had, with failing sight, written it in 1968, the year before he died.

Contents
Preface
Live and Learn
The Survey
Road Block
Milestones
The West
Detours
Brother Man, or The Enemy?
Bend in the Road
War
In Tandem
Family
Destruction and Rebuilding