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The Books

TURBANS

As the clouds of World War II gathered, Gertrude, a product of an extramarital liaison, travels to join her father in India and to find her mother. She meets Richard, a naval lieutenant joining his destroyer in Singapore, and they fall in love.

While he is at sea, she finds her mother’s grave and, nettled by the strict etiquette of the Raj, leaves for Ceylon and has a whirlwind week with Richard in Colombo.

Devastated by news that Richard’s ship has been sunk, she rides her pony and is thrown. She is found by Yuvraj, the Sikh estate driver wearing his turban, as did her Richard at the fancy dress ball on the liner. She is badly concussed and thinks he is Richard and submits willingly to him. A tawny son is born and packed off with Yuvraj, the father.

Seeking vengeance for Richard’s loss, she joins the Women’s Army Corps, becomes involved with the war in Burma, and is captured. She meets a remorseful Yuvraj, now fighting for the Japanese against the British. He helps her escape, but while she becomes a heroine, he is executed as a traitor.

How does she deal with the loss of the three males in her life?

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TURBANS by Dick Parsons

A Fisher of Slaves: 2nd Edition

A Fisher of Slaves weaves together three narratives set in a grim episode of African history. The first story describes the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade through the eyes of Nathaniel, a boy serving as an apprentice in a slave ship and his coming of age in a time of great uncertainty.

The second is centered on Elizabeth, Nathaniel’s widowed mother and a rector’s daughter who is horrified to learn that her son is serving in a slave ship. Elizabeth meets the curate of a neighboring parish who is the son of a planter and learns how slaves are treated on plantations. The curate, after seeing her as an admirable vicar’s wife, wants to marry her but she refuses. Elizabeth is gripped with the desire to help the anti-slavery movement but finds it impossible. All this changes when she crosses paths with an escaped slave and her child.

Finally, the third narrative follows the experiences of James Youle, the master of the slave ship, “Mary Anne.” Youle is a simple mariner who becomes bewitched with Elizabeth but she rebuffs his advances as she does not want to have anything to do with a master serving in that evil trade. In a series of riveting twists, these characters and their separate journeys will collide and culminate in events that will change their lives forever.

A Fisher of Slaves was inspired by Dick Parsons’ visit to the old slaving stations in Gambia and Ghana.  Researching, he found the log of the slaver the “African” and much other useful material including the private diary of a Mate serving in a slave ship.  This has helped to give the book its credence.  He has also read much about the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition, and he discusses this through the eyes of a slave-ship Apprentice and of its abolition through his mother’s concern and horror of the trade.

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A Fisher of Slaves by Dick Parsons

New Zealand A Personal Discovery

Two hundred and twenty years after Captain Cook’s first tour of New Zealand, Dick Parsons takes us on a more comfortable voyage of discovery round the north and south islands. He gives us a fascinating insight into the life—human, animal and botanical—of this green and majestic land on the other side of the world.

From ninety-mile beach in the far north to Dunedin via the Southern Alps, forests, inlets, glaciers, lakes, and islands—even the elusive Mt. Cook—are recorded in fine detail. Birds, beasts, and marine life, plus the impact of man—whether Maori, Scots, or English—are described and commented on with fairness and good humor.

There is much to be admired about the Kiwis, not only their all-conquering “All Blacks”, but their great spirit of enterprise, for when Britain breaking its commercial ties with the Commonwealth, joined the European Common Market, the resourceful Kiwis rose to the challenge and forged strong economic links with Pacific Rim countries. Britain now initiating BREXIT, can learn much from our enterprising Kiwi friends.

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New Zealand A Personal Discovery

A Family Divided

The Versailles Treaty which brought peace after the Great War (1914-18) was viewed by Adolf Hitler as humiliating and unjust, leading to his determination to make Germany great again and the Reich judenfrie (rid of the Jews). When he becomes Führer in 1934, his policies affect the families of two German brothers in evermore contrasting ways. Klaus the younger, is married to a Jew and their children a boy and a girl, are therefore Jewish. His brother Wolfgang’s wife like him, is an Aryan and to Hitler and the Nazis, their two blond blue-eyed sons are archetypal German boys to be nurtured by the Hitler Youth to become enthusiastic and loyal Nazis.

Meanwhile the Jews and Klaus’ family suffer increasing persecution, with the threat of imprisonment in concentration camps and extermination at the hands of the S.S.

The two branches of the family become separated by Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the Uncles, Aunts and the four cousins suffer contrasting fates as the events of WW2 unfold.

Much research by author Dick Parsons has enabled him to portray this terrible period in European history through the lives of this family of two brothers.

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A Family Divided by Dick Parsons

Dick Parsons