When Shelagh Bell was sorting through her mother's possessions after she had moved into a nursing home, she came across a pile of typescript, clumsily typed on one finger, many of the pages screwed up or out of order. She had found her mother's memoirs, covering the years from her birth in 1900 to the death of the husband she worshipped, Shelagh's father, in 1970. Shelagh devoted all her spare time to sorting them out and typing them up properly, and the result is this book; a beautifully-written, moving and often very funny story of a family who lived through two world wars and were constantly on the move, thanks to his career as a sea captain and her passion for house-hunting.