The British Empire Library


Finding A Flame Lily: A Teenager In Africa

by Judy Rawlinson


Review by Hugh Macmillan (Historian and Research Associate, African Studies Centre, Oxford University)
Judy Rawlinson, has written and self-published her own very engaging and entertaining book - Finding a Flame Lily. The book deals with her parents' exotic origins - her mother was of partly Spanish and Anglo-Indian descent and met her husband in Burma - and her own upbringing in wartime and post-war London. She spent five years with her parents in Northern Rhodesia at Fort Rosebery - now Mansa - travelling to school at Jean Rennie's in Lusaka and leaving for university in Liverpool in 1960. Her father had a job in the PWD and she provides a lively and frank account of teenage life on a provincial boma in Luapula Province with sidetrips to Samfya and Lake Bangweulu. Much of her social life was provided by the young officials on the boma, and by her own brother who came out to work on a research project. Among the people whom she encountered was Lorna Gore-Browne - the estranged, and eccentric, wife of the equally eccentric Sir Stewart Gore-Browne of Shiwa Ngandu - who was working on a WHO project. Judy was aware of the emerging nationalist movement and was certain that after her experiences at Fort Rosebery she could not study at a South African university under apartheid.
British Empire Book
Author
Judy Rawlinson
Published
2015
Pages
353
Publisher
Rawlinson Publications
ISBN
1907991131
Availability
Abebooks
Amazon


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