Monkeys, Bears and Gutta Percha: Memories of Manse, Hospital and War (Flashbacks series)

In Monkeys, Bears and Gutta Percha Colin MacLean picks up and develops the family story as told by his mother, Isabella G. MacLean, in the remarkable collection of her letters, Your Father and I (Flashback No. 6) . He looks back across a varied career in journalism and publishing, highlighting many of the distinctive - some now far-distant - features in school and university education, in conditions of health and hygiene, in language, and in the social and religious attitudes of his early years. His strongly personal account traces the span of one family's contacts with two world wars and presents the moving and often painful story of the impact on his sister Isabel of her brief and unexpected war service at Bletchley Park, where the Ultra Secret was being unravelled - in the most intense secrecy.The Rev Alexander MacLean died in 1932 when his son Colin was seven years old. Six decades later Colin chanced upon a copy of the address his father had given, some days before he died, at the general Assembly of the Church of Scotland: Mr MacLean had told of a schoolboy who wrote, 'Monkeys, bears and other animals are to be found in theological gardens', a thought which Colin has found relevant to his own story. As for the gutta percha, that belongs with a real animal in an old family story.