I have a very interesting book group. We’ve had a patchy career so far, moving from cafe to cafe, and finally to my home, in search of a quiet place to share books. Our numbers have waxed and waned, and at present we seem to be down to about 3 regulars, but I’m sure it will grow again.

We’ve chosen not to select one book for all to read. This doesn’t appeal to me; it’s too like school, and I don’t want to have to read books that I might not choose to for myself. I do enough of that when I write reviews for newspapers (which have been drying up lately, and the latest book they’ve sent me is one I wouldn’t even have picked up off the shelf; but I won’t dwell on that!)

Our theme this week is war; its consequences in people’s lives. The two books I’ve chosen to read are Song of Survival: Women Interned, by Helen Colijin (1995), and Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, eds Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge.

Song of Survival is  the story of three sisters and their three-and-a-half year ordeal in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in what was the Netherlands East Indies, and became Indonesia. The Dutch sistes were visiting their parents on the tiny island, Tarakan, where oil derricks supplied crude petroleum. Anton Colijn  was manager of a petroleum company. While the sisters were visiting, the German invaded Poland, and then The Netherlands. so they did not go back, but stayed on in Batavia (now Jakarta), where they were working and studying. In 1942, Tarakan was attacked by the Japanese, a month after the battle of Pearl Harbour, and the Dutch surrendered. Mrs Colijn was taken prisoner, and their father escaped, and joined his daughters in Batavia.As the Japanese began landing on Java, Aton arranged for his daughters to evacuate on a ship bound for Australia, and at the last minute, decided to go with them, rather than stay and try to defend a hopeless cause.

The ship gets bombed, ruthlessly, and the hundreds of passengers abandon ship. The sisters and their father are separated; Helen manages to swim to a very overcrowded lifeboat, and after some haggling among the men on it, is allowed on; she finds, to her joy, that  her father is on it too. After seven days, with nothing to eat but dried biscuit, and very little water,   they reach land, on the isolated coast of Sumatra.