In the Shadow of the Cotton Tree

In 1940, John Archibald McKenzie Rillie - serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps and newly married to Betty - was posted to the African city of Freetown in Sierra Leone. This is the first publication of the writing and the poems, drawn in the main from his diary and the notebook in which he collated much of his war-time verse, that mark his experiences in the sixteen months that followed. In the words of his editor, and grandson, Alasdair Soussi, it is an 'expressive, outspoken, sometimes raw and uncomfortable account of a bygone age'. The later reflections of Jack Rillie, the by then greatly admired and influential university teacher, on this period - and on his life prior to the war - are presented in a brief introduction, "A Young Life Recalled". With a foreword by Andrew Hook and an afterword from Marshall Walker; reproductions of photographs and letters; and even a list of books Jack read while in Sierra Leone, the man who inspired so many is revealed both for his formidable scholarship and his love.