Christopher is the eldest of seven in a middle-class English family.

Theresa is the thirteenth child of Chinese immigrants in the British colony of Singapore.

This is the story of how they met after the war, having grown up on opposite sides of the world.

Despite vastly different backgrounds, they shared a common bond, having both survived the Second World War in Asia - Christopher as a prisoner on the Burma-Siam railway, Theresa a young woman working in Japanese-occupied Singapore.

Real-life characters, from sardonic ex-POWs to affectionate siblings and cousins in the armed forces, eccentric spinster aunts, hilarious ex-girlfriends and ebullient colonial types leap off the page as they tell the story in their own words, collected in this memoir through letters and diaries dating from the 1930s to 1959, interspersed with Theresa's tape-recordings about her life made in 2000.