David Close’s English mother Isobelle Harwood never knew her mother, who died from TB just after childbirth and his Irish father Jack Close never knew his father, who was jailed for bigamy. To the Irish, ‘close’ means ‘near-enough’ while Jack always was, legally speaking, a bastard. These sociological factors shaped their working-class family struggles before, during and after World War Two in England and reappear as ‘family karma’ down the generations of this now-scattered clan.

His mother’s childhood memories of orphanage life in the 1920s were followed by years of domestic servitude in the houses of her rich or unscrupulous ‘betters’ until she trained as a nurse during the war. She calls this story ‘Finding Myself’, which is part 1 of this book. Isobelle saw a photograph of and became pen-pals with an Irish nurses’ brother called Jack, a sailor on Atlantic convoy duties who she married on Victory in Europe Day in May 1945. David was born in June the following year.

The second section ‘Knowing Myself’ reveals their married life until Isobelle’s battle with life-threatening TB when she was thirty years old in 1953. On recovery, her doctors claimed that if she lived in a dry climate and had no more children she would have a life-expectancy of ten more years. However, she produced two more offspring and managed to ride for an hour on a camel in China at the age of seventy-six.

Part 3 contains David’s childhood memories of England, Ireland and in 1961 the first ten years of family life in Oz. Some of his father Jack’s wartime exploits and then his untimely death in 1982 lead the reader into the last section titled Release Retrospectives containing his mother’s mature reflections on grief, life and the all and everything, as well as her Back to Britain and Silk Road Diaries.

Her son David’s lifelong troubled relationship with his father is explored in his other autobiographical works, but his two chapters titled ‘Close encounters of the personal secret kind’ and ‘Conflicts and growth amidst grief’ explore three of the Close family’s personal experiences of communications from beyond the grave – pointing towards reincarnation being cosmic reality central to any ‘Divine Plan’ and the healing answer to why we are here…