In 1943, following the Armistice in Italy, many Prisoners of War were released by their guards but found themselves fugitives in a country over-run by the Germans. One such prisoner was known in Italy as Luigi. Realising that the Allies were not yet in his part of the country, he decided to walk from Padua in the north to reach the front-line in the south. During the course of his arduous journey through the backwaters of Italy he was hidden and given sanctuary by two Italian farming families. In 1949 he took his fiancee to meet them. Sadly, having survived the war he died in 1959 leaving his Italian friends unaware of his tragic death.

Following two and a half years of misadventure in rich, white-dominated Southern Rhodesia (now impoverished, African-controlled Zimbabwe). At the age of nineteen, having travelled 8,000 miles by liner and train from Britain, the author became a technician in the Rhodesian Roads Department but after six months he escaped his impending confinement in a road construction gang caravan containing a bedsit-cum-laboratory! Transferring to a remote research farm in the hot, dry Lowveld; he lived in a bungalow for two years, shared with three other technicians and pampered by African servants. His scientific work was interrupted by elephants, deadly snakes and sexual entanglements! The author's work, like the duties of the rest of the Rhodesian Whites involved the help of Africans. Their co-operation was needed in the home, on the farm and in the laboratory and other workplaces. Without it, Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s would have been unable to function. The replacement of Rhodesia by Zimbabwe resulted in the exodus of the Whites. Denied their know-how Zimbabwe descended into chaos.