George Evans had been working underground as a miner for three years when he volunteered for the British Army in 1944. He was eighteen years old. The train from Banwen across the mountains to the Brecon barracks was the first stage of a remarkable journey that would take him across the world and propel him into one of the last major campaigns of World War 11. Where the Flying Fishes Play is a record of that time in a young man's life when the world holds endless possibilities. It is a moving story of comradeship with his fellow soldiers, and an account of his own widening of horizons through travel across oceans and continents filled with the danger and the romance of a war that would change his life.

Coming back home from the Far East after years serving in Burma, George Brinley Evans returns to his home in Banwen, Dulais Valley, South Wales, to find that the ex-servicemen are being treated as traitors - 'Churchill's army' - by the ferociously Communist self-appointed commissars of the local colliery. But that's not all George has on his plate. There's the fish and chip shop, the ice cream round, the Billiard Hall, the boxing club, Saturday afternoon football in bombed-out Swansea, and getting enough black market coupons off Jack Bach the butcher's wife to buy a suit and marry beautiful, dark-haired Peggy the Papers. As a painter, George has been praised for 'just painting what he sees', and this book is an astonishingly clear-eyed look back over a long lifetime in one community. Conversations fifty or sixty years ago, tales of drunken colliers and runaway ponies, births and deaths, trips to London and Cardiff, all are remembered and told with vivid clarity and directness.

Examining the relationships between families, coal-mining colleagues, and soldiers at war, this collection of seven short stories features several tales set against the partly-autobiographical backdrop of the author's life as a coal miner in the Neath Valley and as a soldier in Burma during World War Two. Also included is an essay on writer B. L. Coombes.