Author Description

In 1936 a bright young man from a London working class family went to Nigeria to work for the Church Missionary Society bookshop in Lagos. Two years later an intelligent and high-spirited young woman from a different part of London took up an isolated missionary post in eastern Nigeria. This couple met early in World War II, fell in love and decided to marry. This dual biography is about a man and a woman deeply in love, yet often held apart by circumstances; about wartime travel; about faith and determination; about bringing up a family in unusual circumstances; about achievement and failure; about living in a dedicated community with its problems and humour. This is about the life led by Don and Rex Wyatt, their personal thoughts about it, the dilemmas they faced, and how they dealt with them. Their son has put together this book to explore the realities of missionary life for these two people, their colleagues, the families they left behind and the family they brought into being. Describing it as "an attempt to understand the past," Martin Wyatt has used the letters his parents wrote to each other, other records, his mother's memoir and his own memories. The results of Martin Wyatt's explorations paint a vivid picture of the time, triumphs and heartbreak of people who chose this vocation in the early Twentieth Century.