Never Forget

These are the incredible people who feature in the six true World War II stories in Never Forget.

Bram, a young boy whose privileged childhood in the Dutch East Indies was lost forever when the Japanese invaded and his father became a prisoner-of-war on the infamous Pekanbaru Death Railway.
Harry, a soldier in the 2nd New Zealand Divisional Cavalry, who survived relentless action on the battlefields of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East with just one tiny nick to his ear, but whose emotional wounds would prove far greater to heal. 
Eva, a young girl in Rotterdam, who witnessed many atrocities under the German occupation of the city, and discovered after the war, she had inadvertently delivered messages for the Resistance. 
The six Węgrzyn children, who were ripped from their happy life in Poland, endured the loss of their parents, and suffered terrible conditions and near starvation in forced labour camps in Russia.
Naylor, who was almost 100 years old before he told his family about his wartime service with one of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s top-secret RAF ‘Moonlight’ Squadrons, flying agents and supplies behind enemy lines. 
And Ronnie, whose tough wartime childhood in the slums of Newcastle upon Tyne, led to him becoming part of a destructive street gang, and ultimately being sent to Australia as a child migrant.

The Long Way Home

The Long Way Home is the story of Ronnie Sabin, who at the age of 11 was part of a street gang, living in the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. In 1950, Ronnie and his brothers were rounded up by the authorities, made wards of the court, and sent to the Fairbridge Farm School, in NSW Australia, as child migrants. It would be 55 years before Ronnie would finally return to the UK and be reunited with his family. This gut-wrenching, yet often hilarious story given Ronnie’s ‘hard case’ character, tells the positive side of the children migrant story, with Ronnie crediting his upbringing at the farm school in Australia for turning his life around. 

The book covers his early childhood in the slums of Newcastle upon Tyne, the six years he spend as a child migrant at Fairbridge Farm School, the years he spent getting in and out of scrapes as a shearer, brickie and labourer in Australia and New Zealand, and the years after he married and settled in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he owned and ran a thriving butchery and meat processing business.

Although Ronnie credits his upbringing at Fairbridge and the discipline instilled by its commanding principal Frederick Woods, for turning his life around and enabling him to make a success of it, Ronnie’s wild spirit and unique character were never fully tamed, as some of the riotous stories in the book attest.