Hurdles are for jumping.

Hurdles are for jumping by Frances McAll New Cherwell Press, 1998, [pounds sterling] 7.99

Frances McAll and her husband, Kenneth McAll, have each written several books--about their experiences in Japanese internment camps in China during World War II, about his pioneering work on the boundaries between psychiatry and spiritual healing, about her work as a GP. Frances McAll's latest book fills in the gaps in their story--but stands on its own, as a engagingly frank, humourous and sometimes exciting read.

Much of the first part of the book is devoted to an account of her journey, aged 23, to join Ken in China, where they married and worked as medical missionaries until they were interned. She set out in August 1939--and survived both a shipwreck (like the survivors of the Titanic, she watched the ship disappear from an overcrowded lifeboat) and later a typhoon. Thanks to the war neither her parents, in Britain, nor Ken, in China, knew what had happened to her and when she eventually arrived months late in Shanghai, there was no one to meet her.

The second half of the book describes the McAlls' return to Britain, after four years' internment, and how she juggled five children, her work as a family doctor and her husband's ventures into ever more controversial areas of medical practice. She describes her reservations and struggles as he branched out first into psychiatry (and some of his patients came to live in their home) and then into helping patients who had dabbled in the occult or been affected by violent or unmourned deaths in their family history.

This is the story of how two very different people--each with a clear, and sometimes opposed, sense of what God wanted them to do--have stuck together for more than 50 years, and enjoyed the experience. It's also a great true life adventure story. Two good reasons to buy it.