Book Description

When Maggie Silk was ten years old, she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life: to become a teacher, to travel, to marry a man in uniform and to have four children. She achieved all this and much more besides... as we see in her memoir, Dancing in the Rain. Born in 1938 in Cleethorpes, North Lincolnshire, Maggie was the third of four children. But who would have believed that the four-year-old girl with a mucky dress, found wandering alone and taken home by an American serviceman who knew her mother, would, four decades later, receive a standing ovation from the Rotary Club in Stanford Springs, Connecticut? Or that the same girl who’d balanced eight pints of beer in a fish basket on the handlebars of her bike would one day take tea and scones with a bishop and an ambassador at the British embassy in Tokyo? Or that the barefoot child who ran ponies for sixpences on the sands every summer would be at the opera in Berlin when President Kennedy was assassinated? Maggie worked on three continents and, over the years, has lived in twenty different homes. She is not, as she herself observes, “an average stay at home housewife” – even with four children! Set in Berlin, Singapore, America, Latvia and Switzerland, her true story gives an affectionate and funny account of the mishaps, faux pas and adventures of a schoolteacher. Featuring every decade from the 1940s to the present day, Dancing in the Rain will appeal to those looking for a nostalgic, yet often amusing and thought-provoking reflection on years gone by. The book has been compiled from Maggie’s diaries and correspondence throughout the years and inspired by a creative writing class, where the idea was nurtured from a seed into a colourful, fascinating memoir.