My birth until she died

In my twelfth year

I called her Nanny, and to me

She shone like the sun and the moon....

So begins Canberra author Leila Marion Field's beguiling memoir in verse, which captures her early years in an England gripped by war until her immigration to Australia at 19.

She had considered telling her story in a novel but a writing mentor convinced her that given her talent for poetry, she should tell it in verse.

"Everyone has a story to tell. The way we tell it is the secret," she said.

"You can say a lot in a line."

And the lines in Corridors: A Verse Memoir are packed with a powerful punch.

It relays one girl's journey to young womanhood at a very evocative time and place, mixing the personal with the wider forces affecting war-time England.

It is a lonely story in many ways and it still moves the now 87-year-old author from Bruce.

Ms Field's socialite mother and soldier father were almost completely uninterested in their six children.

I shall never

Understand what made my mother tick

Perhaps there were too many children

Hanging around her skirts taking up her

Precious time...

She and her younger sister were evacuated from seaside Brighton to northern England during the war where they were farmed off to stay with coal-mining families.

Everything looked different to

Our inexperienced eyes

Instead of green meadows and Burgeoning copses hugging

Slopping Valleys there were rows

Of grey houses huddled together

Under their dusty coverlet

There she was tormented by one of the sons, who tried to assault her as she shared a bed with her sister.

"Down the mine at fifteen, just like his

Dad" his mother said proudly Too young

To fight but not to dig obviously

There is the death of her beloved nanny, soon after they arrived back home. A woman who always had time for the children, who always put them first.

Home again, I shall never forget the

Look on Nanny's face as she rushed through

the door to greet us, tears in her eyes once

Again as she held us close to her chest

Then packed off to a convent boarding school where she stayed four years after her parents divorced, finally feeling "wonderfully safe".

I enjoyed

The new feeling of belonging that

Enveloped me after years of a lonely

Childhood with no girlfriends of my

Own age....

And then her migration to Australia where two of her older sisters had settled after marrying Australian airmen who had been stationed in England, travelling first class on the RMS Orion, leaving alone.

No one standing on the dock at Tilbury

For me to send down a coloured paper streamer

But then revelling in the hint of a new life and a new beginning

Did I imagine

I could smell spiciness in the breezes blowing off

The west coast of Australia as the ship approached

Fremantle? The scent of Eucalypts, the gum trees

I had heard about?

Ms Field went on to lead a full life in Australia, marrying, having two children, divorcing. She returned to England to study, at the age of 49, at the Cordon Bleu School of Cookery in London. She later returned to Australia and has lived in Canberra since 2000, now re-married.

"I had always written poetry from an early age, always read books from my childhood and am rarely without a book in my hand," she said.

Publishing her poetry is next on her list but so, too, a sequel to Corridors.

"Many readers want to know how the story ends to this present time - more of my life to reveal," she said.

Corridors: A Verse Memoir will be launched at the Paperchain book store on Thursday at 6pm by Tony Brennan, Deputy High Commissioner of the British High Commission.