Small Fish, A: Memoirs Of A Survivor

WEST AUSTRALIANA
“I was baptised Imelda Pearl Margarita … It was such an impressive list of names for a small fish who in her early years was jostled back and forth, passed from hand to hand and slept in more strange beds in strangers’ homes than most folk do in a lifetime.”
Pearl Smith grew to womanhood with plenty of experience of the darker side of human nature. Born to a single mother, related to a notorious prostitute, Pearl was an innocent victim of the cruel gossip, hypocrisy and distorted moralism that was the downside of the close-knit working class community of Fremantle between the wars.
After war service in the Air Force, where the experience of a community of supportive women showed how things might have been, Pearl drifted into an ill-advised marriage to a man whose home life is revealed as a sharp contrast to his public image as a hero of the union movement.
Vividly and passionately written, A Small Fish finally exorcises the demons of Pearl’s past. Somewhere, she found the strength to endure, survive and eventually triumph.
332 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. #270123