Bound with Love: Letters Home from China, 1935-1945.

Seton, Rosemary

Bound with Love: Letters Home from China, 1935-1945.

Edited by Audrey Salters. Agequod Publications, 2007. Pp. 360. Paperback 12.50 [pounds sterling]/$20. (To order, go to www.boundwithlove.co.uk.)

Ronald and Gwyneth Still sailed from British shores for China in August 1935 to join the Baptist Missionary Society's mission in a town they called Chouts'un (Zhoucun), in Shantung (Shandong) Province, where Ronald Still was to take up a position in the BMS Foster Hospital. From Chouts'un the newly married couple sent home letters to their parents and siblings vividly describing their experiences and impressions. Later on, they wrote in some detail of their survival with three small daughters under Japanese occupation and internment.

About a thousand of the couple's letters in blue airmail envelopes survive in the home of Audrey Salters, one of the three daughters born in China. From these she has selected and edited extracts, deftly weaving together an absorbing and, at times, extremely moving narrative. The lives of a deeply Christian but modern young couple on a small, remote mission station in North China in the 1930s are brilliantly re-created through the engaging frankness and humor of Gwyneth's letters, while Ronald's provide fascinating detail about hospital patients, their medical conditions, and his surgical experiences. At Christmas 1937 everything changed as Japanese forces first bombed and then occupied Chouts'un. With some interruptions, the Stills stayed at their post, Ronald working valiantly but under increasing difficulties at the hospital until August 1942, when, with hopes of repatriation fast receding, the family moved with three hundred or so other Britishers into the Columbia Country Club in Shanghai. Though the club, unlike Chouts'un, had running water, eleven flush toilets were found insufficient to provide for the needs of 360 inmates! Other far worse shortcomings and deprivations were experienced over the next three years, and the reader feels all the joy and relief of the Stills as they write at the end of August 1945 that they have all survived and will soon be on their way home.

Over the years I have read many missionary compilations and memoirs, but I found this book to be one of the most engaging. I have been charmed, moved, and informed and was sorry only that the story had to end!

Rosemary Seton was, until 2004, Keeper of Archives and Special Collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.