In 1932, Lionel J. Pearce, 12, arrived at Fremantle, Australia, in a group of 27 children from the Child Emigration Society, The Strand, London, England, and en route to Fairbridge Farm School, Pinjarra, Australia.

Lionel told the story of his early life in England and at Fairbridge in his memoir, Feathers of the Snow Angel: Memroies of a Child in Exile. It was reviewed by Bron Sibree:
r n"Lionel Pearce begins his poignant memoir with a series of evocative images, childhood memories that flower fleetingly on the page as universal images of warmth and familiarity, carefully distilled into potent tools of inquiry.
r n'I see them,' he writes of a china washbasin and a water jug, 'through the bars of the cot, the essentials of civilisation, passed from generation to generation.'

Peering through these bars, Pearce opens a brief vista of life in early 1920s Lancashire as he sets the tone for a heart-rending journey into the legacy of childhood grief and cruelty. For these seemingly innocent cot bars are a metaphor for what years later is to become Pearce's personal prison -- a powerful invisible jail of inadequacy, loneliness, class-consciousness and shame.

Writing this memoir for Pearce, a retired teacher of zoology and botany and father of five, part of a life-long process of trying to deal with the effects of a painful and traumatic childhood. In the epilogue, written not long before he died at the age of 81, he reveals that 'through all the years I could never forget the sorrows of my early life.'

Yet even the honesty of this sentence cannot prepare you for the emotionaly intensity of Feathers of the Snow Angel. Pearce was five when his mother died, and the book takes its title from his fragmented memory of his mother's death. Her cold body lying in a feather bed with rumpled white sheets left on the child an impression of snow and feathers that was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

The illegitimate son of a Lancashire coalminer, Pearce spent his early years in the care of his mother, living in a household of stern, God-fearing aunts. His father, a shy awkward visitor, unwelcome in the home of his mother's family, is a caring but shadowy figure in Pearce's treasure trove of memories -- a child's universe flavoured with the taste of stale bread puddings and fearsome tales of chimney sweeps and tinkers.

Fragmentary images of his mother sewing, rolling pastry or toiling over a copper, kaleidoscope into memories of her ostracism and shame.

It is is the child Pearce who tells this story. His burgeoning class-consciousness is coloured by hunger and loneliness after his mother's death when he is taken to live with an aunt.

He becomes a desperate and hungry five-year-old roaming the streets searching for his mother, begging for pennies or food. Darkest of all these images are those of the priestly, black-robed visitors, who frequent the house and who eventually come to spirit the unwitting boy away to a convent in London to be put up for adoption.

It is the child's perspective, too, that lends such authority to Feathers of the Snow Angel and such palpable grief to its narration. Pearce is again wrenched away from a foster family he comes to love and placed into the care of a well-to-do family whose attitudes to child-rearing reinforce his self-consciousness, shame and isolation.

He is not yet eight when he receives the first of many beatings by his stepfather, for stealing chocolate.

By the time he is packed off to Fairbridge Farm in Western Australia at the age of 12, his life with his adoptive family is little more than a succession of beatings and small humiliations.

Yet, Feathers of the Snow Angel is also coloured by a curiosity and intelligence that triumphs over shame and isolation to seek elevation in books and in the beauty of nature. He recalls his years as an indentured