I have lost a tale. Or a tail. Either I am more confused than I thought I was, or I make up fantastic stories during the rest of my 3 - 4 hours of sleep left me after enduring the regular nightmares I have to put up with every night, These nightmares are things that were caused by my being at age two caught up in a horrible war - we lived then in the east end of London, and before we were evacuated because the house we lived in had a bomb fall on it and it fell to bits and I had to be dug free from the wreckage. Before that, I recall (every effing night !), emerging with my parents from a communal shelter erected on the middle of our small cul de sac after the All Clear was sounded, to find the other such shelter in our 'turning' had taken a direct hit, and there were burning bits of human bodies lying in the street, the smell is what hits me most. People were looking around to see the gaps in the houses and breaking into tears and cries when one of the gaps was where their house had stood. Gas mains were burning and water mains were broken and bubbling up. I have sought help, but nothing has ever worked. The sheer horror of such experiences on a 2-year old are magnified and so deeply imprinted on the brain.

Many years later I was sent by my employers to Germany, and lived and worked there for some years. I even married a German (that lasted 12 years).

Whilst there I was offered the opportunity to visit one of those NAZI Death Camps (they take children of 12 or so years to see them to drive into them the awfulness of such places, to teach them that such things must never happen again. It works, as the children come home shocked and say to their grandparents that they should have stopped all that, and the Germans, at least until the Unification anyway, are or were the most pacifistic and un-warlike of ALL the Europeans) Well, three times I was going to see one of them (they are kept as reminders to the People what a depth of nastiness they had descended into back then), and three times I caught a sniff of the still-lingering smell of burning human flesh; my hair stood on end, I felt very cold and shivered, was nauseous, and one time actually vomited. I always turned back.

But back to my lost tale, I can remember it was about a family with I think 2 or possibly 3 children, one of whom was a small and frail boy who looked more like a girl. It was a bit like Angharad's story "Totally Insane" except that they lived not far from the South Coast of England.
One chapter had the girlish boy and a girl he went to school with joining a Course where they were taught how to sail a Mirror Dinghy, and the pair of them ended up winning a race at the end of that week.

I think that later there was a trip to Switzerland, to visit a surgeon who did the SRS on the main character. She already had gone out a few times with a Boyfriend, and her future was obviously heading that way.

Her Father was promoted by his employers and asked to move to Australia to open a new branch of his Company for them, and the story ends with the family, minus an older brother who wanted to stay in Britain to get a proper degree from a British rather than a Commonwealth university, settling into this new life which was painted as rather a big step up for them all.

I have tried to find it again, as I like to re-read the most interesting tales. I have used Google, Story Site's search facility, and the one BCTS offers, but none of them have found it. It may have been withdrawn, of sent to bed in Stardust (I looked but did not find it there), or even have been on an older site, like Sapphire's.

If only I could recall the name of the Author and or the Title,,,,, but I cannot.

If the clever and hard-working people in Brielle, New Jersey can find it for me I will be so grateful. I promise to send you £ 5 straight away, that should be about US$ 7-8, and I just heard that a small start-up biotech company I helped to finance a few years ago is being bought by a bigger firm and I should receive a small payment for my small shareholding there - I have wanted to help you with a donation for a long time, but now I am 78 and retired and trying to live on a UK State Pension, I have a wee hoosie on a tiny Scottish Island and a very old car that needs more and more done to keep it going, without which I cannot get about much (it's the leg that was trapped by the girder when I was 2 - the older I get the worse it gets) so I am living in what are politely called "Reduced Circumstances".

And as from now I am making a note of all the tales I think I will want to read more than once.

Thank you for your time and efforts,

with thanks and respect for all your achievements,

Briar