Dangerous wartime trek is recalled

But her friends rightly convinced her that it was a piece of history that needed to be preserved - the story of a perilous trek through the jungle and across a continent in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Burma.

Sadly her mother and her father both perished. Forced to stay behind, they were never to see their children again.

But despite the obstacles, despite the distance, Maude, her two sisters and her brother, managed to cross the jungle and cross India to reach the safety of Lahore - a monumental journey she has chronicled in her book Burma And Beyond, the true story of survival in the Far East in World War Two.

The child of a British father and an Indian mother, Maude was born in Rawalpindi which is now Pakistan.

"The book is about my move from India to Burma. When I was about six my father was in the post and telegraphs department and we journeyed to Burma normally as a family would in those days, but when I was 12, of course the war came to Burma when the Japanese invaded.

"My father could not leave his post and my mother was too ill to go anyway.

She had to stay behind with him. And so my father sent us with a convoy of people to go back to India, to get back to safety as it was getting very dangerous. It was myself, two sisters and my brother. My brother was 18. My sister was 15. I was 12 and my little sister was six.

"We joined a convoy of people and trekked through the jungle. It was very frightening. The Japanese at that point were about two weeks away from where our home was. We trekked through the jungle for seven days, but it wasn't simply the trek. When we left home, we left by steam boat and then at a certain point we walked through the jungle, and then we went by bus to Calcutta. Our final destination was Lahore right across the continent.

"You are talking about 1,500 miles, and conditions were very bad. There were lots of refugees pouring out from Burma everywhere we went.

"To start with, my father had given us enough money, and he thought we would be safe once we got to India, but we ran out of money - though we were allowed free travel as we were refugees, and when we got to Calcutta we did have the British Red Cross that provided us with clothes and shoes and all our necessities.

"But after we left Calcutta we were on our own for the train journey to Lahore and that took about five days. We had no idea what had happened to our parents. Communication was very poor at that point.

"We were just travelling to my aunt in Lahore, but when we got to Lahore we went to the address to discover that she had died the month before. There was someone else living there and she didn't know my aunt. We had to go to the station platform and we stayed there for about ten days until my brother discovered some friends that we had had before we left in India."

Sadly, they were to discover later that their parents had not survived: "My dad trekked through the jungle by a much longer route and got to Calcutta, but when he arrived he had a piece of shrapnel in his thigh and it turned gangrenous there. He died there after trekking all those miles. It was perhaps just a piece of flying debris. We don't know the full story of how he got the shrapnel.

"My mother had been too ill to go anywhere and my father had put her in a convent in Mandalay, and that's where she died just before the British recaptured Burma. She had been in the convent for about four years. My mother was 44 when she died; my father was 54."

Maude's book is available from St Olav's Bookshop, North Street, Chichester or from http://www.jeff.vinter.talktalk.net/books/books.htm at 11.99 including p&p.