Paul Letters, the author who left with his family for Australia at the end of last year, reports they are loving the Gold Coast’s wide open spaces but missing Sai Kung’s tight community.
“Everyone is so much more spread out here,” Paul wrote to BUZZ. “We miss turning up at an eatery like CASA and knowing at least half of the patrons.” Son James, now 10, loves their lawn, which is the size of a tennis court, and the nearby park. “We love the beaches and we like the fact we can afford to buy property here.”
The Letters family now lives on the Gold Coast south of Brisbane and just north of the New South Wales border. “Everything works smoothly from the health service to wheelchair access onto the beach. (Paul was a familiar sight in Sai Kung getting around on his mobility scooter because of a back condition). I love the fact that Australia welcomes wheelchairs. I’d find it hard to go back to more discriminatory Hong Kong.”
James is doing well in sports, music and maths, taking after his mother Joanne, now teaching the subject at Lindisfarne Anglican School. James has represented his school at soccer and rugby and is playing saxophone in the school band. He has joined a maths extension group and is competing in the school’s Tournament of the Minds team.
Paul continues to write books. His latest, published by Blacksmith Books, is set in war-time Hong Kong in 1941. Some of the action takes part in familiar Sai Kung scenes. “The Slightest Chance” tells the story of an Anglo-Australian civil servant, Dominic Sotherly, who leads a complicated double life in war and love. Dominic takes up with Gwen Harmison, an Englishwoman with secrets, including an inscrutable Eurasian, Chester Drake. One of Hong Kong’s legendary heroes, a one-legged Chinese admiral, enters the action leading the “Great Escape” into China. Paul’s book is a thriller and a love story revealing authentic insights into what really happened in Hong Kong and China during Word War II.
Paul’s earlier war novel, “A Chance Kill”, topped the South China Morning Post book charts. With James, Paul presents a history podcast for kids and adults, “Dad and Me Love History”. See www.paulletters.com
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