IN JAPAN THE CRICKETS CRY
BY Ronald Clements & Steve Metcalf
Monarch Books. 224 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-85424 9708
This book is hard to put down. It begins with a small boy in a missionary family, growing up in a tribal village in southwest China.
In 1934 at the age of six, Steve’s life changed forever when his parents took him to join his sister at the China Inland Mission (CIM) Chefoo school in north China. In 1937 the Japanese occupation of north China ended his annual Christmas visits home and the Pearl Harbour attack finally severed communication with his parents and the whole school was moved to the Weifang (Weihsien) POW Internment camp. But there the gold medallist Eric Liddell had a profound influence on this teenager which changed the course of his life.
