Bill's Secrets

Class War and Ambition

By: Belinda Probert

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Paperback | 7 January 2025

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21.0 x 15.1 x 2.4

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A father presents as an English gentleman and war hero to his wife and subsequent children who catch up with the truth of the impoverished Welsh beginnings only after his death. His daughter ponders this singular life in the context of a changing Britain in the 20th century.

Major Bill Probert emerged from the Second World War a decorated war hero, a gifted linguist in the Intelligence Corps. He met the love of his life, a beautiful Oxford graduate, when they were both posted to the Allied Control Commission occupying Vienna in 1945. He was a cultured and ambitious Englishman, with no living family of his own.

After a successful international business career, Bill retires at 59, only to reinvent himself first as a fly fisherman and farmer in Wales, and then - for the last decade of his life - as a resident of the Bearn, lover of the Pyrenees and everything French.

Four months after he was buried in St Faust de Haut a letter arrives for him, announcing that his nephew Denzil, from Brecon in Wales, has finally found him, and is coming to visit. Bill's wife and children were about to learn that Bill began life as Roy, in an impoverished Welsh mining family in the Rhondda. His mother and three siblings were alive and well when his children were born.

Why did Roy decide to become Bill and erase Wales and his family? Thirty years after his death it was time to unearth his many secrets. This is the story of a daughter's hunt for her perplexing and unpredictable father.

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