Friday 19 May 2017





World War 2, 1940. For 76 consecutive nights Adolph Hitler unleashed the fury of his Luftwaffe on Britain’s largest city in a nonstop hail of bombs that had helpless civilians wilting under their blast. Step Green was three weeks old and his sister Tess two years when the Green family of eleven siblings sought refuge from the bombing and in desperation were evacuated from London’s East End and dispatched to sympathetic countries of the British Empire to evade the Fuehrer’s wrath. 77 child evacuees drowned when a German U-boat sank the ocean liner City of Benares on which they travelled. Having been assessed as being too young to travel, Step and Tess were sent to East Anglia to live with an aunt where they were reasonably safe from the war, but never safe from death which lurked in the hedgerows of Poplar Farm. Tess was brutally killed and at twelve years of age Step’s loyalty and love for his sister committed him to a lifetime of retribution during which he travelled the world to satisfy his childhood vow to avenge her death. The killer was punished by the courts, but ‘never enough’, said Step who pursued that killer, released under a new identity along his trail of freedom to Auckland New Zealand. It was there Step learned to love and to forgive and begin a new life with a brother he thought had perished in a dramatic action on the high seas. With murder and arson in the headlines of Auckland newspapers it was judged Step Green had administered his own version of justice. Throughout the trial he refused to plead his innocence and was committed to Mt Eden Prison for life. Guilty, or not guilty? You be the judge.

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