A seventeen-year-old would-be actress arrives in London at the outbreak of peace in 1945, seeking fame and fortune.

 

     She soon joins a theatre company, touring ration-bound England and then the war-ravaged British Zone of occupied Germany.  On her return and now seriously out of work, she meets a motley group of characters.  

 

     One of them, another Australian girl, has a bright idea:  they would buy a train ticket each to Zurich and from there, travel further a-field by hitch-hiking – as it was then known.  

     To their surprise, it worked.  After many adventures and back in England with only a few minor television parts to keep the wolf from the door, she decides to enrol in a secretarial college. 

 

     But before she can graduate from this institution, she comes down with mumps.  

After a spell in an infectious diseases hospital of which Florence Nightingale would have been proud, and a swim in the Channel with some English submariners, homesickness overtakes and she returns to Australia.  

 

     She realises that achievement is relative; the whole world can be, and has been, her stage.   

 

 

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