Night light
Richard West
Dust of Life: Children of the Saigon Streets Liz Thomas (Hamish Hamilton £4.50)
Of all the millions of foreigners who went to South Vietnam during the civil war, few can have done more good or less harm than Liz Thomas, the author of this engaging memoir. She Went first as a nurse, at the age of twenty, and remained to found a home for those stray girls and street children who called themselves the 'dust of life.'
She tended the sick on the battlefield, and she stayed in Vietnam after the Cornmum:st take-over, but her courage was most heavily taxed when confronting the horror of life in the lower depths of Saigon. At the orphanage where she first went to work (one sponsored by Britain's Ockenden Venture, pet charity of the Cabinet Minister, Davld Ennals), the children fought with the rats for their food; the nurses would cook and urinate on the same patch of floor; infants were left on high tables from which theY could fall and smash their skulls. She saw old men and mentally ill patients shackled to their beds. But perhaps the most harrowing passages in the book concern the young drug addicts of Le Lai Street, a district where few other foreigners dared to walk• . Some readers of this book may find .n incredible. How could a young English glr,1 have survived alone in the horrors 01 Saigon ? I can testify to the truthfulness of this book, having got to know Liz Thomas in 1974 ('Richard West . . a liking Vietnamese beer "33" and gin and tonic)' having helped to make a film about her the following year, and having seen most of the places and met most of the people that she describes.. The orphanage, when we went back, was still a disgrace and a baby was. actually perched on a high table; the Le Lai drug district was even more dreadful than Liz Thomas paints it; above all she reallY was just as famous and popular in the of Saigon as she was unknown in the Posn quarter where we journalists lived. Liz Thomas could not have stuck Saigoil had she not been endowed with love of hlei. and people, high spirits and humour—all 01_ which qualities come put in this book..she got permission to visit the main Saigo.ne prison by flirting with its governor when 11, offered her a cigarette she took one of ho cigars. When the Communists took 0.ver; she joined in looting the local police statt°1i. 00,..
and later turned down several offers
marriage with soldiers from Hanoi. Kncibe ing and liking Liz Thomas, I cannot called an impartial critic, but I am sure t11.4:r many people will love this simple, tetlac and heartening book.
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