Peter Forrester

An Apprentice's War Peter Forrester

Publisher Marketing: Memoirs of war-time "I wonder now did I take all these war-time friendships and mentors and acquaintances for granted? Perhaps I did. They all add up to an incredible richness-fantastic privilege. "There have been other friendships since those days, all different, all special in their own way, all valued very highly, but they don't come into this memoir of war-time. I am truly grateful to my heavenly Father for all of them. "There have been times when I have looked back to those war years and felt yet again the atmosphere of gloom which often attended them. One sees just the long hours of work, the endless travelling in blacked-out buses through blacked-out streets passed blacked-out homes and the food rationing and clothing rationing and petrol rationing and general squalor. "Then there was the feeling of not being in any sort of control over one's life-in a certain sense, Hitler was running everyone's life. I might even feel, at times that I was 'cheated' out of my youth. "Which only goes to show that we humans have the capacity to ignore enormous blessings. We should be careful not to do that. "In a different mood I see clearly that while evil may seem to be in control the God of heaven "works all things together for good, to those who love Him." I believe that no other way of life, during those years, would have proved more fruitful in terms of the eternal values." Contributor Bio:  Forrester, Peter Peter J. Forrester is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, Victoria. He is the author of Log-Gases and Random Matrices (2010) and was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2004.