I stuffed a copy of The Small Woman, The Heroic Story of Gladys Aylward by Alan Burgess (Servant Books) into my overloaded bag at the annual book sale at the Denman Island Blackberry Fair (all the books you want in exchange for a donation to the Land Conservancy) because I, myself, am a small woman, though not nearly as brave as Gladys Aylward. At the age of 3, Gladys, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary. She spoke only English and had little money but she must have been a good walker because that’s how she made it to China after the rail line was block by a brief China-Russia war, and that is how she often made her way around the mountainous province of Shanxi. She spent the next 12 years there, running an inn for travelling muleteers, nursing, looking after orphans, being an official “foot inspector” and trying to make converts, and only fled when Japanese invaders announced a $1 reward on a poster with her name on it. By now the Japanese were bombing villages and taking no prisoners so she and fifty orphans made a perilous journey over the mountains to safety. This book was the basis of the movie “The Inn of Sixth Happiness” in which, much to Gladys’s displeasure, she saw herself played by Ingrid Bergman, who didn’t even take on a Cockney accent. Burgess’s book, which was first published in 1957, is well-written and kept my interest as it ran along smoothly. My copy has the name “Shiral Tobin” followed by “9t” written on the inside front cover and since this is an unusual name I assume that this book was read by the CBC journalist as part of her school curriculum. This assumption is reinforced by the hand-drawn heart with an arrow through it on a blank page at the back of the book and, facing it on the inside back cover, the phrase “Shiral Tobin + Dave Lawrence.”