At ten years old, Judith Kelly had lost her father and was living with her mother and grandparents in Bayswater. But when her mother quarrelled with her parents, Judith was sent away to a Catholic orphanage near the seaside. It was the early 1960s, and Judith was soon to make friends with Frances, who had been there since early childhood, and a number of the other girls. What followed, however, were not blissful boarding school days, but years of unbelievable cruelty and abuse, as the incarcerated girls were forced not only to do heavy housework but were frequently punished and terribly beaten. Rock Me Gently is a moving, lucid account of Kelly's time at the convent orphanage, which culminated in the drowning of her closest friend, Frances, and another other girl at sea while the nuns knelt praying on the beach.

But Kelly's book is more than just an account of these terrors. The story of her time at the orphanage is interspersed with memories time she spent at a kibbutz in Israel eight years later, where she befriended an elderly woman, a Holocaust survivor called Miriam, who helped unlock her feelings against the nuns and her feelings of responsibility for Frances' death.  Finally, back in Britain, Kelly meets with one of the nuns who had persecuted her so terribly and slowly and painfully achieves a kind of peace.

Affecting and deeply shocking, Rock Me Gently is an extraordinary book with exceptional and deeply-affecting prose. Judith Kelly is now retired after a successful career in television production.
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