About the Author
William Ash was born in Texas but fought as a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War before spending three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. His repeated attempts to escape made him one of the models for the character played by Steve McQueen in the film ‘The Great Escape’, and were chronicled in his bestselling memoir ‘Under the Wire’.
After the war Ash acquired British citizenship, and went on to become a politician, broadcaster and President of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
He was a lifelong socialist and his final work shows a rare sympathetic engagement not only with the cause of post-colonial liberation but also with the problems faced by revolutionary governments once they have won power.
It is the end of the 1990s and, above all else, Catherine Hill wants to go on being a teacher. She sees her job as being to help young people from whatever background absorb as much as possible of the rich cultural and scientific heritage mankind has accumulated over the ages.
An excellent aim; a rewarding profession.
But her objectives put her into conflict with those who think in terms of a two-tiered educational system, a step back into the past, the bottom tier being reserved for those to be given suitable training to make them usefully exploitable in the workplace. And she finds that this is a conflict in which the People’s Government is firmly on the other side.
‘Rise Like Lions’ is a sequel to ‘But My Fist Is Free’, also avaialbale in the GFTU Bookshop.