WHERE THE RAINBOW FELL DOWN Synopsis

A memoir in two parts. The first half details the author’s life growing up in post-war New Zealand. Born into a dysfunctional NZ Catholic family with a disturbed mother, controlling father, and abusive step father, political and historical events help influence and shape her. After leaving home to work at the age of 15, Robinson was coerced into marriage at 18 to a calculating, older man. She experiences years of marital unhappiness until she begins a career as a Marriage Guidance Counsellor, and finds unexpected love, joy and escape with a Catholic Priest.

During the second half of the story the priest’s tale unfolds. Brian is the only child of an introverted mother preoccupied with concealing her deformity, and a passive father who ‘went with the flow.’ As a young naïve man he was easily coerced into the priesthood and spent years of training in the Seminary where young men were conditioned and shaped for their role, their sexual natures suppressed, attitudes to women distorted, and their loyalty to the Church made absolute. Brian questioned all of this but continued. He then forms a relationship that challenges his Catholic conditioning and he determines to leave the priesthood. His struggle to escape the Church and the pressures placed on him to remain, test this relationship fully, but both remain firm.