"Grateful" is too small a word.

A little vignette that pricks the eye. From the preface of the Slightly Foxed edition of I was a Stranger by John Hackett. Referring to the Battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands in World War II

As with Dunkirk, the part played by civilians is essential to the story. Dutch resistance fighters and householders not only gave support and succor to their would-be liberators, but also took them into their hearts. One local woman, interviewed half a century later by the historian Martin Middlebrook, spoke of seeing a soldier shot before her eyes, and hearing him shout the words 'Goodbye' three times before he died: 'Because of that, I now use "Goodbye" very rarely; there is a kind of finality about it for me. Those men are, for me, friends . . . "Grateful" is too small a word.'

Hackett is severely wounded and put up, at great peril to themselves in occupied Holland, by Dutch civilians.

Readers of Slightly Foxed will be especially pleased by the importance of books in his convalescence. Ann de Nooij, who had spent time in England, is able to supply him with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott and Dickens; the head of the local Resistance is prevailed upon to seek out a copy of Vanity Fair ('I felt a great longing for a glimpse of that cool, orderly world and the taste of elegant and lucid English prose'). An anthology entitled A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry ignites a passion for Paradise Lost, which Hackett later reads in its entirety 'like a horse put out to pasture'. On his return to England, in a magnificent misuse of authority, he arranges for a consignment of theology books to be delivered by Mosquito bomber as a thank-you to Dominie Blauw, the de Nooji's pastor.

The Bible is another important part of his reading, and a shared Christian faith does much to cement his relationship with his hostesses. (His own book's title is a reference to St. Matthew's Gospel: 'I was a stranger and ye took me in.')