By Carolyn Barnes

Town Crier Correspondent

They say that a difficult childhood either makes you or breaks you.

For local author Rewa Hulden-Hodges, a childhood straight out of Dickens (she was placed in a British orphanage at the age of three) now provides great writing material.

“I was born in Ceylon and my father was a British army officer,” Hulden-Hodges said.

To save her from the medical risks of the tropics, her parents sent her to England, where she was passed among elderly relatives. When none of them wanted the responsibility of raising her, she was first placed in an orphanage and then sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota. Alone, the 6-year-old Hulden-Hodges endured a journey which lasted for 14 days and required transfers from an ocean liner to Ellis Island to Grand Central Station to a transcontinental railroad car.

Now, many years later, that spunky little girl lives again in “Molly May on the High Seas,” a young adult book by Hulden-Hodges, published last fall by Fithian Press in Santa Barbara ($8.95).

“I started writing the book about 20 years ago,” Hulden-Hodges said. A freelance writer with over 100 published short stories and articles in magazines, she also worked at Ford Country Day School in Los Altos Hills when her children were young and in the Registrar’s Office at Stanford University for 11 years.

“I’ve always written, ever since I can remember,” Hulden-Hodges said.

A Los Altos area resident since 1949, she and her first husband built a house off Summerhill Avenue with their own hands and tended 1-1/2 acres of apricot trees while raising their three children. Along the way, Hulden-Hodges enrolled in writing classes, wrote several columns for local newspapers and turned her experiences raising apricots - and children - into stories and articles.

“I contributed some of the apricot-growing stories to the ‘Los Altos Millennium Time Capsule’ last year,” she said.

In “Molly May on the High Seas,” Hulden-Hodges transforms her own well-remembered shipboard adventures - and fears - into a tale which re-creates an era when children could trust most strangers, when ladies wore fine frocks for formal dinners every night, and when gentlemen snoozed in deck chairs between games of shuffleboard.

The book’s cover illustration is by Hulden-Hodges’ daughter Christy Hulden Westmoreland of Philadelphia and throughout the chapters are black and white drawings by Westmoreland and her daughter, Lori.

“We worked together by long distance,” Hulden-Hodges said.

Hulden-Hodges has been invited to talk about her book at local elementary schools. Most recently, she presented it to three fifth-grade classes at Almond School. It is selling on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and is also available at The Linden Tree Children’s Records and Books on State Street.

Did Hulden-Hodges, in real life, find calm and contentment once she reached the ranch outside of Buffalo Gap? Not at all - like Molly May, she continued to be curious, eventually attended many schools and traveled on her own to San Francisco at the age of 21, determined to start a new life.

“I’ve written a second book about Molly May at the ranch and am working on a third book about Molly May’s educational adventures at various schools,” Hulden-Hodges said. “Tell other writers not to pay any attention to rejection letters; don’t ever get discouraged; if a story doesn’t work the first time, write it three or four more times.”