Walk With Me, Always

This is a story of deep friendship fostered on exclusion. It is powerful in sensitivity and tenderness. In 1938 Aneurin, an abandoned baby, was set adrift in a small curach that was washed up with the tide in Cardigan Bay. His adoptive parents live in a Welsh hill village once dependent on lead mining. In 1954 he meets Zakiya Rahman who lives with her family in Birmingham. She is Asian, crippled by polio and disciplined in the Islamic faith. Her father, an entrepreneur, wishes to establish a holiday caravan site in the village. Aneurin is waiting to be called-up for National Service and plans, on his return, to take Zakiya to the holy shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk to seek a miracle cure for her withered leg. 'It is not Hajj, it is not pilgrimage, it is hope and happiness, and it is a chance for wholeness,' Zakiya pleads with her sister, Zarah, who understands the plan is alien to the Rahman family-and worse, alien to her Islamic upbringing and teaching. White boy: Christian shrine. 'It is a mad adventure that you are undertaking,' scorned Zarah. 'No good will come of it ... only bad.'