Böcker av William Woodruff

From his birth in 1916 (in the carding room of a cotton mill) until he ran away to London, William Woodruff lived in the heart of Blackburn's weaving community. But after Lancashire's supremacy in cotton textiles had ended with the crash of 1920, his father was thrown out of work. From then on, including the great depression of the 1930s, Woodruff and his family faced a life blighted by extreme poverty. Reading this book today, it is hard to comprehend that within living memory - and in what was the richest country in the world - so many people couldn't even afford to buy enough food. For the ordinary families of Lancashire, unemployment was an ever-present fear: "If you worked you ate. If there was no work you went hungry."

* A short history of the world from 1500 to the present.

A terrifying true-life novel about the 1944 Anzio landings in the tradition of BAND OF BROTHERS.

The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with his arrival in the EastEnd of London in the early 1930s. He finds lodgings with a Cockney family inStratford, where he shares a single bed (head to toe) with a stonebreaker.He thinks himself lucky to get a job at an iron foundry until he faces thegruelling, back-breaking work. But William is indomitable. To find his oldsweetheart, he one day cycles to Berkhamstead. She's not there and hereturns in a snowstorm - it takes him eight hours to reach friends in thewest of London and then, after three hours sleep, another four to get towork on time.Eventually he joins a night school to 'get some learnin'; his first whitecollar job starts for the water board in S( Brettenham House! His studiesfinally take him to the Catholic Workers College (which is now PlaterCollege), Oxford.How the foundry worker became a scholar, how war interrupted his studies -and William's concluding description of returning from war to meet the sonhe's never seen - is a deeply moving story.