The Road To Nab End

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 1405520450
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
William Woodruff had the sort of childhood satirised in the famous Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch. The son of a weaver, he was born on a pallet of straw at the back of the mill and two days later his mother was back at work. Life was extrememly tough for the family in 1920's Blackburn -- a treat was sheep's head or cow heel soup -- and got worse when his father lost his job when the cotton industry started its terminal decline. Woodruff had to find his childhood fun in the little free time he had available between his delivery job and school, but he never writes self-pityingly, leaving the reader to shed the tears on his behalf. At ten his mother takes him on his one and only holiday -- to Blackpool. He never wonders where they get the money to do so, only where she disappears to with strange men in the afternoons, before taking him to the funfair, pockets jingling an hour or two later. NAB END is certainly not all grime and gloom however, there's a cast of great minor characters from an unfrocked vicar to William's indomitable grandmother Bridget who lend some colour and humour -- and all against the strongly rendered social backdrop of the 1920s and 1930s.

Billy Boy

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cotton manufacture
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description

Beyond Nab End

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 9780349116228
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with him having arrived in Poplar in the early 1930s. On spec he turns up at a steel foundry and luckily gets a job. His digs are with an old couple in Bow where he has to share a single bed (head to toe) with their mentally retarded son. Life in the foundry is grim but William is indomitable. For recreation one day he cycles (then in the days before inflatable tyres) to Berkhamstead to try and track down an old girlfriend. She's not there and he has to return in a snowstorm - it takes him eight hours to get back to Poplar and then he has to get up three hours later to work at the foundry. Eventually he decides to 'get some leernin' and his first white collar job starts for the water board in ... Brettenham House! He continues to pursue his studies, finally winning a place at Ruskin College, Oxford. How the ex-steel worker became an Oxford academic - and William's concluding description of returning from the war to meet the son he's never seen - is deeply moving.

The Road to Nab End

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1561310697
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The Road to Nab End is a marvelously evocative account of growing up poor in a British mill town. From William Woodruff's birth in 1916 until he ran away to London at the age of sixteen, he lived in the heart of Blackburn's weaving community in the north of England, where the crash of 1920 left his family in extreme poverty.

Vessel of Sadness

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Abacus (UK)
ISBN: 9780349118116
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Italy, 1944 - this is the setting of one of the most convincing and quietly magnificent stories about man and war that has ever been written. Here, (distilled from the experiences and observations of one who fought with them in the British infantry unit) is the mood of those who fought and died at Anzio. Their task - to seize the Alban Hills and then Rome forty miles away. Instead, for more than four months, they sank into the mud of the Anzio plain and fought for their lives. Nothing has appeared since Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT that can compare with this book's ability to penetrate the minds of men at war. There are no heroes, no heroines, no victories. This is a faceless, nameless, fragmented war. Even national differences - Britain, Italian, German, American - merge and are forgotten in this larger story of humanity. This story, in fact, does not need to be Anzio; it could be any battlefield where man has faced death.

A Concise History of the Modern World

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349122349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description

Nab End and Beyond

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Little Brown GBR
ISBN: 9780316726658
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 724

Book Description
This omnibus edition comprises William Woodruff's two volumes of autobiography, The Road to Nab End and Beyond Nab End. Born on a pallet of straw at the back of the mill, William faced a tough life in 1920s Blackburn. At 16 he left the poverty of Blackburn for London, where he found no streets paved with gold, but instead filthy tenements and squalor. He eventually makes it to Plater College, in Oxford, and witnesses the courage of ordinary people in the face of war—a war in which he himself will soon be fighting

Shadows of Glory

Author: William Woodruff
Publisher: Little Brown Uk
ISBN: 9780349116891
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
Woodruff's novel is about the fortunes of an Oxford University rowing eight, leading up to and during the Second World War. 1938: the Arnold College crew are a varied bunch, united only by the love of their sport and a sense that theirs is a generation which may have to fight for king and country. There's Charley Bradbury, a Scottish Communist and pacifist; David Evans, a chorister and super-boffin; Roger Blundell a witty dandy;Tony Markham, heir to a substantial estate and brother to four Mitford-type sisters; Pat Riley, charming somewhat mysterious Irishman; Alex Haverfield, handsome and a natural leader; Max Elsfield a dangerous self-destructive drinker and Bill Clark a naval cadet. As the war progresses they are gradually whittled away. Some, like Max Elsfield and David Evans, have been unhappy in love and have brought about their own destruction through reckless assaults on the enemy. Others like Charley Bradbury have had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - torpedoed on a passenger vessel from Russia. Ultimately this - like the Nab End stories - is a book about common humanity: the importance of virtues such as faith, loyalty and self-sacrifice.

Camouflage

Author: Bill Pronzini
Publisher: Forge Books
ISBN: 1429975725
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Nameless may not like David Virden, but the case is simple enough: find his ex-wife—and they know where she is. Deliver some papers to her and it's all done. But she refuses the papers, sends a message to Virden to never contact her again, and slams the door. His colleague, Tamara, tells Nameless that Virden threatens to sue, stops payment on his checks, and claims that the woman they located isn't his wife. Then he disappears and his fiancée hires Nameless to find out why. Clearly, someone is trying to make Nameless the monkey in the middle. The investigation that Nameless's partner, Jake Runyon, has to undertake is personal...and urgent. His girlfriend Bryn's son, a pawn in a bitter divorce settlement, is being beaten and every indication is that his father is responsible. Is he bitter enough to take out his frustrations on a young boy, to fracture his arm? Then events turn on Jake: a dead woman, a bloodied Bryn, and a scared and silent child force him to look in other, darker, more deadly directions. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book

Author: Jordan Raphael
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613742924
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Book Description
Based on interviews with Stan Lee and dozens of his colleagues and contemporaries, as well as extensive archival research, this book provides a professional history, an appreciation, and a critical exploration of the face of Marvel Comics. Recognized as a dazzling writer, a skilled editor, a relentless self-promoter, a credit hog, and a huckster, Stan Lee rose from his humble beginnings to ride the wave of the 1940s comic books boom and witness the current motion picture madness and comic industry woes. Included is a complete examination of the rise of Marvel Comics, Lee's work in the years of postwar prosperity, and his efforts in the 1960s to revitalize the medium after it had grown stale.