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The Road to Nab End
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.
Billy Boy
None
Vessel of Sadness
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.
Nab End and Beyond
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
Beyond Nab End
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.
Beyond Nab End
The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with his arrival in the East End of London in the early 1930s. He finds lodgings with a Cockney family in Stratford, 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 the gruelling, back-breaking work. But William is indomitable. To find his old sweetheart, he one day cycles to Berkhamstead. She's not there and he returns in a snowstorm - it takes him eight hours to reach friends in the west of London and then, after three hours sleep, another four to get to work on time. Eventually he joins a night school to 'get some learnin'; his first white collar job starts for the water board in S( Brettenham House! His studies finally take him to the Catholic Workers College (which is now Plater College), 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 son he's never seen - is a deeply moving story.
Vessel of Sadness
'Vessel of Sadness' is a terrifying true-life novel about the 1944 Anzio landings.
The Road to Nab End
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.
Impact of Western Man
Maps on endpapers. Bibliography: p. [344]-358.
