This is the autobiography, memories and impressions of a boy born in 1918 in the poorer district of a large Lancashire city. His childhood and early youth were spent unaware of the awful poverty and deprivation of the hungry thirties, which were coloured by the spectre of mass unemployment, social degradation and abject misery. The clouds of war had been building up from 1935 and the Spanish Civil War was a prelude to the final holocaust of 1939. On his twenty-first birthday, in July 1939, his passport into manhood was getting conscripted into the armed forces among the newly recruited militia and he became a militia