Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. Signed author dedication in front. Book looks unused. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The clouds of war were gathering over Western Europe in the year that I was born. My father aged thirty was stationed with his battalion 2nd battalion the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) at Inkerman Barracks near Woking in Surrey. My mother aged twenty-six was in the last weeks of her second pregnancy and finding it hard; my brother Michael had been born six weeks prematurely at the end of May 1935 and she had thought that something similar might happen again. It did not turn out like that; instead this time she had to wait until her full term and she once told me how hard those last weeks had been for her before I was born on 6th April 1938 in a nursing home in Woking. This was seventeen months before the outbreak of World War Two and I cannot tell this tale without saying how much that war dominated my early life and the years that followed. Even today at certain times I can feel the shadow cast by the terrible events of the twentieth century. A soldier and the son of a soldier have no settled home and this was certainly true for me until my father retired at the end of his army service. In addition the war made everything so much more confused because it meant that my father was never at home except for brief periods of leave. Like all children who know nothing else we took it for granted as the norm but it was hard for him and also for my mother who carried all the responsibility. (LL)