The Road to Nab End is a book that holds a special place in many
people's esteem, so richly did William Woodruff recreate his life
in Lancashire in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Woodruff was born
into a family of Lancashire cotton workers, and worked as a
delivery boy in a grocer's shop. But despite these unpromising
beginnings, the author's skills at evoking a vanished era and the
many colourful characters he encountered made for delightful
reading. Beyond Nab End is the sequel to that remarkable book, and
maintains the high standard of its predecessor. Woodruff is now 16
years old, and has decided to strike out from his familiar haunts,
leaving the economically depressed Lancashire of his childhood to
establish himself in London. But the East End of London proves to
be a forbidding, squalid place, and his bedsit is hardly welcoming.
In the streets, British fascism is stirring, and the author will
witness the response of his neighbours to the Blackshirts, as the
nation finds that it must gird its loins for the challenge of
another world war. What makes Beyond Nab End quite as engrossing as
Woodruff's earlier book is the fastidious recreation of a crucial
and troubling time in British history, along with the individuals
he encounters, such as his alcoholic landlady and her psychotic
son, with whom the luckless Woodruff has to share a room. Most of
all, it's the sprit of a people that the author conjures so vividly
here: a nation in all its variegated character facing a massive
threat from abroad. The first book had the always safe perspective
of a child's vision; Woodruff shows that he can confidently handle
the more complex challenge of the older narrator used here. (Kirkus
UK)
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.
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