| Language | English |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0-349-11521-4 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0006543350 |
| No of pages | 407 |
| Font Size | Medium |
| Book Publisher | Little Brown & Co |
| Published Date | 03 Jan 2002 |
About Author
Related Books
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0-349-11521-4 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0006543350 |
| No of pages | 407 |
| Font Size | Medium |
| Book Publisher | Little Brown & Co |
| Published Date | 03 Jan 2002 |
William Woodruff was born 12 September 1916 in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, a cotton textile town which suffered industrial collapse in the 1920s and '30s. From the age of six to thirteen he helped supplement his family's meager income by delivering newspapers; school seems to have been incidental - sometimes just a place where he could catch up on his sleep. At thirteen he left school to become a delivery boy in a grocer’s shop.
At the age of sixteen, when he was a temporary laborer in a brickworks, he ran away to London. For two years he worked as a ‘sand rat’ in an iron foundry. Discovering a love of learning, he attended night school. In 1936, with the aid of a London County Council Scholarship, he went to Oxford University.
During the Second World War he fought with the 24th Guards Brigade of the British Army in North Africa and the Mediterranean region; his wartime experiences became the basis of his novel Vessel of Sadness.
In 1946 Woodruff renewed his studies. Before him lay an academic career at Harvard, Illinois, Melbourne (Australia), Princeton and Florida. He died at the age of 92 on 23 September 2008.
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William Woodruff had the sort of childhood satirized 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 extremely 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 color and humor -- and all against the strongly rendered social backdrop of the 1920s and 1930s.