10 things that we didn't have when I was a boy

Many things that I now take for granted, small trivial aspects of life, did not exist when I was a boy. Ours was not a poor household; my father was a tradesman (a plumber) but he worked for himself and he owned his own home.

Therefore, we were not working class in the strict definition, but we were only a small way removed and we experienced what today would be considered a socially deprived life (without "essential" items that one should expect to own).

We used public transport - buses mainly - quite happily and we were far less affected by consumerism, not because we didn't want things, but because things we might have wanted didn't exist or were unknown to us.

Here's 10 items that I can remember being introduced into our household. This doesn't mean they were invented in my boyhood, it just means they were acquired by our family in the 1950s through to the 1970s.

Teabags

I start with the trivial, it's something I now use every day, several times a day. but the humble teabag didn't exist for me until the late 1960s. Until then, we used a teapot and loose leaf tea. We always had Brooke Bond tea, which came in a green packet and was kept in a metal tea caddy with its own special spoon.

I loved the smell of a freshly opened packet of tea as it was poured into the caddy. I liked to bury the spoon in tea, which irritated my mother when she next used it, but most of all I wanted the Brooke Bond card for my collection. Every packet of Brooke Bond contained a small picture card between the inner and outer wrapping. You could write to them and receive an album to glue your cards into. I remember British Butterflies and Wild Flowers as the two series I collected.

We didn't have an electric kettle. Ours always sat on the Rayburn (like an Aga) so the water was warm. When you wanted it to boil, you lifted a cover on the Rayburn and put it on the hotplate. My grandma used to put her old, blackened kettle directly onto her fire. She had a metal range, with an oven at the side and her kettle always rested part on the coals and part on the iron fire basket. We both had gas rings in our kitchens, but they were rarely used. The Rayburn provided hot water and so was running all year round. Gas was on a meter and you had to keep feeding it with shillings; when your shilling ran out the gas stopped. I didn’t get an electric kettle until I was married and moved to a house which was all electric.

No-one in our family bothered to use a tea-strainer, so the bottom of the cup always contained tea leaves. It was a skill to drink as much tea as possible without sucking up a mouthful of leaves. I used to mix the cold, used tea leaves from the teapot with bran to feed my rabbit in winter. He seemed to like it.

The teabag was invented in 1908 (in a silk bag) and was introduced to Britain (in a paper bag) by Tetley in 1953. In the early 1960s, teabags accounted for only three per cent of the market, but by 2007 they took a 96 per cent share.

A fridge

Our first fridge was an Electrolux and it was still going strong almost 20 years later. It must have arrived when I was about six or seven.

I didn't really appreciate what a boon it must have been to my mother. I can't imagine life without a fridge (or indeed a freezer) now.

Mum was quite excited and I guess that was at the prospect of keeping things fresh for longer. I was quite excited by the possibility of making ice cubes in a tiny freezer section, which was just large enough for the ice-cube box. You then had to drop it in warm water, so you could pull up a handle and release the cubes from the mould. That was the first time I saw an ice cube.

We also had some blue plastic ice-lolly moulds, so you could make your own lollies using fruit squash. I was very excited about this, but the finished product was very disappointing and it was a real fiddle, trying to get them into the ice compartment without spilling them and they took an age to freeze.

Before the fridge came, everything was kept in the pantry, which was about four feet wide and 12 feet long. It was reached down three steps and was quite cool, even in summer. Milk arrived every day (via a milkman) and mum would have bought meat from the butcher and cooked it the same day. In Bottom Lostock, where we lived, there was a post office/sweet shop, a grocer, a butcher, greengrocer and paper-shop (newsagent). Supermarkets didn't exist.

The domestic fridge was invented in 1913, around 50 years before we acquired ours.

Television

I'm not quite sure when we got a TV; I think it must have been just before 1960 because I can remember my mum watching the first episode of Coronation Street.

I seem to remember going next door to Auntie Annie and Auntie Doris to watch Watch With Mother, which was shown just after dinner at about half past one. I hated Andy Pandy, the Flower Pot Men were slightly annoying (especially that girly Weed), but I loved Rag,Tag and Bobtail and the Woodentops.

Our TV was fairly small (19in screen) and it was black and white (there were no colour TVs). It was also very low definition - 405 lines. Later, 625 lines TV sets came out, which had a better pictures, but nothing like as good as even the worse TV today.

There were just two channels, BBC and ITV and they broadcast briefly around lunchtime for BBC Watch with Mother and then started up around tea-time with children's TV. The stations closed before midnight. During the week, ITV was run by Granada from Manchester and, at the weekend, it switched to ATV.

Programmes I enjoyed watching included: Tales from the Riverbank (narrated by Johnny Morris), Blue Peter (with Valerie Singleton and John Noakes), My Friend Flicker (a US series about a boy and his horse), Mr Ed (a talking horse), The Beverly Hillbillies (about hillbillies who struck oil and moved to California), Doctor Who (I liked the music better than the crap monsters, although the Daleks were scary).

On Sunday, we would watch Sunday Night at the London Palladium, presented by Bruce Forsyth.

The first TV broadcast in the UK was in 1929 by Baird. The BBC started its service in 1932.

Central heating

There are no unheated rooms in our current house; even the garage is pretty warm as the gas boiler sits in there.

My boyhood home - 339 Manchester Road - had a large stove (the Rayburn) in the kitchen and an open fire in the sitting room. There was also an old gas fire in mum and dad's bedroom.

We had no loft insulation and single glazing with sash-cord windows, which would let a raging draught through.

In winter it was very cold. Frost would make amazing patterns on the inside of bedroom windows and, in the evening, we’d be around the coal fire in the sitting room. The Rayburn ran on coke and would be lit the whole day. It would be banked up overnight and then turned up in the morning and (most of the time) it had stayed lit. If not, you had to rake it out and light it again. It was often my job to take out the ashes, which went into the dustbin.

My mother felt the cold. She was always complaining there was a draught and trying to work out where it was coming from. She went to bed with bedsocks and an electric blanket; we had hot-water bottles for half the year.

Bedrooms were particularly cold and, on bath night, you'd be allowed to have the gas fire on in the front bedroom and get dry and get your pyjamas on in front of that.

This is exactly like our old phone

Telephone

Because my dad ran his own business, we got a telephone quite early, perhaps by 1962. Before that, people would have just knocked on the door and asked for work to be done.

We waited a long time for the phone. In those days, the GPO (Post Office) had a monopoly on telephony and they'd put a phone in when they were ready. People waited months and months. Even when we got ours, we had to share the line with another house in what was called a "party line". This meant if they were on the phone, we couldn't take calls and if you picked up our handset while they were on the phone, you'd be able to listen in.

The handset was a large black Bakelite instrument with a chromed dial and plaited wire cord. You had to press a button on the top to get a line and you could only call numbers in Northwich. If you wanted to call outside your exchange, you had to call the operator, someone would answer and you'd ask them to connect you with the number. "Could I have Chester 4235 please?"

Our telephone number was Northwich 3352.

Old money

Decimal money - £s and Ps - didn't come in until 1971, we were brought up with LSD - pounds, shillings and pence.

There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound. A penny was actually quite a useful coin and was valuable enough to be split into ha'pennies and farthings. There were four farthings in a penny and two ha'pennies.

Pennies, ha'pennies, farthings and thr'penny bits

Farthings were withdrawn in 1961, but I can't really remember using those. However, I remember seeing a lot of them around. The coin was familiar and a favourite because it had a wren on it, but I don't remember ever spending one.

I remember my bus far to school being three-ha'pence and being told by my mother to ask for a three-ha'penny one from the conductor.

There was also something called a guinea, which was one pound and one shilling (21 shillings). This was never a coin or note, but shops used to use guineas as a means to make things sound cheaper. Nowadays, something would be offered for £99.99p because it sounds cheaper than £100. Back then 99 guineas sounded less than £100, but would actually be £103 19s.

Deodorant spray

I remember using roll-on deodorant for the first time in my mid teens. There was no aerosol deodorant and people simply didn't wash as often as they do now.

I don't think this was because they were deliberately dirty or lazy, it just wasn't as convenient. We would wash in the sink morning and evening, but have a bath only once a week.

If houses didn't have a bathroom, which many older houses didn't, it was a real palaver having a bath. You had to get a tin bath set up in the living room or kitchen, fill it as best you could, wash in it (as best you could) and then empty it.

Washing clothes wasn't as easy as it is now, so they were changed less often too. Truth was that a lot of people smelt quite bad. I remember some folk really stank. You'd get on the bus and someone next to you might smell of sweat, but others would be really ripe, like a stinky cheese. You just don't experience that these days.

People also smelled of cigarettes or pipe tobacco and my dad always smelt of putty.

Sun block

A sun tan was considered healthy (I guess it still is) and no-one thought of putting any product on your skin to stop it burning. Every summer, I got pink arms and legs until I went a bit brown and freckly. If we were in the sun too long, too quickly and got burned, we had Calamine Lotion applied.

I never had much faith in this stuff. It was supposed to cool the skin and stop itching, but it did no use at all. It was also slapped on for gnat bites, nettle stings and any other skin problem from spots to impetigo.

Foreign food

In my childhood world, foreign food did not exist. My diet was non-exotic and repetitive – we had the same food, the same meal on the same day (with some variation) week after week. There would be seasonal food, like runner beans and strawberries, but these were British grown and only available for a short period of time.

We didn’t eat out, except for picnics, and few pubs served food. Apart from cafes, I wouldn’t know where there was a restaurant in Northwich.

Pubs started selling chicken in the basket in the 1960s and it was considered very sophisticated to go for a basket meal. A few Chinese take-aways started to appear when I was a teenager, but they were much derided by most. It was a sensation when the first Chinese restaurant opened in Northwich, but I didn’t eat there until I was working (at 18).

Cheap foreign holidays

My first holidays were to a holiday camp. I can’t really remember much about it. I seem to remember crying when I was left in the nursery, but that’s it.

The camp we used was in Morecambe (Middleton Towers) and our holidays after that would be a week in Blackpool staying at a boarding house or once, famously, to the Isle of Man. That’s the nearest I got to going abroad.

Other holidays were day trips or trips to stay with relations – to Aunt Margaret’s in Doncaster or Uncle Dick in Keighley.

My first holiday abroad was to Austria when I was 16 with a friend called Robert Broomfield and I don’t think I went abroad again until I was about 32 and we had a week in France.

My mother never went abroad and my dad’s only foreign travel was in khaki and folk (Germans, Palestinians and Jews) were trying to kill him – no wonder he never went back.

That's me (in the high chair) having a great time on holiday in Morecambe

Holly is going to be an auntie!

Big news today is that Holly is going to be an auntie, or more importantly, Margaret and I will have our first grandchild in 2015.

As someone who wasn't planned and who didn't plan any of his children, it's good to see that my children are carrying on this tradition. I don't have anything against planned babies - it makes absolute sense - but there's something right about the baby that just turns up out of the blue.

Tom and Lucy have known that she was pregnant for a little while now, but have been waiting until the 12-week scan to let everyone know. That happened today at Lewisham hospital and the birth date is predicted for mid-July - a Cancerian, just like its father and paternal grandfather.

Sam has known for a few weeks, he guessed when he saw that Lucy wasn't drinking, and Margaret also claims that she knew because Lucy had a good appetite and went to bed early over Christmas.

I guess I will be grandfather and Carlos will be abuelo, although I think I'd prefer to be called 'grappa' than grandfather.

I don't know if I'm having a grandson or a granddaughter; I don't know if he or she will be a redhead, but I would bet money that they grow up to be taller than their mother.

Well, this will be an exciting year!

My grandchild - aged 12 weeks

Footnote: The 20-week scan has now happened and we know that Lucy is having a baby girl. I didn't know the sex of any of my children before they were born, so this is something of a novelty. Tom and Lucy have been thinking of names. Lucy likes Henrietta (which would be shortened to Hattie or Hetty), Tom has suggested Julia (for a July baby) and there's also Luisa (from Lucy's grandmother, who was 99 this year).

Thank heavens for health and safety

Health and safety gets a bad press these days. It’s blamed for us not being able to do lots of things that we were once able to do – smoke in pubs, ride motorcycles without crash helmets, allow children to hold burning candles in church ...

Cut through the tabloid bluster and we have to agree that health and safety is a good thing. If it had been around in the 1950s in any meaningful form, my great Uncle Fred Burrows may well have lived to a ripe old age.

Fred worked on the railways in Doncaster (a railway town) and, in the 1950s, rail moved most things in the country – people, goods, livestock, all went by train.

The Flying Scotsman

It was known that my mother’s uncle had been killed in an accident on the railways and the family legend was that he had been run over by the Flying Scotsman, the famous express train that ran between London and Edinburgh.

Thanks to some research by Mike Towers, my cousin’s husband, I now have the facts – and they are not pleasant.

Fred was killed in 1956. He was indeed a railwayman and was working on the tracks when he was run over by a train. Both legs were severed and he died from shock and loss of blood. It must have been horrific.

At the inquest, the coroner asked if any measures could be taken to prevent a similar accident and British Railways said they were satisfied with the precautions taken. What were those precautions? This is a transcript of the report of the inquest printed in the Doncaster Chronicle.

-------

Doncaster Coroner asks about safety measures

Rail man seemed to slip – killed

After a look-out man’s warning shout, three men jumped clear, but a 56-year-old railway lengthman seemed to slip and was fatally injured when a van and coach ran over his legs at Doncaster station.

This was disclosed at the inquest when the coroner Mr W H Carlile asked witnesses if they could suggest measures to prevent a similar accident.

They all agreed the position in which they were working at the time of the accident was very awkward but were satisfied with the precautions taken.

A verdict of accidental death was returned on the lengthman Fred Burrows, South Street, Highfields, near Doncaster who, said Dr Stanley Pearson, senior casualty officer at Doncaster Infirmary, died from shock and haemorrhage following double compound fractures of both legs.

Reginald Clarence Burton relayer, Shaftesbury Avenue, Intake, Doncaster said he was acting as lookout man about five yards from the other three men who were clearing snow from a set of points. He had no idea of the train timetable and his attention was mainly directed to the south to some carriages in the station to see if there was an engine on them.

"I turned round to look in the other direction and saw a pilot train approaching about 10 yards away from me. I shouted straight away and the other three men began to jump clear but Burrows seemed to slip. He was working on the side nearest the platform and had less room to get out of the way," said Burton.

They found Burrows lying between the lines. He was conscious and trying to pull himself up to a sitting position

------

So here’s what happened - the men were working on an icy track, the look-out was looking the wrong way, he didn’t have a timetable to say when trains were due and the first (and only) warning was given when the train was just 15 yards away.

British Railways said it was satisfied with the precautions taken.

Can you imagine the rage such complacency and carelessness would create today? Fred’s widow would have the compensation lawyers queuing outside her house (and quite right too).

A hunting we did go ...

Max at the hunt gathering in Stilton

Today we went to Stilton to see the Boxing Day hunt meet up.

It’s a toss up which end of the social/political spectrum I feel least comfortable about - the class-driven, toff-hating anti-hunt brigade or the hunting, shooting, fishing set. 

Oscar Wilde described foxhunters as the “unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable” but I think the hunters he was referring to were the upper classes.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect today’s hunts are made up of bankers, lawyers and rich farmers.

I admire anyone skillful and brave enough to ride a horse, I like dogs (especially working dogs) and the hunt does generate some much-needed cash in the rural economy, but the real reason why we went to see the hunt set off today was to show Lucy a little slice of England.

It might be chocolate-box England, but it’s authentic enough and it is quite a spectacle. The local hunt is the Fitzwilliam and it meets at the Bell Inn at Stilton on Boxing Day. The Bell is an old coaching inn and the main road through Stilton would once have been the A1 Great North Road.

Today, it’s a stranded backwater, but the old road is good and wide and the police close it for traffic for an hour to allow the hunt to assemble. A few hundred people come to watch and the pubs in the village have a busy hour or two serving drinks and lunches. There was a good turn-out of hunters (perhaps 30 horses) and they were a splendid sight en-masse.

Some of the dogs are very friendly

However, the real stars with the public who come to watch are the hounds. Foxhounds are quite large dogs, but pretty gentle (provided you're not a fox). They’ve clearly seen all this before and know full well that lots of people come with doggy treats in their pockets, so the pack immediately starts working the crowd. Once the dogs have completed a sweep  of people, pausing for the odd stroke and ear scratch, they undertake a full search of the surrounding area for any discarded edible item (which includes hose poo).

They were very interested to sniff my trousers and gloves, covered as they are by the smell of Holly, and Holly was very interested in a return sniff when we got back.

The master of the hunt gave a little speech before they set off. He thanked everyone for coming, he thanked the hunt staff, he thanked the Bell Inn for its hospitality and he reminded the crowd that there was a general election next year and that we should all support the party that supported hunting. I’m guessing he wasn’t talking about the Lib-Dems.

That done, the master of hounds gave a few toots on his horn and the pack of hounds, which was becoming increasingly impatient to leave, formed up and set off with the lead horse, followed by the rest of the hunt, which seemed to comprise mainly women.

The hounds will follow a scent laid down across a course designed to give dogs and horses a decent run. If any foxes are disturbed along the way, then that’s bad luck for the fox. It’s illegal to hunt any mammal with dogs, but if the dogs disturb a fox and happen to kill it before they can be called off then it’s not a crime.

Tom took this picture of the hunt setting off (above). Lucy below at her first hunt.

Books read in 2014

I haven't been reading as much this past year. I'm tempted to say the reason is that now I'm retired I'm  too busy (which is true) but it's really because I no longer have the dead time of two-and-a-half hours on a train every day.

Twelve-and-a-half hours every week is a lot of reading time and I do sort of miss it. I now spend the time between 6pm and 7.15 watching Pointless and Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two, which is diverting but isn't really improving my mind (not that the canon of work by George R R Martin did much for my mind).

Anyway, my list of books read in the past year is much shorter than it was in 2013. Here it is:

Flag Fen: A Concise Archæoguide by Francis Pryor

It has been interesting (as a local) following the story of Flag Fen. It started years ago when I was working for the Peterborough Standard. They found the wooden remains of a causeway going out into the fen between Peterborough and Northey Island, where Whittlesey now stands. Then they found  what looked like a village on an island of logs, with masses of well-preserved timber.

The story has moved on - it's now almost certainly some kind of ceremonial structure linked to a religion or form of worship we no longer know. There are only a couple like it in the world and speculation is that worship was moving away from stone/wood circles and towards water as a sacred medium.

The book tells you everything that's known about Flag Fen, also quite a bit about the pre-history of Peterborough and Fengate. It's academic, but also very readable.

The Enemy at the Gate - Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe, by Andrew Wheatcroft.

I read a little about the Ottomans last year - the struggle between Spain and the Ottomans for control of the Mediterranean and also the fall of Constantinople. I followed up with Osman's Dream, a full history of the Ottoman Empire.

The Enemy at the Gate tells the story of the Turks' siege of Vienna in 1683 and it's quite a story. For the Turks to send an army as far as Vienna and then lay siege to the city (and be within a whisker of taking it) was an amazing feat.

Equally amazing was the spirited defence of the city, led by Count Rudiger von Starhemberg and its relief thanks to Charles, Duke of Lorraine, and the Polish King John III (Sobieski). Had the Ottomans (led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa in the name of Mehmed IV) succeeded, then the Hapsburg empire may have fallen with its emperor, Leopold I. Indeed Leopold I may have been Leopold the last!

George of Hanover (later George I of England) brought 600 cavalry and fought in the relief force as Europe's warring kings and princes finally showed some unity, bankrolled by Pope Innocent XI.

If Kara Mustafa had taken Vienna, it wouldn't have meant Europe turning Islamic, but it would have extended Turkey's influence. It may have prevented the First World War, or it may just have substituted one player for another. Imagine a German-Ottoman alliance against Russia and France ...

As it was, after a bitter battle, the Turks were routed and Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had fought in Charles' bodyguard became the commander who drove the Turks out of Budapest, Belgrade and the Balkans over the next couple of decades. The Ottoman empire never really recovered.

Wheatcroft has an easy narrative style without simplifying his facts or analysis. It's very readable.

Zulu: Queen Victoria's Most Famous Little War, by W. B. Bartlett

The film Zulu has made this conflict more famous and more glamorous that it really deserves. It wasn't the British Empire’s finest hour; it was (I suspect) fairly typical of what happens when opportunists and chancers get to be in charge of a country and see a way of feathering their own nests.

Bartle Frere, the governor of the region, wanted to expand his territory into Zululand and he was supported by Lord Chelmsford, a man desperate to make his name. The Zulus were a pretty warlike bunch, but happy enough to sit behind their border (most of the time).

A war was started by Frere by making demands that the Zulus couldn't meet and despite a British commission supporting their border claims, Frere and Chelmsford invaded Zululand with three columns.

Chelmsford was not a competent leader or general. His plan was simple, he thought if he marched troops into Zulu territory, the Zulus would join them in battle and be mown down by rifle and Gatling gun. The flaw in his plan was that the Zulus, inconsiderately, decided not to line up and be shot.

Instead they used hit-and-run tactics, made best used of the terrain and Chelmsford ended up with one column massacred and another besieged in a forward base. A furious British government now had to send more troops to win a war they hadn't wanted to be fought in the first place.

The end was inevitable, the Zulus were eventually mown down; Frere was sacked and Chelmsford's reputation in tatters. No-one came out of it well, least of all the Zulus. The author does a good job of pricking the bubble of glamour that has surrounded the war thanks to the excellent, but historically flawed film Zulu. The injustices are laid bare, both sides' tactics analysed and personal bravery (and cowardice) highlighted. Chelmsford's complete incompetence is thoroughly exposed.

Max lent me the book (he'd found it in a second-hand bookshop) and I left it with Lucy's uncle in Ecuador. He runs a British language library in Quito and this sorry tale of colonialism should sit well in a land that's suffered similar ills at the hands of the Spanish.

Loos 1915 by Nick Lloyd

I had discovered that my grandfather, Richard Little, had fought at the first battle of Loos in 1915 and I wanted to read a little more about it.

A former colleague and fellow pension fund trustee, John Spencer, is something of an authority on the First World War and has a small business leading battlefield tours. He recommended Nick Lloyd's book as the best account of the battle.

Loos, like many battles during this war, shouldn't have been fought at that time or place. It was a hopelessly optimistic objective in a wider plan to support a French attack further down the line. Just as the Somme offensive sought to relieve massive French losses at Verdun, Loos was intended to draw German resources away from another part of the front to allow the French to break through.

Reading it made me quite angry. Here was incompetence on an incomprehensible scale. The book might have been titled 'How Haig Almost Killed my Grandfather'.

The British command failed to learn from earlier battles that year which tactics worked best and which didn't, so they employed those that didn't; they used poison gas for the first time and were so determined that it would work and it should be used, they persisted even when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction.

Worst was that there was conflict between two British commanders - French and Haig. Haig commanded the battle, but French wouldn't give him control of the reserves, so they were positioned too far behind the lines to effectively reinforce the front or quickly occupy territory taken in the first wave of attacks.

The reserves often had no maps, they didn't have a clue where they were, they arrived late, artillery support was inadequate ... the list goes on.

My grandfather was in the 10th battalion York & Lancaster Regiment, raised in south Yorkshire during 1914. He was among the first of Kitchener’s new recruits and he and his comrades were about to get a bitter awakening. They were in the reserve, but managed to reach their objective and relieve the first wave of troops by midnight after the first day of the battle. They were expected to launch a fresh assault on the German second line on day two.

The battle was a complete shambles. Logistics broke down completely, everyone was late, no-one knew where they were and battlefield intelligence was completely missing. Nick Lloyd's account of what happened to the 10th York & Lancaster Regiment is at odds with the war diaries of the battalion. He says orders were misinterpreted and they moved into an exposed position, German artillery spotted them and shelled the hell out of them.

The war diary (and I've read it in detail) has them in position and attacking their objective. They take ground, but are under murderous fire from a number of machine gun positions, which they cannot locate. They fight off a counter-attack and then try again to take their objective, but suffer the same fate. They lost around 350 men out of a total strength of less than 800 and were relieved later in the day.

Casualties at Loos were higher per capita than the Somme. The area immediately in front of my grandfather's position was called Corpse Field, which gives some idea of the situation.

Such losses are incredible and highlight the thoughtless slaughter allowed by high command. A battalion is thrown into the battle, loses almost half its strength and is withdrawn in less than 24 hours, to be replaced by another hapless set of cannon fodder.

My grandfather was one of the lucky ones, a survivor (although he may have been injured). I hope to visit Loos in 2015 – the 100th anniversary of the battle – to see where he fought. I'll be referring to Nick Lloyd again, but I'll have to buy a paper copy of the book - I read it on Kindle and maps just don't render well enough to allow me to reference places properly.

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer

If Loos in 1915 sounds pretty grim, it was a walk in the park compared to the Russian front in the Second World War.

The Forgotten Soldier is a war diary by Guy Sajer, a Frenchman with a German mother, who volunteered to fight in the German army.

Posted to the Russian front, it’s a tale of unremitting misery, you wonder how anyone could survive (and of course, many didn’t). Most of the time Sajer had no idea what was going on or why; he just followed orders and did his best.

His account illustrates graphically the confusion of war, he didn't have the big picture, just his small part. It’s not easy reading, but it is compelling.

Cold by Ranulph Fiennes

Max bought this book for me and it’s signed by Fiennes himself (he came to give a talk to the Dulwich College geography group).

An account of Fiennes’ travels and adventures, its main focus is the famous trans-globe expedition of the 1970s, when Fiennes became the first man to reach both poles by land and circumnavigate the globe by sea and land.

It’s a pretty amazing story and a pretty amazing life, but it’s also a lot more than a simple account of his difficult journeys. Fiennes looks at the history of exploration, the men who first visited and opened up these areas; also the people who lived there and how they survived. He's a surprisingly good writer (for an explorer/adventurer). Cold is a cruel extreme, this is a book to read beside a nice warm fire or tucked up in a comfy bed.