Beyond Nab End

The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with his arrival in the East End of London in the early 1039s. 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 her 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 - 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.