Dimensions
130 x 197 x 15mm
An award-winning and highly distinguished documentary film-maker, Leslie Woodhead has written a funny, sad and highly atmospheric memoir of what it was like to be hurled into maturity amidst the peculiar circumstances of the Cold War.
In 1956, like two million other men of his generation, eighteen-year old Leslie Woodhead received a summons to serve Her Majesty. An only child, living above a shop in repressed, post-war Halifax, he had grown up with austerity and secrets. But nothing prepared him for comically bleak RAF training camps, or the grim isolation of the joint Services School for Linguistics on the east coast of Scotland. Posted to an ex-Luftwaffe base in war ravaged Berlin, a city gripped by espionage and paranoia, Woodhead was a bemused participant in a little known chapter of Cold War history which was to define his future as an observer and documenter of people. Retracing his teenage steps fifty years later, Leslie has written a highly atmospheric memoir of coming of age during the peculiar circumstances of the early Cold War, and a poignant reflection on how our lives can be formed by events and experiences we don't comprehend at the time.
