This book has been shaped by my childhood experiences, growing up in the 1950s. An earlier book on farmworkers in the early twentieth century owed its origin to stories about the Great War told to me by ex-servicemen. These suggested that patriotism, in the close-knit community where I grew up, was compatible with class consciousness and political activism. Though at that time the Second World War seemed as far away as the Crimean War, this conflict was the centre of most juvenile popular culture: comics, ‘pictures’, toy soldiers and games of army versus Germans played on the ‘rec’. We all knew what roles our parents had played in the war.

My father, Fred Mansfield (1912–2004), had a relatively quiet war. Though a pre-war Territorial in the Engineers, an old footballing injury kept him in the UK, as a gunner, exchanging fire spasmodically with German planes. Army service opened horizons beyond his home town, and furnished him with material for later soldiers’ stories. He was a servant or ‘batman’ to his battery commander. This excused him much ‘bull’ and enabled his cadging skills to thrive. (The CO's hard-to-obtain Brylcreem, would be diluted with army issue disinfectant.) Later, he was posted to an isolated gun site overlooking Scapa Flow, where he did odd jobs for an elderly widow who ran a croft on South Ronaldsay. Despite Orkney being classed as a war zone, he brought my mother and older brother up to join him. They lived with the widow, and my father paid the rent by working on the farm. His mates covered for him, the officer turned a blind eye to any irregularities, and they were rewarded with off-the-ration eggs. With a background in the building trade, towards the end of the war, he was ‘combed-out’ of his unit. He spent months repairing bomb and shell damage in Dover, where he was billeted in the Napoleonic defences of the Western Heights. (These had been constructed by soldier-tradesmen 140 years before; see the section ‘Artificers and sappers’, in Chapter 3, below.) Fred also continued his promising football career, making guest appearances for a number of League clubs in the scratch wartime programme, and even playing once against the famous Stanley Matthews.