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The View in Winter

In 1979 Ronald Blythe, author of The Age of Illusion and Akenfield, listened to and recorded all kinds of men and women - miners, teachers, craftsmen soldiers, villagers, priests, the widowed and the long retired - as they talked about their old age.

Out of his gentle, but masterly probings came The View in Winter a marvellous, haunting tracing of a landscape that everyone will journey through.

Two of the interviews are included here: from his section about great war veterans,  with George, whose body is still twisted from the wounds he received in 1918, and Tom who long ago was Douglas Haig's batman and now because of the onset of alzheimer's disease remembers nothing about that time.