Living For The Moment

About Charles Hanaway

This book is an account of one individual's participation in a dramatic period of British social economic and military history. The following narrative is a series of my memories from childhood to the end of my army life at the age of 22 at the end of the Second World War in 1945. I was born in 1923 just five years since Great Britain had signed a peace treaty to finalise the end of the most terrible and brutal war ever. I was born in London to a family of Irish ancestry although my parents were born English. The British never remotely ever considered or imagined that within twenty years after the 1918 Armistice their country would again be embroiled in another cruel and costly world war and I like millions more would be involved in it. The time of my birth was a period when Britain was in the process of recovering from the Great War. Britain was left bankrupt owing billions of dollars to America a debt that took a further eighty years to be cleared. America which after taking three years to enter the war after the British had been fighting Germany and sustaining tremendous casualties became the richest country in the world while Britain became the opposite - pitiably poor. Great Britain fought in both wars to defend our democratic way of life and that of the rest of Europe and America. We paid a very high price for that which today I feel has not been truly appreciated by the people and governments of these countries particularly France and America.