Beyond Nab End, by William Woodruff

The bestselling Lancashire lad now goes to Oxford - and to war. Paul Barker follows his moving progress from poverty to peril

Young William Woodruff "always wondered what southerners looked like". Arriving in London in 1933 in the back of a lorry from his native Blackburn, the 16-year-old peers out at the scurrying inhabitants of Hendon. No clogs or shawls; neat frocks and suits. He's here to make his fame and fortune. In his suitcase lies his Wonderland of Knowledge encyclopaedia, bought with soup coupons and constantly re-read. But it hasn't taught him that London life encompasses much more than shawl-less, prosperous Hendon.

He fetches up in the smelly East End backstreets, sweating for a labourer's meagre pay in the Bow Bridge Iron Foundry. Unlike slump time in a cotton town, though, there is work, however dispiriting. And Cockneys strike him as much less easily crushed. In Mrs Tanner's rickety lodging house, where he sleeps head to toe with her son, stolen clothes mysteriously appear from a dealer, and William wears silk underpants for the first time. Pearly Lilly, up the street, makes her living as a West End "bride"– that is, by commuting to Mayfair as a whore.

We've met young William before. In 2002, more than a quarter of a million copies were sold of The Road to Nab End, his vivid childhood story of poverty in Blackburn. That book ends with him clambering on to the lorry to escape. Beyond Nab End chronicles how he does so, and sets himself on the road to becoming a respected historian.

In all autobiographies, earliest years are the best: impressions strongest, memories most searing. So it is here. The first third of the new book is as extraordinary as its predecessor. You are shown, in searing detail, what back-breaking industrial work was like. You're reminded that the East End was not just the mother-love Utopia of Young and Willmott's sociological study, Family and Kinship in East London. Young Sarah Tanner, who works in a match factory, has to make love in a hallway. William hears every bump and grind. Her ambition is to get out, and find a house with a garden. She's killed in the Blitz, still in her slum.

William revels in visiting Parliament, not only "the heart of Britain and the British empire", but also "of the world". He seeks solace in Harry Roy and his jazz band. At 19, a London County Council night class and the intelligent affection of a Jesuit priest lever him out into Oxford.

From here, Woodruff's remarkable photographic memory still serves him as faithfully as ever. He attends philosophy lectures in a fenced East End suit. He fends off his factory-girl lover, Miranda. But the tale of a working-man's rise through academe has been told before, if not always so readably. The imminence and actuality of war bring the story back into top gear.

Woodruff fought on the murderous Anzio beaches. He and his wife spent five weeks together in their first five years of marriage; "the years the locusts ate". Brought up partly as a Protestant and partly as a Catholic, he "no longer pleaded with God for grace to know Him, I pleaded with Him to stop the war". Four years in the First World War broke the spirit of William's loom-operator father. After the Second's "disruption, slaughter and chaos", it took his son, he says, 20 years to purge the nightmare. Only then did "the memory of other men's deaths" begin to fade. Woodruff's last pages brought tears to this reader's eyes.