Charlie Wright was a real-life Forrest Gump. Leaving the idyllic rural valley below Exmoor where he was born, he enlisted in British Army and found himself in the midst of the Second Boer War and the battles of Colenso, Spion Kop and Ladysmith. He was later posted to India in the Meerut cantonment where the Indian Mutiny had begun. On demobilisation he became a collier in the mines of South Wales where the Tonypandy Riots were put down by Churchill's troops. On the first day of the First World War, he joined the South Wales Borders and fought the Germans to a standstill at Langemarck and Gheluvelt Chateau, Ypres, before spending the rest of the war a sentinel in the Libyan Desert facing the Senussi Revolt. During the Depression and strikes of the 1920s he hacked coal from the Black Vein, the most dangerous of the Welsh seams, in Cwmcarn and raised a family of nine surviving children. This book is his death-bed reassessment of how his life took him through many of the critical events of British and world history. Charlie's reminiscences comes to his mind unbidden as interwoven and overlapping intense personal episodes. Throughout the story, the author provides for the reader the relevant historical contexts.