Little Apples Will Grow Again Book

In the early 20th Century, 'little apples will grow again' was a popular saying used by way of consolation after a set-back, similar to 'never mind, there are worse losses at sea'. Little Apples Will Grow Again is based on the true story of a young man from a working class area of Manchester, his childhood amongst the cotton mills and farmlands of Collyhurst and his time in the Army leading up to and during the First World War. Fired by the stories of his father and elder step-brother of travel and army life, James Donna leaves his job in the mill after his father dies and enlists in the recently formed Royal Army Medical Corps in 1910. After a few weeks in the army he is homesick and decides to desert, but at the railway station he is persuaded by a fatherly Military Policeman to return to barracks before he's missed, which he does. Thereafter he settles down and begins to get more used to the regimented life and medical training. Posted to York Military Hospital, he is wrongly accused of stealing two pairs of army socks and sentenced to a month in the brutal York Military Prison. On his release he is posted to Great Yarmouth and later to Shorncliff in Kent, but because he now had a criminal record he is passed over for promotion. From an officer he learns that if a soldier volunteers to serve abroad in peacetime, his past record would be expunged. By chance he sees a recruiting poster for the Seaforth Highlanders about to sail for India. To the dismay of his superiors, he enlists. He has difficulty at first understanding the Scottish accent, but he enjoys the sea voyage and the different regime of an Infantry Regiment. On the sub-continent, the Seaforths are stationed at Agra and are part of the 1st Indian Army. In September 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, the Seaforths, plus half a battalion of Leicester's, the Dehra Dun brigade and 7th Meerot Division, sail for France and the trenches. He is wounded twice and suffers constantly with trench fever. He dreads the prospects of another winter in the trenches. His prayers are answered, however, when on 25th November 1915, the regiment is ordered south to Marseilles where barely a quarter of the original battalion board ships bound for Mesopotamia to face the Turks. With echoes of Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice and Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole, Little Apples Will Grow Again is a remarkable biographical novel of working class life at the beginning of the 20th Century and the horrors brought about by the outbreak of the Great War.Read More