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THE GREAT ESCAPE is a movie about men escaping from a prisoner-ofwar camp in World War II. The Great Escape of this book is the story of mankind’s escaping from deprivation and early death, of how people have managed to make their lives better, and led the way for others to follow.

One of those lives was my father’s. Leslie Harold Deaton was born in 1918 in a tough coal-mining village called Thurcroft in the South Yorkshire coalfield. His grandparents Alice and Thomas had given up agricultural labor in the hope of doing better in the new mine. Their eldest son, my grandfather Harold, fought in World War I, returned to the “pit,” and eventually became a supervisor. For my father, it was difficult to become educated in Thurcroft between the wars because only a few children were allowed to go to high school. Leslie took odd jobs at the pit; like the other boys, his ambition was that, one day, he would get the …