The nearly a quarter of a million people still alive in 1993 who were born in the last century lived through events which most of us consider distant history. This book sets out to bring these events to life again through the memories of some of the oldest living witnesses, as they look back over nearly a century of dramatic change. The 20th century is brought to life in witty and sometimes shocking accounts of a past which has shaped the present world. This past incorporates days out at Blackpool or the races, when the pubs never closed and no one went home until the paypackets had been drunk; astonishing sexual ignorance and daily battles against poverty, disease, dirt and despair, at a time when a woman could be locked away in a mental asylum for having an illegitimate baby; and a world in which sex was an unspoken secret and death part of the common experience. They were days also of the realization of childhood dreams to be missionaries; to serve the Empire and save the poor in strange and dangerous far-away places. The book is a tribute to those who have survived to tell their stories. It ties in with a BBC2 series of eight programmes.