Hugh Patterson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1917. At the age of eighty, in 1997, he bought himself an Apple Mac and started writing. Until that point in his life he had maintained a silence about wartime experiences. We, his family, were unaware of any detail. But then a rich story unfolded in the resulting modest memoir ‘Geordie Hussar’: five years of intrepid travel, as a soldier and POW, through Africa, the Mediterranean and Sudetenland. Only late in life he had felt able to share the tale. 500 copies were published and the costs soon covered by sales of the book which he touted around local bookshops and friends’ networks. He reached his 90th Birthday but died later that year. On the anniversary of his 100th birthday, I attended a conference with my
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