Description

Ronald James Moody was born in wartime Chelmsford in February 1939, and by his own account has lived enough for several lifetimes. Ron’s War and Peace is his own telling of that story – a warm, wide-ranging memoir spanning nearly nine decades, from ration books and air raid shelters to Arctic radar stations, television studios, ocean cruises, and a sixty-year marriage that shaped everything he did.

The book opens in the dirt-track lanes of wartime Essex, where young Ron grew up in a small house with no hot water, learned his letters at the local school, and watched the Marconi factories that dominated his hometown. There are Morrison shelters in the front room, doodlebugs overhead, chickens and rationed sweets, and the quiet ingenuity of a family making do. Ron’s eye for detail – the taste of his first Coca-Cola, the sting of a schoolmaster’s slipper, the smell of paraffin on a winter’s morning – brings 1940s England vividly to life.

As a young man, Ron trained as an apprentice engineer at Marconi before completing his National Service with a secretive RAF unit in Northern Ireland, tracking Soviet submarines from ageing Shackleton aircraft. It was the start of a long career in electronics and television engineering that carried him from early broadcast technology to testing camera equipment for the 1968 Mexico Olympics, built on curiosity, persistence, and a talent for solving problems nobody else could.

Twice, Ron crossed the Atlantic for Canada – first to a remote radar station on the Mid-Canada Line, sharing the wilderness with bears, wolves and forty-below winters, and later to a bustling Toronto television studio, where he found himself working alongside The Mamas and the Papas, Cat Stevens, and other stars of the day. Between postings, he wrote love letters home by hand to his sweetheart Margaret, sent out on supply helicopters – a courtship carried out almost entirely on paper, across thousands of miles.

Ron and Margaret married in 1964 and spent sixty years together, raising their son Bryan, building and renovating a string of homes, and eventually running their own successful electronics company. Their story is one of steady partnership through career changes, family milestones, and the everyday ups and downs of married life, told with the same warmth and humour that runs through the whole book.

Retirement brought no shortage of adventure: a nine-day yacht voyage along France’s Canal du Midi, cruises across the globe where Ron found himself leading hymn-singing and Bible study for fellow passengers, and a Christian faith, deepened over decades, that became the quiet backbone of his later years. Old friends appear throughout under cheerful pseudonyms – Almiranti, Matron, Pheasant, Book Worm – as one escapade tumbles into the next.

The book closes with real tenderness, as Ron cares for Margaret through her final years and says a loving goodbye to his wife of six decades. Told throughout in Ron’s own irrepressible voice – funny, digressive, and completely honest, full of puns, asides and infectious ‘Ha, Ha’s – Ron’s War and Peace is a reminder of just how much adventure, faith and love can be found in one ordinary life, extraordinarily lived.

Readers who enjoy memoirs of everyday English life, wartime childhood recollections, stories of overseas adventure, and accounts of enduring marriage and faith will find much to love in Ron’s remarkable and moving story.