Amazon.com description: Product Description: This is an abridgement of Harold Owen's autobiography which was published in three volumes. It covers the years 1890-1920 when the family of four children, including Wilfred Owen, later the First World War poet, were growing up in Birkenhead and Shrewsbury under strained financial circumstances. Owen relives the past with intensity, whether describing his own excitements and disappointments and those of his family, or the scene around him - the mean and wretched streets of Birkenhead, the poverty-dulled schools, the docks and their shipping or the country around Shrewsbury. Further he recounts the places and experiences of his travels at sea, in India, along the South American coast and elsewhere when at the age of 15, he joined the Merchant Service. The abridgement ends when Wilfred's poetry is just being published, Harold setting out to study art in London and Colin starting to farm. John Wain who wrote the introduction is author and editor of "Oxford Library of English Poetry".