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Lenny and Sid are friends. Best friends - inseparable, but very different. Sid's a streetwise tough kid from one of the big, sometimes, 'problem' families housed in the terraces at the top end of a 1950s council estate called Broddlepark. Lenny's an only child from one of the semis down the posh end at the bottom. Because they're pals, Lenny enjoys an honorary membership and the protection of the hardbitten 'Top o' Broddley Gang' in which Sid and his brothers are big wheels. Their coming of age adventures are a mixture. Often funny. Sometimes tragic - always met head on. Teenage finds Sid in and out of poorly paid dead-end jobs. In construction. At the local factory. On a farm. He's usually broke, often in trouble and sometimes homeless. He decides to join the army - a new start. A new life.
Incredibly, to all who know him and to the horror and anguish of his doting mother, Lenny slavishly follows him. Same time. Same place. Same regiment. Sid takes to the hard routine of the infantry training camp like a duck to water, his muscles and stamina already honed by hod carrying and haymaking but Lenny - his safe, sensible job down at the council offices now history on another planet - struggles. And worse. His delicate, slightly effeminate way of doing things attracts the attention of, and awakens darkness in, a brutal and sadistic NCO. Sid helps his friend as much as he can - but his brothers aren't with them now. What can he do? What could anyone do? They're in the 'First Battalion'. There are mottos. Traditions. They have to face the facts of human life, its failings and foibles as well as the bloody reality of war, with its attendant violence - as men. As soldiers. And in so doing - find out who they are. What they are.
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