An only child, living above a shop in post-war Halifax, Woodhead grew up with austerity and secrets. But nothing prepared him for the comically bleak RAF National Service training camps he now found himself in, nor the isolated Joint Services School for Linguistics on the East coast of Scotland. Here he was taught Russian, before being posted to an ex-Luftwaffe base in a war-scarred Berlin. In the ruins of a city observer by espionage and paranoia, he discovers adulthood and his vocation as an observer and documenter of people.