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Book of the Week: Captain Tom’s ‘Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day’

To commemorate Armistice Day, we're reading record-breaking NHS fundraiser and war hero Captain Sir Tom Moore's inspiring autobiography – the perfect pick-me-up for these anxious times.

Captain Tom
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At the age of 100, Captain Tom Moore has woken up to more tomorrows than most of us (36,506 of them as of today, to be exact). They weren't all good ones, though many of them, he'll tell you, were. But that's not the point. The former war hero and record-breaking NHS fundraiser has lived the kind of life few mortals achieve.

This summer, “this quiet little soul”, as he describes himself in his recent autobiography Tomorrow Will Be a Good Day, became the hero of the coronavirus lockdown after raising £33 million for the NHS by walking circuits of his garden ahead of his 100th birthday. 

“All I did was go for a walk,” he demures in his book. Still, the rest of the nation – which was in dire need of something happy to hold on to as COVID-19 ravaged normality – disagreed. It was the feel-good story everybody craved.

“Tomorrow will be a good day. Tomorrow you will maybe find everything will be much better than today, even if today was all right ... that's the way I've always looked at life."

With the war's end, he returned to England to work in the building trade, rising to managing director of a concrete company.

His personal life was no less of up and down. His first wife, Billie, refused to consummate the marriage and ended up leaving him for a sex therapist. Pamela, his second, was a loving wife beset with mental health difficulties, leaving the lion's share of childcare for their two daughters to him. “This suited me fine,” he writes, “and led to a very special relationship with them from the start.”

On top of all that, he was a competitive motorcycle racer and outdoor adventurer, opting to travel to the Himalayas and Mount Everest in his 90s simply because, in Mallory-like fashion, it was there and he had never been.

The autobiography is, in short, both the story of a man and the story of a century. He doesn't hold back in his views on the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Raj in India, the atomic bomb, the founding of the NHS, Britain's first motorway, the moon landings, the fall of the Berlin Wall and many of the other events that have shaped the last hundred years.

“If I have learnt one thing from all that has happened it's that it's never too late to start something new and to make a difference"

And if there's one lesson to be learned from Captain Tom's extraordinary existence, as implied by the title of his autobiography, it is one of resilience, hard work and the refusal to be crushed by life's bad patches.

“Tomorrow will be a good day," he writes. "Tomorrow you will maybe find everything will be much better than today, even if today was all right. My today was all right and my tomorrow will certainly be better. That's the way I've always looked at life.”

His insatiable curiosity and appetite for life radiates from the pages of this book like a warm, reassuring hug from a granddad who knows best. As he reflects in its final chapter, “If I have learnt one thing from all that has happened it's that it's never too late to start something new and to make a difference, especially if it brings life and light to people around the world.”

Whatever Captain Tom's drinking, we should all be knocking back. His story is the perfect pick-me-up for uncertain times.

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