Meals of horsemeat and tea made from puddles

He was one of many thousands of British Tommies who endured the grim mud-and-blood years of 1914 to 1918. But what made him different was that he tapped it all out, using one finger, on an old typewriter.

Now his reminiscences are to be turned into a book so people today can reflect on the realities of conflict.

His work, The Tale Of A Boy Soldier, is considered so important that the Imperial War Museum has asked for the manuscript.

The decision to publish the work was made after Mr Parker's daughter, Pat Brown, sent the manuscript to Brighton publishing house QueenSpark to store in its archives.

The team found the tale so moving it was convinced it had to become a book.

Mrs Brown, 73, who now lives in Southsea after moving from Brighton in 1957, said: "I had no idea they were going to make a book out of it. He would have been so proud.

"He always said the war wouldn't interest anyone else but people do remember."

The manuscript tells Mr Parker's story from his birth in Southampton Street, Brighton, in 1898, through to his life fighting at Ypres, the Somme and the Hindenburg line after joining the Army as a boy.

He was born the third child of an apprentice tailor in Brighton and suffered a childhood of extreme poverty and hardship. The family moved from place to place and young George was sent out to work at nine.

At 15, he joined the Army, living and fighting in the trenches and surviving on horsemeat and tea made from puddle water. At 17, he was seriously wounded and sent home with the Military Medal.

He returned to Brighton to face unemployment and further hardship when his wife died from tuberculosis after giving birth to Pat.

Mrs Brown said her father found his war memories hard to talk about and she had had no idea he had them written down.

She said: "My stepmother found the manuscript after he died in 1973. He had typed it with one finger on an old typewriter but I think he stopped when he got to my mother's death because it really choked him up.

"Sometimes I could get him to talk about it but not a lot because some of the things he had seen were so horrific.

"He still had nightmares about the mud. He hated thunderstorms - I think the bangs reminded him of gunfire.

"I must have been 11 or 12 when I realised what he had gone through. We used to go for long walks together and sometimes he would talk about things."

Mr Parker found comfort in friends who had shared similar experiences and visited Ypres with his brothers in 1970.

Mrs Brown recalled: "He talked to me a bit more after that visit but it brought back a lot of memories. He had to go, though, because of his mates who had died."

Mr Parker died from a brain tumour, aged 75.

His daughter said: "I do miss him. We were very close."

Volunteer manuscript reader Pamela Platt has worked on the manuscript for 18 months and feels privileged to have read it.

She said: "It was just such a personal story. He was just an ordinary man who grew up in extreme poverty in Brighton.

"The story was told with such feeling and not over-sensationalised."

The book has taken almost two years to prepare for publication but the team has kept close to the original manuscript.

Mrs Platt said: "It was a very roughly-typed script, written just before he died. It was fairly straightforward. He started with his background and then moved to the war. We checked all the dates, battles and regiments and a foreword was written by an archivist from the Imperial War Museum."

QueenSpark is a non-profit, community publisher which has been run for 30 years by a team of volunteers and part-time workers.

Development worker Jackie Blackwell said: "We feel strongly about working with the authors, or in this case, their families, to keep their stories as true as possible."

Two hundred copies of the book will be printed and it will be launched at the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton on December 6.

The Tale Of A Boy Soldier will be available from bookshops throughout the city.