I was born in a tenement flat in the East End of London in the year in which Queen Victoria died.'FOUR MEALS FOR FOURPENCE is Grace Foakes's memories of her girlhood in Wapping in the early 1900s. With a child's uncluttered eye, she describes the small details - shopping in the market, men waiting for work at the dock gates, the rituals of washday, the sights, sounds and smells of the old East End of London. She also describes the fear - of illness, of unemployment, of the workhous...

The poor boy who made his fortune . . . not just once but twice.Little Jeff Pearce grew up in a post-war Liverpool slum. His father lived the life of an affluent gentleman whilst his mother was forced to steal bread to feed her starving children. Life was tough and from the moment Jeff could walk he learned to go door to door, begging rags from the rich, which he sold down the markets.Leaving school at the age of fourteen, he embarked on an extraordinary jo...

'Poverty is a very exacting teacher and I had been taught well'The post-war urban jungle of the Glasgow tenements was the setting for Molly Weir's childhood. From sharing a pull-out bed in her mother's tiny kitchen to running in terror from the fever van, it was an upbringing that was cemented in hardship. Hunger, cold and sickness was an everyday reality and complaining was not an option.Despite the crippling poverty, there was a vivacity to the tenements ...

No Cake, No Jam is the heart-warming true story of a little girl’s London childhood during the Blitz, and of how she rose above adversity through sheer guts and strength of character.Marian Hughes was born in the same year as her father committed suicide. She spent most of her early childhood with her elder sisters and brother in Spurgeon’s Orphanage in South London. There she learned to love extravagant hymns and to receive regular beatings.Suddenly, when Marian w...

Discover the heart-warming and uplifting story of a Glasgow tenement urchin finding her way against adversityBorn during the Second World War in Glasgow, Christine Fraser was her mother's eighth child.Growing up with her siblings in a tiny flat, learning to avoid her hardworking, hard-drinking one-eyed father, making a menace of herself in the streets along with the other urchins, Christine lived an impoverished life but never once cared.Until she w...

'We ain't got no drink, Pa.'I trembled as I spoke. Then somewhere inside me I found the anger, the courage to answer him back.'We don't have no grog cos you drank it all!'I knew he was going for me tonight, so I reckoned I might as well go down fighting after all.Growing up in the slums of 1920s and 30s Bermondsey, Hilda Kemp's childhood was one of chaos and fear. Every day was battleground, a fight to survive and a fight to ...

'A wonderful tale of 1950s Britain... a vivid account of a midwife's lot' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Amazon reader review'I couldn't put it down' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Amazon reader review'Charming, sad, humorous and poignant' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Amazon reader review*****The compelling and heartwarming true story of a young nurse's life and work in 1950s England, from the Sunday Times bestseller.'Three small children pee...

World War Two is finally over. Millions all over the country are starting to wonder if peacetime really is much of an improvement on the War. Food shortages, endless queues, power cuts, rationing and freezing winters make it extremely difficult to make ends meet as husbands return from battlefields to families they hardly know. Yet some East Enders are living large...in a bombed out damp and squalid Hackney slum, one family are leading a life of luxury, a loadsamoney world funded by illega...

Bernadette was just ten years old when her father packed her off to a convent school in Dublin. Seven gruelling years later, she returned home to Liverpool at the start of the swinging sixties. Bernadette had dreamed of being a teacher ever since she was a little girl so she promptly began a course at teacher training college, determined to give children the sort of education she wished she'd had. Bernadette got her first job at 21, teaching five to seven year olds in a school in one of Li...

** Saga Magazine 'Life Story' competition winner**From the streets of London to the Welsh countryside, evacuee Iris Simantel tells of her desperate search for somewhere to belong in Far From the East End.Born in 1938 under threat of looming war, Iris spent her early years playing in the rubble of bombed buildings in Dagenham by day and cowering in a dusty shelter at night. But the hardships of poverty and the dreaded Blitz could not match the pain ...

'IF YOU LOVE DOWNTON, THIS IS RIGHT UP YOUR STREET! CloserIf you liked Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, it's time to discover the true story in Mollie Moran's Sunday Times charming bestselling memoir of life as a 1930s kitchen maid.When young Mollie became a 'skivvy' in a stately London townhouse aged just 14, she quickly learned that she would need a large amount of elbow grease and a sen...

The Blitz had made many families in the East End of London homeless. One solution was to erect prefabs on fields and open spaces to give temporary accommodation to those who had been bombed out. It was in one of these 'modern' boxes that young Norman Jacobs grew up through the 1950s and 1960s. In a lively, detailed and humorous picture of a postwar Hackney childhood, Norman takes us back to an age of rationing, bomb sites, street markets, colourful characters and camaraderie. And in remini...