Silvertown

Product Description

Melanie Mc Grath's critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in paperback. In this remarkable book award-winning writer Melanie Mc Grath has given us a vivid & poignant memoir of the East End. Mc Grath spent years wondering about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives Poplar East Ham & Silvertown -- are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents Jenny & Len Page long since dead & already half forgotten. Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks & pubs & dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie Mc Grath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys & lanes of Poplar in 1914 where eleven year old Jenny watches the men go off to fight; the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; the London docks then the largest port in the world; & Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Cafe opened full of hope by Jenny & Len -- later a home to their troubled marriage -- & an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks & the disintegration of this close knit community. The places Melanie Mc Grath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative & deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End & the struggles of those who live there.