Whanganuilibrary.com
Syndetics cover image
Image from Syndetics

Silvertown : an East End family memoir / Melanie McGrath.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: London : Fourth Estate, 2002.Description: xii, 235 pages ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 1841151424
Subject(s): Review: "In this book, writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath 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 and Silvertown -are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, are long since dead and already half forgotten." "Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and 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; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Cafe, opened full of hope by Jenny and Len - later a home to their troubled marriage - and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close-knit community."--BOOK JACKET.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Non-Fiction Davis (Central) Library Non-Fiction Non-Fiction 942.15 MCG 1 Available T00357817
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The story of one East End family, across three generations, living on the fringe of the Thames. Silvertown itself is a ribbon of marshland that sits beside the King George VI dock near Bow Creek. In 1944 Melanie McGrath's grandfather Lenny, bought the Cosy Cafe in Silvertown. From here Lenny, his mistress, his wife and his daughter served egg and chips, liver and bacon, eels and jellied custard to the passing trade from the thriving docks. Business was good. By the late 1940s Lenny was the only Cafe owner in the East End to drive a Cadillac.

"In this book, writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath 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 and Silvertown -are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, are long since dead and already half forgotten." "Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and 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; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Cafe, opened full of hope by Jenny and Len - later a home to their troubled marriage - and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close-knit community."--BOOK JACKET.

11 19 96 133 159

Powered by Koha