Book description
Melanie McGrath's critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in
ebook format.
In this remarkable book, award-winning 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, 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 Café, 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.
The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This
evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End
and the struggles of those who live there. 'McGrath tells her story in
a novelist's idiom, and the result is extraordinarily powerful and
curiously resonant. Like much of the East End, Silvertown today is in
the process of an astonishing transformation. The curse on the area has
been lifted. But McGrath has beautifully recorded the old Silvertown
just before it disappears for ever.' Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph
'This is a remarkable account of the social history of the East End. It
provides a rare bridge between those two separate Londons; for while the
story belongs to a mysterious past, the style and sophistication is
strikingly contemporary.' Anthony Sampson, Guardian Melanie McGrath is
the author of three previous books, 'Motel Nirvana', 'Hard, Soft &
Wet' and 'Silvertown'. She is a regular contributor for the Guardian,
Independent and the Express. She lives in Vauxhall, London.
