Four Meals for Fourpence;

 

I was born in a tenement flat in the East End of London in the year in which Queen Victoria died. In this book, Grace Foakes shares her 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, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the old East End of London. She also describes the fear—of illness, of unemployment, of the workhouse—that hung over her family and thousands like them, and her determination that her own children would never know the kind of poverty she had experienced.