Silvertown
Subtitle: an East End family memoir
By: Melanie McGrath
Edition: Large print [ed.].
Series: Isis reminiscence series; Isis reminiscence series
Publisher: Isis Large Print
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Oxford
Language: eng
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780753152232; 9780753152249
Copyright date: 2002
Subjects: Social life and customs; Families; Family; English Authors; Social conditions; Large type books; Manners and customs; Biography
Description: "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."--Jacket.