World's End: A Memoir of a Blitz Childhood,Donald James Wheal

Best-selling author Donald James grew up in World's End, Chelsea during the Blitz years. Just on the edge of a fashionable middle class world, his childhood experience was in stark contrast to the privileged, bourgeois lifestyle glimpsed a few hundred yards away. He grew up in stark poverty and depredation, a hard existence yet shot through by the humour and courage of his family and neighbours. This was a now vanished world of grimy factories and generating plants, coal drays, flat caps and boozers, betting shops, dog tracks, 'Piccadilly girls', Guinness Trust buildings and bare foot children. World's End was a melting pot of the working class labourers who flooded to London in the previous century to make their fortunes. Donald's family was no exception- his maternal grandfather was a farm labourer who came to London from Essex, married a combative woman who regarded the small enclave as her personal bailiwick. Donald's great grandfather on his father's side was a Victorian bare kn.