Four Meals For Fourpence: A Heartwarming Tale of Family Life in London's old East End

by Grace Foakes

Overview

I was born in a tenement flat in the East End of London in the year in which Queen Victoria died.'

FOUR MEALS FOR FOURPENCE is Grace Foakes's 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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748128921
Publisher:	Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date:	05/12/2011
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	940,578
File size:	343 KB

About the Author

Grace Foakes was born in Wapping in 1901.

Table of Contents

Prologue: My London 3

1 Where I Spent My Childhood 9

2 My Mother 16

3 My Father 26

4 My Mother's Petticoats 37

5 The Games We Played 53

6 Paradise Row and Other Streets 66

7 Grass Between the Cracks 74

8 Sundays 88

9 My Brothers 106

10 The Clothes We Wore and the Food We Ate 115

11 School Days 132

12 Survival of the Fittest 145

13 Penny in the Slot 163

14 Bootnose and Other Local Characters 174

15 Summertime 189

16 Christmas 199

17 Looking for Work 207

18 Leaving School and Going to War 216

19 Reuben 223

20 Courtship and Marriage 240

21 A Death and a Birth 259

22 Our New House 274

Epilogue: What Grace Did Next 279