Norman Jacobs

In this revealing memoir of childhood, the author shows not only what affected his family, but also reveals a large slice of social history concerning the lives of all ordinary working-class people struggling to live in the slums of the East End of London in those pre-Welfare State days. He writes with sympathy, and sometimes anger, of the overcrowded houses with families of anything up to eight children, as his own had, living in just two or three rooms with outside W.C. and water tap; of the...