Awards

• Short-listed for James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Biography) 2002
• Shortlisted for James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Biography) 2002.

Overview

Melanie McGrath’s critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in paperback. In this remarkable book, award-winning 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, 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 Café, 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. The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End and the struggles of those who live there.

Full Product Details

9781841151434

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Reviews

'McGrath tells her story in a novelist's idiom, and the result is extraordinarily powerful and curiously resonant. Like much of the East End, Silvertown today is in the process of an astonishing transformation. The curse on the area has been lifted. But McGrath has beautifully recorded the old Silvertown just before it disappears for ever.' Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph 'This is a remarkable account of the social history of the East End. It provides a rare bridge between those two separate Londons; for while the story belongs to a mysterious past, the style and sophistication is strikingly contemporary.' Anthony Sampson, Guardian

In her preface to this story of her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, Melanie McGrath gives as her grandmother's two passions her fierce love for the East End and her addiction to sweets - the latter an antidote to all the sourness in her life. McGrath illustrates, through the fortunes of her family, the history of what is now known as the Docklands, from the grinding poverty when Jenny Page was born in Poplar in 1903 up to 1994 when she died at the age of 91. The book is written with a personal perspective of the historical background and the social changes brought about first by the relentless intensity of the bombing in the Second World War, then the gradual disintegration of the docks, and the replacement of the tight narrow streets by the doomed tower blocks. The Silvertown of the title could easily have been Smoketown, Sulphurtown or Sugartown. In fact the name came from Silver's India Rubber and Gutta Percha factory. The author gives a very honest account of Len Page, the spiv with his Cosy Corner Cafe, his smuggling, his scams at the dog meets, and his eventual desertion of Jenny. But this is really the story of Jenny's painful life. The removal of all her teeth at the age of 17 makes grim reading today. She rejects the isolation of the countryside at the start of the war, returning to the East End to find queues and blackout. There follows the evacuation of her children, her daughter's TB and her husband's infidelity. Despite all of this she is determined that the East End is where she wants to be. A compelling book and a tribute to all the hardship that went before the shiny new prosperity of the Docklands. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Melanie McGrath was born near Romford, Essex. Her books include, Motel Nirvana, which won the 1996 John Llewelyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday award for the Best New British and Commonwealth Writer under thirty-five, Hard Soft and Wet, the bestselling memoir Silvertown and, most recently, The Long Exile: A True Story of Deception and Survival Amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. Hopping, the sequel to Silvertown, will be published by Fourth Estate in early 2008. She writes for the Guardian, Independent, The Times, Evening Standard and Condé Nast Traveller. She is a regular broadcaster on radio, and has been a television producer and presenter. She lives and works in London.

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