World's End

(Paperback)

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Description

A warm-hearted and moving memoir in the tradition of The Road to Nab End- World's End is the story of Donald Wheal s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War. Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho. World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.

Reviews

'An overwhelmingly honest account of one boy's wartime memories' * The Good Books Guide *
'Written to almost make you wish you had been there' * The Times *
'Terrific, an insightful memoir about family love' * Evening Standard *
'I loved it. Wheal spins a fine, affecting tale. It begins in a world where, on Fridays, factory girls wore curlers in their hair, and the now gentrified streets were once known for the brutality of their Saturday night fights. It ends with the horrors and destruction of war.' Gilda O'Neill, author of My East End and Our Street

Author Bio

DONALD WHEAL is the real name of DONALD JAMES, the critically acclaimed thriller writer of Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and Vadim. As Donald Wheal he has also written The Fall of the Russian Empire and The Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich.