Product Description

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 Cafe, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19309 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Silvertown is the story of the life of author Melanie McGrath's grandmother, Jenny Page. As McGrath acknowledges, "It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn't. It belonged to Jenny". McGrath's achievement in the book is to make Jenny's very commonplace, circumscribed life not only believable and moving but also to turn it into a mirror in which the reader can see the changes that the century visited upon the East End. When Jenny was a young girl, the London docks were the biggest port in the world, teeming with life and industry. By the time she was an old woman, all the docks were closed and the old East End was a part of history. Not that Silvertown encourages nostalgia. The descriptions of Jenny's impoverished childhood, of the pulling of all her teeth on her 17th birthday, of the sweatshop where she worked, are enough to make readers throw away any rose-tinted glasses they might be tempted to use. Very occasionally the dialogue in the book lapses into the "Cor, blimey, strike a light, guv'nor" kind of Cockney heard in so many bad British films of the black-and-white era. Largely, both dialogue and narrative combine to provide a remarkably convincing and lively portrait of an ordinary life rescued from oblivion and of a world that's gone.--Nick Rennison

Review
'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

Stephanie Cross, Observer
'McGrath has produced an unsentimental work that is at once affectionate and deeply affecting.'

Customer Reviews

A rare gem of book to be added to your MUST READ list.
The first thing that struck me about this book was the use of language which raises it head and shoulders above others of a similar genre.For example " Jenny was salty and wilful,as thin and prickly as the reeds that once grew where she was born. Her heart was full of tiny thorns, which chafed but were never big enough to make her bleed. "

The second thing to strike me that I was being led through a door into a world and a London about which I knew absolutely nothing and had never dreamt that such a place existed. Perhaps much of this would be familiar to Londoners but as a Scot this book was a revelation, a history lesson intertwined with the story of an ordinary, yet somehow extraordinary life.

If I have any criticism of the book it would simply be that it was far too short and passed too quickly from my life. I wanted to know so much more, to ask so many more questions than were answered. And yet that is the mastery of this book, it leaves you wishing there was just one more sweetie in the bag. That Jenny Page had one more sugary treat to offer.

It is without doubt one the best books I have read this year.

absorbing and moving
This is a really impressive book. It is the story of a poor, passive young woman, born and living out her life in the East End, unhappily married, and pretty much at the mercy of big national and world events. It is the very ordinariness of the story that makes it so impressive; Jenny Page could be anybody's grandma, and her life story is absorbing. Melanie McGrath wears her research/general learning lightly. I found it impossible to put down, and wanted it to go beyond Jenny's story, to tell us more about Rosie, and, indeed, McGrath herself. Very highly recommended.

A family story - A history - A really good read
Telling the story of her grandparents the author weaves a marvelous tapestry of east end life, family life and an almost lost area of London. One can only admire the courage and tenacity of her grandmother surviving against poverty, loss, an unfulfilling marriage, and a world war. The style is compelling and clearly written by someone who is happy that the terrible circumstances of poverty are no longer seen in England yet who also realises that there were qualities and characteristics of the people who lived in the East End which are both admirable and in some ways also in danger of being lost. The author has researched the back-ground of so many places and events in the 20th century east end. This is a book that historians will read with relish as much as those of us who are interested in other people's lives. First Rate.