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)
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.
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