Our Street: East End Life in the Second World War

by Gilda O ' Neill (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.25

  Can Gilda tell us yet more about the East End? Yes she can! OUR STREET focuses on the oral testimony of East Londoners as it tells their funny, sad, hopeful, and sometimes shocking stories of what it was like to live in the East End during the Blitz. Our Street - a place both physical and metaphorical - describes the security and the claustrophobia of living in a tight knit community of working people made up of extended family networks, life-long friends, and neighbours who knew you by name.This is an affectionate record of an often fondly remembered, more communal, way of life that has for too many people in our increasingly isolated, change-obsessed twenty first century, all but disappeared.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.25

  Gilda O'Neill's Our Street focuses on the lives of Londoners in the East End during the Second World War. Showing the concerns, hopes and fears of these so-called 'ordinary people' Our Street illustrates these times by looking at the every day rituals which marked the patterns of daily life during WWII. It is an important book and also an affectionate record of an often fondly remembered, more communal, way of life that has all but disappeared. 'Every page is a delight. Every chapter made vivid by a writer who has poured heart and soul into her book' Daily Mail 'A rich tapestry...a finely detailed examination of our not so distant past. Her book is as much a piece of history as the accounts it contains' Time Out Gilda O'Neill was born and brought up in the East End. She left school at fifteen but returned to education as a mature student. She wrote full-time and continued to live in the East End with her husband and family. Sadly she died on 24 September 2010 after a short illness.