From the front-inside of the dustcover:

“This sometimes hilarious, often moving story is a verbally photographic representation of life as seen through the eyes of a little girl brought up in London’s East End in the early years of this [20th] century; one of eight children and whose overwhelming sense of inferiority rendered her extremely vulnerable to mental batterings from her father and teachers.

Leaving school at fourteen to work in a cigarette factory, she came to know a Twenties era that rumbled rather than roared. Her later stint as a housemaid in domestic service revealed to her how the ‘other half’ lived, in cosy shelter from the reality of the grim nineteen-thirties, endured by herself and her family and friends. There are more helpings of mirth amid the hardships, however.

With her marriage and the adoption of a child during the Second World War, she found a new confidence in life which was doubled when, near to middle age, she finally had more children of her own.”