"Author Donald James grew up in World's End, Chelsea during the Blitz years. Just on the edge of a fashionable middle class world, his childhood experience was in stark contrast to the privileged, bourgeois lifestyle glimpsed a few hundred yards away. He grew up in stark poverty and depredation, a hard existence yet shot through by the humour and courage of his family and neighbours. This was a now-vanished world of grimy factories and generating plants, coal drays, flat caps and boozers, betting shops, dog tracks, 'Piccadilly girls', Guinness Trust buildings and barefoot children. World's End was a melting pot of the working class labourers who flooded to London in the previous century to make their fortunes, and Donald's family was no exception"--Publisher's description.