MY EAST END REMEMBERED

Joanna Roberts (born Joan Samuels) spent the early years of her life in modest circumstances in a neighbourhood of Poplar in the East End of London. Shortly after the period when she was growing up in the nineteen thirties her home and much of the neighbourhood in which she lived was dramatically destroyed in the bombing of the Second World War. In this book she provides an anecdotal account of what her childhood and teenage years were like and how she spent her time. All are described in great detail with close attention being paid to what people were wearing and their hair styles. Particular attention being paid to what the children thought of their elders and how they took advantage of them when opportunities arose. She shows what pleasures could be obtained despite the hardships and how special events like weddings could be turned into elaborate affairs even when there was shortage of materials. All this she set down some years later while the memories were still clear in her mind while she was working at Benthal Junior School in Hackney and at the Ragged School Museum in Tower Hamlets, work for which she received an MBE in 2004 for services to Education and the Community.