Jean Fullerton - A Child of the East End: A heartfelt, funny and often shocking memoir, perfect for fans of My East End and Call the Midwife

Jean Fullerton is the author of nineteen historical novels. She is a qualified district and queens nurse who has spent most of her working life in the East End of London, first as a sister in charge of a team, and then as a district nurse tutor. She is also a qualified teacher and spent twelve years lecturing on Community Nursing studies at a London university. She now writes full time.

Find out more at www.jeanfullerton.com

Also by Jean Fullerton

East End Nolan Family

No Cure for Love

A Glimpse at Happiness

Perhaps Tomorrow

Hold on to Hope

Nurse Millie and Connie

Call Nurse Millie

All Change for Nurse Millie

Christmas With Nurse Millie

Fetch Nurse Connie

Easter With Nurse Millie

Wedding Bells for Nurse Connie

East End Ration Book

A Ration Book Christmas Kiss

A Ration Book Christmas Broadcast

Pocketful of Dreams aka A Ration Book Dream

A Ration Book Christmas

A Ration Book Childhood

A Ration Book Wedding

A Ration Book Daughter

A Ration Book Victory

Jean Fullerton

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2022 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Jean Fullerton, 2022

The moral right of Jean Fullerton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 286 0

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 287 7

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

2627 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk/corvus/

To my husband of forty-five years Revd Kelvin Woolmer,
my three daughters and eight grandchildren

O NE OF MY first East London memories is lying in bed, listening to the low boom of the barges as they nudged each other on the Thames, just half a mile away from our estate. It is a sound my family had listened to for just short of two centuries. Today, I am the last Fullerton to have heard that noise floating on the still night air.

What used to be nothing more than a gravel floodplain has since been transformed into the waterfront of million-pound apartments, chic restaurants and coffee bars known as Canary Wharf. Where a silt marsh once lay, sharp, angular glass towers now stretch into the sky. When I was a child, this part of London looked very different to the way it does now.

It was work that first drew all my ancestors to the East End to Wapping, Stepney and Bethnal Green and work revolved around the water. As the dock and its surrounding factories began work at seven, the first front doors in the street started banging just after six, and the sound of dozens of pairs of hobnail boots marching southwards echoed between the rows of houses. East London was alive with industries. The docks London, St Katharines and the Royal were unloading spirits and food daily from all four corners of the globe. The warehouses now riverside apartments were bursting at the seams with goods ready to be loaded on to trucks. Further from the docks there were machine factories, food processing plants, woodwork shops and hundreds of small wholesale companies working out of old Victorian houses along Commercial Road.

East London is the oldest suburb of London, springing up in the Middle Ages when craftsmen like boat builders and bakers settled there, and the area dates back to pre-historical times. The Ratcliffe Highway, as it was known for centuries, runs along the same high ground as an Iron Age causeway. If you stand on the Highway, and look south down Wapping Lane towards the river, you can still see the dip away as it goes towards the shore.

Through the sixties, when post-war promises crashed around our ears, followed by the oil crisis and industrial unrest of the seventies, to the nineties and now almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, Ive always known my roots. They are embedded in the tangle of streets in the true East End, where I grew up.

I was part of the large, tight-knit network of families in the East End whose very survival often depended on each member pulling together for the good of all. The unwritten rule of East London was that you had a duty to your family. You were loyal to them and they took precedence over everyone else. People who broke that rule were often cold-shouldered. I would call across the street to gloriously rowdy neighbours; I knew the auntie behind every door, who would tend to your scraped knees or give you a mouthful if you stepped out of line. I bore witness to crime from a young age, too. There was always someone who knew someone who could get you what you were after, be it a television or a fur coat.

The East End way of life I was born into had a rhythm that had existed for generations. The men came home on a Friday night and put housekeeping money on the table; their social life centred around the pub, the betting shop and football. Women caught up with each other on street corners and in shop queues; they lived communal lives helping each other with childcare and pitching in with a hot meal when there was sickness or bereavement in a neighbours house. Everyone had a part to play and everyone did what was expected of them.

Life was tough. Living conditions were diabolical. Damp walls and an outside toilet were the least of it, as often there was just a single cold tap in the kitchen and no electricity upstairs. Although its hard to believe now, it wasnt unknown for a family of seven or more to occupy a couple of damp rooms in a house, with smaller children sleeping on truckle beds beside their parents and older children top-to-tail in double beds.

However, these were our streets and they were where we belonged. I grew up through the fifties, when the old Victorian houses were being swept aside to make way for high-rise blocks with indoor toilets and modern kitchens, but even when we were moved into flats and maisonettes on new council estates, the spirit of the old streets remained. Children played on concrete landings instead of cobbles and women gossiped at the top of the stairwell rather than on street corners, but the sense of community was the same.