Father is a dustman and Mother a washerwoman.
That seemed to me magic of the highest order and I raced off to other shelves to find it again.THE FAMILY FROM ONE END STREET by Eve Garnett is the story of everyday life in the big, happy Ruggles family who live in the small town of Otwell. It was as if, with the story of Kate Ruggles' summer-long stay at the eponymous hostelry and enthusiastic embrace of village life, Eve Garnett had peered into my mind and written down exactly what she knew would delight me most. This gave me a wholly misguided sense of life as a process of cumulative improvement, which would take several painful years of experience to dispel, but on the plus side, Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn gave me my first understanding of just how deep the pleasures of reading could run. Two, in fact: The Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street, and Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, which were, if you can believe it, even better. Incidentally, the drawings are lovely - sweet, strong and deceptively simple, like the book itself.īut better even than the book was this: it had a sequel. Garnett had been an art student and the book grew out of her walks through the back streets of London as she searched for subjects to sketch. It was also the first book I owned that had been written and illustrated by the author. I just knew it was a relief to spend time with book-children who, like me, had more experience of a world bounded by building sites, patches of grubby parkland and knackered working parents than they did of one strewn with rolling moors, private islands and spies. Not that I knew or cared about any of this at the time, of course. Some critics detected a patronising tone towards Garnett's characters, but others praised her for avoiding both sentimentality and condescension and replacing them with what one called "a careful truthfulness" instead.
And it was the first book not only for me, but for all of its readers when it was first published in 1937, to make urban, working-class children its heroes. Episodically structured, it became therefore the first book I loved for its characters rather than its plot.
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