Born in 1950s Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Yvonne Young's childhood was spent at the heart of the city's industry. With her grandfather working as a ship painter, her Uncle Tom helping to build them, and neighbours working for the local armaments factory, the shipyards and factories were her community's lifeblood. Growing up so soon after the Second World War, it was also a time of great hardship and many families around Yvonne suffered poverty and neglect. And yet, people made the best of what little they had, as housewives competed to scrub their doorsteps clean and children turned derelict houses into playgrounds. Yvonne also delighted in hearing about the characters that made up her area, from the chimney sweep to the still occasional sight of the rag-and-bone man. Despite challenges at home, and an education system that didn't expect her to make it beyond the local factory, she always tried to see the bright side. Cobbled Streets and Penny Sweets is an affectionate, at times hard-hitting, and beautifully evocative portrait of life in a city that has changed beyond recognition. Above all, it is a story of family, friendship, and getting through the hard times with a healthy dose of Geordie humour.

Nanny Pat has always been the heart of her family, and her children and grandchildren regularly pitch up at her house for a cup of tea, a slice of her famous sausage plait and some wise advice. Now, with her trademark warmth and humour, she evokes the colourful East End world of her childhood. Pat was born in 1935 and, apart from a brief period when she was evacuated during the Second World War, she lived in Bow, part of a poor but close-knit community. Her mother died when Pat was only eleven, leaving her heartbroken. As young as she was, she was soon running the household, washing, cleaning and cooking for her father and brother - as well as working in a cork factory upon leaving school. It was a lonely life at times, as her strict father refused to let her go courting. But then she met a handsome young man called Charlie . . . and, against all opposition, she was determined to marry him. Full of great characters, from her deaf Nan to Auntie Alice, who would dress in all her furs to pop out to buy a pork chop, and packed with wonderful anecdotes, this delightful memoir vividly captures a lost way of life.

Born in the early 1950s, Yvonne Young grew up in the West End of Newcastle. With her grandfather working as a ship painter, her Uncle Tom helping to build them, and her neighbours working for the local armament factory, she saw the city's heart, its manufacturing, all around her. Growing up so soon after the Second World War, it was also a time of great hardship and she grew up surrounded by grinding poverty and neglect. And yet, people made the best of what little they had, as housewives proudly competed to scrub their doorsteps clean and children turned derelict houses into playgrounds. Yvonne delighted in hearing about the characters that made up the area, seeing the chimney sweep and the coal man make the rounds, and seeing folks singing and dancing in their neighbours' homes after closing time. It was a time when community was everything, before the city's industry began to be dismantled and took this old way of life with it. Cobbled Streets and Penny Sweets is an affectionate, at times hard-hitting, and beautifully evocative portrait of life in a city that has changed beyond recognition. Above all, it is a story of family, friendship, and getting through the hard times with a healthy dose of Geordie humour.

Life for East End families like Pat's was always a struggle. She worked for years in Tate & Lyle's sugar factory while her husband Charlie took on two jobs so their growing family could survive. Until one day Charlie came home with a brilliant idea - they should take over The Rising Sun pub in Bromley-by-Bow. In this charming memoir Pat describes her years as a pub landlady and vividly evokes the East End community she served in the 1960s, the extraordinary characters she encountered and the changes that swept through society at that time. She also reveals why she and Charlie moved to Essex, and what it felt like to become a star of The Only Way is Essex in her seventies.

This wonderfully charming memoir, written when the author was 93, vibrantly brings to life an all-but-forgotten time and place. It is a moving tale of working-class life, and of the boundaries that can be overcome by love. “There are places that I have never forgotten. A little cobbled street in a smoky mill town in the North of England has haunted me for the greater part of my life. It was inevitable that I should write about it and the people who lived on both sides of its ‘Invisible Wall.’ ” The narrow street where Harry Bernstein grew up, in a small English mill town, was seemingly unremarkable. It was identical to countless other streets in countless other working-class neighborhoods of the early 1900s, except for the “invisible wall” that ran down its center, dividing Jewish families on one side from Christian families on the other. Only a few feet of cobblestones separated Jews from Gentiles, but socially, it they were miles apart. On the eve of World War I, Harry’s family struggles to make ends meet. His father earns little money at the Jewish tailoring shop and brings home even less, preferring to spend his wages drinking and gambling. Harry’s mother, devoted to her children and fiercely resilient, survives on her dreams: new shoes that might secure Harry’s admission to a fancy school; that her daughter might marry the local rabbi; that the entire family might one day be whisked off to the paradise of America. Then Harry’s older sister, Lily, does the unthinkable: She falls in love with Arthur, a Christian boy from across the street. When Harry unwittingly discovers their secret affair, he must choose between the morals he’s been taught all his life, his loyalty to his selfless mother, and what he knows to be true in his own heart.

A compelling and colourful memoir that takes the reader inside the forgotten world of domestic service. Arriving at the great houses of 1920s London, fifteen-year-old Margaret's life in service was about to begin... As a kitchen maid - the lowest of the low - she entered an entirely new world; one of stoves to be blacked, vegetables to be scrubbed, mistresses to be appeased, and even bootlaces to be ironed. Work started at 5.30am and went on until after dark. Yet from the gentleman with a penchant for stroking the housemaids' curlers, to the heartbreaking story of Agnes the pregnant under-parlourmaid, fired for being seduced by her mistress' nephew, Margaret's tales of her time in service are told with wit, warmth, and a sharp eye for the prejudices of her situation.

Paul Pennyfeather is a second-year theology student who, as a result of mistaken identity, has his “education discontinued for personal reasons.” He ends up as a schoolmaster at a fourth-rate school, hired despite not meeting any of the qualifications in their advertisement. He there encounters a cornucopia of eccentric characters, including another master who has a wooden leg, a former clergyman with capital-D Doubts, and a servant who tells everyone he’s rich, but with a different tale for each about why he’s posing as a servant. Paul’s time at school leads to romance with a student’s mother, and that in turn leads to enormous complications in Paul’s life. Inspired in part by his own experiences in school and as a schoolmaster, Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, Decline and Fall, is a dark and occasionally farcical satire of British college life. It’s something of a perverse coming-of-age story, subverting the expected journey and ending that the archetype usually demands. Shining a devastating light on many of the societal struggles of post-WWI Britain, Waugh took his novel’s title from another work that revealed the ineluctable descent of a great society: Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Waugh issued a new edition of Decline and Fall in 1960 that contained restored text that was removed by his publisher from the first edition. This Standard Ebooks edition follows the first edition. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.