World`s End: A Memoir of a Blitz Childhood by Donald James Wheal

Softcover published by Arrow 2006

Best-selling author Donald James grew up in Worlds 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. Worlds End was a melting pot of the working class labourers who flooded to London in the previous century to make their fortunes, and Donalds family was no exception. Though it was hard, Donalds was a happy childhood until the war came. Then came the night that Donalds world, did literally end and with it his childhood.