Read by Michael Jayston

Best-selling author Donald James grew up in World's 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. This was a now vanished world of grimy
factories and generating plants, coal drays, flat caps and boozers, betting
shops, dog tracks, 'Piccadilly girls', Guinness Trust buildings and bare foot
children. World's 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.

The story tells of the feud between Donald's two grandmothers that meant
that though they only lived a few yards away from each other, for a dozen
years they never acknowledge one another avoiding even at Donald's parent's
wedding, Christmases or birthday celebrations. Yet, though it was hard,
Donald's was a happy childhood until the war came. Donald was eight. The radio
carried news of impending war and then the declaration of war, difficult to
believe in the Indian summer of the 1939. But soon Donald's world would be
torn apart by school drills with gas masks and evacuation plans, evacuation
itself then an uneasy return to London just as the Blitz itself began and the
nights were spent in terror as bombs rained down through the Black Out. Then
came the night that Donald's world, did literally end and with it his childhood.

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