Wow! This is how we should all live our life. Talk about being like children to become holy. The mother, Rose, is a laundress, and the father, Old Jo, is a dustman (garbage man), and they love their life and their seven children (although the wife does comment that that is plenty). Rose says early on in the book that where would the world be without a laundress and a dustman? I have mixed feelings about nostalgia. I want to avoid a mindset that irritates me in others, that there is inherent value in something that merely serves as a prompt for memories of times past. The memories are good, but the book is only a prompt. Who wants to live in the past? Especially if rose-tinted memories may seem more attractive than the mixed experience of living in the present. I'm also a bit hesitant about (unaccompanied) adults who value children's books, or music, TV programmes or days out, above adult-experiences. It suggests some stunted development. Now tie all that up and what you have is a childhood that didn’t have much technology but what it did have was a tremendous capacity to create happy memories. The Family from One End Street was born from author and artist Eve Garnett’s (1900 – 1991) eye-opening experiences of the poverty in London. Coming from a middle-class family, she trained as an artist in London in the 1920s and there observed the day to day realities of working class children. Initially publishers were reluctant to publish the book, saying the content was unsuitable and in recent years it has been accused of being condescending rather than ground breaking but her close observation of the children she used to draw in the street makes the children of her story lively, full of character and very real – and a generation of working class children got to see the world they were growing up in portrayed in print.

Episodically structured, it became therefore the first book I loved for its characters rather than its plot. 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. 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. William, the youngest Ruggles child, is entered in the Annual Baby Show, but the family is concerned as he is a late teether. He wins his age category (6–12 months) but an older competitor wins the Grand Challenge Cup as William has no teeth. The Ruggles return home only to find that William now has a tooth. The stories are of family life set in a bygone era, where there are no electronic devices to distract the children, and they can play outside creating their own adventures, even though sometimes it lands them in hot water! And if the children want anything, i.e. a trip to the cinema, they come up with ideas as to how to make money to do so, not just hold out their hand and expect mum and dad to cough up, which they could not anyway as they are quite poor. Poor but happy and content with their lot and happy to save what little they earn (doing any odd job) for Bank Holiday treats such as a visit to the sea, where they would eat pork-pies and doughnuts on the promenade.Recent British editions have been published by Puffin. The Family first appeared as a Puffin Book in 1942, under the editorship of Eleanor Graham, only a year after Penguin Books introduced the imprint. It is regarded as a classic, and remains in print, most recently reissued as a Puffin Classic in 2014. But better even than the book was this: it had a sequel. 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. 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.

Set near London around the 1930s, this is sure to please not only the kids, but the parents who can completely relate to the comical, haphazard predicaments! Not everyone agreed with the praise heaped on this book; some found it patronising and unacceptable – the book continues to be read and the arguments about it go on. Meet The Ruggles family that lives at No.1 One End Street in the fictional town of Otwell. Jo Ruggles is the local dustman and his wife Rosie is the local washerwoman. Jo and Rosie’s singular source of pride is their large brood of seven children. Yep, you read it right. Seven children. And each of these seven children has a distinctive personality and the promising ability to get into all kinds of mischief and mayhem. The Ruggles family is always low on funds but never on dignity. The Senior Ruggles rule their little clan with a blend of old-fashioned discipline, gentle cajolement and a gruff optimism. lying on a beach with your talkative family and wriggling your toes in the sand as you snarfed down sandwiches and slabs of fruit cake.

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Garnett has a wonderful ear for dialogue and a true understanding of the way kids' minds work. Though many of the concerns the Ruggles kids struggle with are not relevant to the worries of contemporary kids, their feelings of embarrassment when they do something wrong and their spirit of adventure when a new opportunity arises can be understood by children from any time period, and readers of any age. This book was really a treat, and well worth the long while I had to wait to get my hands on a copy. Strangely, I actually think it will be easier for me to get a hold of the sequels, Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street and Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, which I hope to read soon. Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street is an English children's book by Eve Garnett which was first published by Heinemann in 1956. It is the first of two sequels to Garnett's Carnegie Prize-winning book, The Family from One End Street, which was published by Muller in 1937. 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. Father is a dustman and Mother a washerwoman. Then there's all the children - practical Lily Rose, clever Kate, mischievous twins James and John, followed by Jo, who loves films, little Peg and finally baby William. In 1938, Garnett won the second annual Carnegie Medal awarded by the Library Association for The Family from One End Street, recognising the best children's book by a British subject for the previous year. [2] On the 70th anniversary of the Medal it was named one of the top ten winning works of the previous seventy years, selected by a panel from a public ballot to propose the all-time favourite. [3] However, I see no harm in occasionally revisiting novels you read as a child and trying to assess it objectively.

Garnett subsequently wrote a final book in the series, Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, which details Kate's return visit to Upper Cassington alone the following summer, with the setting remaining as the late 1930s. This was first published by Heinemann in 1962.This is a very good book. I could criticise this for avoiding complex emotions and adult psychology, but that would be churlish. Its strength are many. The book tells of the Ruggles family – Mr Ruggles was a dustman, Mrs Ruggles took in washing and they had seven children – and of their life at Number 1, One End Street. It was a huge success and won the Carnegie Medal as the best book of the year – one of the titles it beat was Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Eve Garnett described The Family from One End Street as “a shot in the battle against slums”. It was translated into many languages, including Japanese – but never Russian as the author’s politics would not allow it. I learned about Eve Garnett’s ‘Family from One End Street’ series from Lucy Mangan’s reading memoir titled Bookworm. As book-finder chance would have it, not long after reading about these childhood favourites of Mangan’s - featuring the working class Ruggles family, with their seven children - I discovered this book (and its follow-up) in vintage 1970s Puffin editions at the Oxfam bookshop I volunteer at. These are the books that I should have been reading as a child: how I would have adored them, with their English style, dialect and setting. (Even as I child, I was a confirmed Anglophile.)