A.S Jasper (2013 [1969]) A Hoxton Childhood.

Jan, the narrator, is aged eight in 1913 when this memoir begins. It takes the reader through the First World War and into the mass unemployment of the 1920s and finishes with his eventual marriage to a childhood sweetheart. It’s a slim volume and can be read in one sitting, as I did. In simple sentences it explains what it was like to part of the working poor and living through a period of  social change. The book begins with a set-to and make-do. His eldest sister Mary is pregnant and her boyfriend Gerry is made to marry her and they come to live with the Jaspar family. Jan describes his family as gypsies always on the move from rented  house to rented house. The chief reason is defaulting on rent arrears, but they also move because the house  they live in is too big, or too small. They are a family that grows and shrinks. Jan’s baby sister Molly dies. Mary’s daughter and son dies. His sister Jo, four years-older than the narrator,  first husband dies, torpedoed on his ship in the Merchant Navy, the child they have dies in infancy. Jo is poisoned by the materials used in a factory producing armaments for the front, but recovers sufficently to marry the workng- class toff, Arthur,  and their son also dies. Bill, the narrator’s dad, who is forty when the story begins, is dead before he is fifty, but dies of natural causes. It’s the drink that takes him. He is the baddy of the story, keeping his wife short of house-keeping money, always scamming at work so he can get money for drink and spending the rent money. Jan’s mother is the goody and the hero of the story. She works as a machinist and dress maker and worries and frets. She sends Bert, Jan’s brother, into the naval training school when he’s fifteen, because he’s hanging around with a rough crowd. Her eldest son Will is already in the navy and brings home a fiancee (and his rival) for Jo to marry.  They too become part of the family.   There’s fights and knock-out blows and everybody’s trying to make an extra shilling to get on, but nobody seems to manage it. Perhaps the most poignant note is when young Jan looks out his window of the house they’re renting when the old destitute married couples who are incarcerated in the poor house across the street come out of the separate doors. Men being incarcerated in one section and women in another, but when they allowed outside, once or twice a week, they’re allowed to be the old married couple they’d once been. Death and the poor house.  The working class find relieve in both, but this is not a morbid tale. It’s a love story, Jan for his mother, in particular, and his family that was his true home in Hoxton.