Eve Garnett and the Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street

 

It’s 1938, and in the small Sussex town of Otwell life goes on much as usual for the Ruggles family. Mrs Ruggles still takes in washing, her kitchen being HQ of ‘The Ideal Laundry – Careful Hand Work – Bag Wash’, while all the time looking after her husband and their seven children.

Mr Ruggles is still a dustman, spending his evenings at the allotment and dreaming of buying a pig.

The children go – some more enthusiastically than others – to school, and in between have their own adventures and mishaps. There is, by our standards, a lot of freedom, but there is also very little money. The challenges of putting food on the table and clothes on the backs of a large family in a crowded little house are real ones for both parents.

This is working class life between the wars, and many of its details would be familiar to my own parents, from fish paste sandwiches to Celluloid toys, farthings, and doses of malt-and-oil. But as the second instalment of Eve Garnett’s much-loved trilogy opens, disaster strikes.

Measles is rife in the town, and has infected Lily Rose (14), Jo (7) and Peg (5). They are swiftly carted off (by ambulance!) to the Fever Hospital (again something my own mother remembers well) – but when the doctor prescribes convalescence in country air for the younger two, how on earth are the impecunious Ruggles to provide it?

Enter Mrs Ruggles’ friend, Mrs Beasley;

‘"Well isn’t that a co-incidence!" exclaimed the cook. "Only this morning I had a letter from my sister what lives in Kent – Mrs Wildgoose – you’ve heard me speak of her? – saying as the children she usually has there of a summer won’t be coming this year"'

The Dew Drop Inn

So, after many calculations re the price of train tickets and boot repairs, and a raid on poor Mr Ruggles’ Pig Money tin, Peg and Jo are off to The Dew Drop Inn. With them is Kate – next in line after Lily Rose, (for Lily Rose can’t think of anything worse than spending six weeks with nothing to look at but fields) – who has not had measles, but is desperate to visit the countryside;

'Country she, Kate, had been wanting to go to for as long as she could remember; where it was so important she, of all the family – the one who was ‘going on the land’ (as soon as she’d got a scholarship to that Agricultural College place she was always dreaming about) – should go!'

This clever set up allows Eve Garnett to show us both town and country life.  At the Inn – whose joys are seen largely through Kate’s eyes – there is plenty of good food, a bedroom just for Kate (who is used to sharing not only a bedroom but also a bed with Lily Rose – again something familiar to my mother, who shared a bed with her three sisters, the other bedroom being reserved for their only brother’s sole occupancy), and all manner of interesting characters to meet and places to explore.

Kate in her very own bedroom

Garnett is so good at character development, from lovely Elsie-what-helps-me to the unpredictable and often curmudgeonly shopkeeper Mrs Megson, that from my very first reading of the books as a child I felt I knew these people.

The village shop, whose appearance is rather more welcoming than its owner

Even the train journey is an adventure, and almost a disastrous one. Garnett knows exactly how Kate feels as she takes charge of her young siblings; the pride in being (sort of, for Mrs Ruggles has her doubts) trusted, the worry about having to change trains at Haywards Heath, the responsibility for Peg and Jo. Small events are large for children – and indeed I can remember many myself. An annoying lady sharing the carriage complains about Kate peeling oranges; she demands a response from Kate, but Kate has been ordered by Mum to speak to no strangers – a predicament I know I found myself in on many occasions. We may think of ‘adventures’ as involving far flung travels, pirates or dragons, but really, the little everyday things can be just as exciting (or upsetting, if they involve hot irons and petticoats…)

The chemist's shop

Worst of all for Kate, at Haywards Heath the expensive bottle of malt-and-oil meets a sorry fate, and she is obliged to leave the Peg on the platform (tied to the suitcase!) while she and Jo rush to a chemist to buy a replacement. In the shop, with only minutes to spare, she is stuck behind an elderly gentleman pondering the qualities of various toothbrushes. It’s bad enough being in this situation as an adult; as a child the feeling of powerlessness is overwhelming;

'The chemist looked coldly at her through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

"Children" he said severely "must wait. Try this one sir – it’s not so hard."'

Of course the children get to The Dew Drop Inn in the end, and have a marvellous, eventful, holiday.

Lily Rose in her bridesmaid's dress

Meanwhile, back in Otwell time does not stand still. Lily Rose is asked to be a bridesmaid at her Uncle Albert’s wedding, and more calculations ensue as the beleaguered Mr Ruggles tries to find the cash for the bus fares, and Mrs Ruggles frets over Lily Rose’s attire. Then there is the problem of a present – one that is solved in a most unusual way.

Albert, who has a Past, is clearly marrying up in the world, and Garnett’s description of the bride’s home tells us all we need to know about the really quite small, but also chasmal, differences between the families. The wedding day itself is a microcosm of 1930s life; the bus journey (few cars, and definitely none owned by dustmen), the need for the wedding to be concluded by 3pm to be legal, the paper hats and crackers at the reception, the 'cold tongue buffet.'

So much else happens in this wonderful book, which is now as much an historic record as a children’s story. The entire trilogy (The Family from One End Street, Further Adventures, and The Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn) is very enjoyable, and in 1937 the first book won the second ever Carnegie Medal – beating none other than The Hobbit in the process.

Eve Garnett originally trained as an artist. She exhibited at the Tate and Lefevre Galleries and the New English Art Club, and was commissioned to illustrate Evelyn Sharp’s The London Child (1927.) This experience left her horrified at the conditions in which London (then one of the world’s richest cities) allowed its poor to live. 

One of Eve Garnett's illustrations for The London Child

Garnett's wish to bring such poverty and class division to the attention of the world led her to work on a 40 foot long mural at the Children’s House in Bow, a nursery founded by the pioneering Lester sisters, Muriel and Doris. In the mural, a line of children is seen walking along an East End street. At the end of the street they go through a door into a green wood, where they can then play freely. The mural illustrates the Lester sisters' social and educational ideals, which were based on ideas similar to Garnett's own;

'Muriel and Doris did not see their work as charity but as an 'overdue act of justice.' They encouraged local people in this poor, overcrowded and polluted area of East London to believe that they deserved as much and had the potential to achieve as much in life as the rich and powerful.' *

Garnett was also inspired by what she had seen in London's slums to publish a book of drawings with commentary, Is It Well With The Child? (1938). Her evocative pen and ink illustrations for the Family From One End Street trilogy help to bring the stories alive.

The first Family From One End Street book was rejected by several publishers as ‘unsuitable for children’; it was finally published by Frederick Muller in 1937.

In 2016 The Carnegie Medal Project blog published a very interesting article* about the first book, refuting the opinion (voiced by Rosemary Manning in 1966) that it was a patronising view of working class life. The writer pointed out that, although the Ruggles family does appear ‘poor but happy’, (which is a trope I myself find highly irritating), Garnett does not shy away from the problems they face, nor portray them as inferior beings:

'Throughout the novel Garnett gives the impression that the Ruggles are no less intelligent, creative or virtuous than any middle-class family; they are just poorer.'**

Kate in particular aspires to great things, and has already won a scholarship to the Grammar School.

The writer concludes that The Family From One End Street is in fact a good deal more radical than it might at first appear, and I agree. It may be ‘cosy’ in its way (Puffin recommended it as ‘a charming book for 8-11 year olds’), it’s not The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, but the message it sends is still a powerful one.

'The Ruggles have a happy home, but their poverty is never forgotten about; from the opening mention of Mrs Ruggles’ worry about boots to her anxiety about Joe revealing the split in his Sunday suit by straphanging in the Tube with the ‘wrong’ arm, we’re given many little reminders of the way having no money shapes your experience of the world.’*

Jacqueline Wilson (c) BookTrust

In a January 2019 interview for the BookTrust, the writer Jacqueline Wilson chose The Family From One End Street as 'The Book That Made Me':

'They (the Ruggles) didn't look like the usual story book children at all, They obviously didn't live in posh houses with big gardens and go to boarding school. They looked like the children in our flats, the children in my class at school. They looked like me.

This was my world.

It was as if The Family From One End Street had given me permission to write about ordinary urban children in an honest, natural way. I know that there have been criticisms since its publication, and claims that it patronises the working classes. All I can say is that I loved it, and still do. It thoroughly deserved to have won the Library Association Carnegie Medal. I think it's one of the most original and outstanding stories for children and I keep my copy in pride of place on my bookshelves.' 

Like Wilson, I returned to these books again and again as a child, and rereading them now is still a very great pleasure.  They are all still in print, and justly so.


The Family from One End Street, Further Adventures of the Family From One End Street, and The Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, by Eve Garnett, are published by Puffin. (You can also often find copies in charity shops.)

*There is lots of interesting information about the Lester sisters and their work in the East End on http://www.muriellester.org/ - Muriel and Doris Lester and the Heritage of the Kingsley Hall Community Centres.

** https://carnegieproject.wordpress.com/tag/author-eve-garnett/