In Four Meals for Fourpence, Grace Foakes recounts the simple joys and the many harships of her childhood in the impoverished East End of London during the early 20th century. The book provides good insight into the era and the plight of her family, and some very heartwarming moments along the way. Though her writing is just a shade below many other childhood memoirs that I've read, her conversational interjections peppered throughout give this a quaint "oral history" quality which more than compensates. ( )

This is a detailed look at a very ordinary young girl's life in the London slum of Wapping in the early 1900s, before World War I. Grace Foakes wrote it in the 1970s, during the final years of her life. When she was a child she and her family lived in dire poverty in a two-room flat in the East End of London and she describes it in detail, without pulling any punches as to how hard life was. Her long-suffering mother bore a child every year ("I think she had 14 children altogether, but I am not sure of this, for some died at birth and some lived just a few weeks") but the babies often died, and Grace notes that many of them "should never have been born." She writes in detail about the meals they ate -- scraping to get by on as little as possible, with meat eaten but rarely -- and the suffering people endured because of disease, malnutrition, overcrowding and never any money for a doctor. When Grace was in her teens, her mother got cancer, became bedridden and died, and the burden of running the household fell to her.

In spite of the suffering and deprivation in her childhood, Grace doesn't complain; she has no room for self-pity. I got the impression that her parents did the best they could with what they had, and Grace has many good memories of her life in Wapping. This isn't "misery lit" by any means; I enjoyed it. ( )