The Family from One End Street (A Puffin Book)

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CILIP, successor to the Library Association, assigns the subject tags "family large roisterous" and "family working class" in its online presentation of the Carnegie Medal winning books. [2] Plot [ edit ] The Ruggles family lives at No. 1 One End Street in the heart of Otwell, located on the Ouse river. Otwell-on-the-Ouse is a fictional town resembling Lewes, Sussex, where the author lived.

The story begins with Lily Rose, the eldest child, trying to help her mother Rosie with the ironing and ruining a green petticoat. She apologises to its owner, Mrs Beaseley, who forgives her. Mrs Beaseley also gives Kate (the second eldest child) her niece's cast off clothes for her new school, as the government funds to help with this are paid in arrears. Kate loses the school hat, and tries to sell mushrooms to pay for a new one, but the original is eventually found. It's the classic story of life in a big, happy family! And with seven children, you know there won't be a dull moment. Each chapter introduces you to a different child and tells of their adventures. From Lily Rose's plans to assist her mother with the laundering, to the twin's joining a "gang" (great laughs here!), to baby William being entered in a baby contest, it's fun twists and laughs ahead for everyone. It is regarded as a classic, and remains in print, most recently reissued as a Puffin Classic in 2014. 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.

But what about the (slightly) shabbily shod children who leaned over the fence and watched the FIVE ride along in their quaint caravans? What did those kids do to enjoy summer in all it’s sweltering glory?

I loved learning, as an adult, that this beloved book was ground-breaking for being the first British children's book to depict the everyday lives of normal working-class kids, instead of the polished "desirable" lives of upper-class children. 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. Eve Garnett lived in Lewes, Sussex for the last half of her life. She published more books but her greatest interest was in painting and she had several London exhibitions. 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. This is the story of the Ruggles siblings Kate, Peg and Jo — three of the seven children of Mr Ruggles the dustman and Mrs Ruggles the washerwoman — who go on holiday to the Dew Drop Inn, in the fictional country village of Upper Cassington, while Peg and Jo convalesce from the measles and Kate takes the opportunity to learn about agriculture, her planned future career.However, I see no harm in occasionally revisiting novels you read as a child and trying to assess it objectively. 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 first heard about The Family from One End Street: and Some of Their Adventures by Eve Garnett from the BBC television special, "Picture Book: An Illustrated History of Children's Literature", which my husband and I watched together a few years ago. In a segment of the show, Jacqueline Wilson, author of The Story of Tracy Beaker, spoke of the way Garnett's portrayal of working class life resonated with her as she grew up in similar circumstances. She identified the book as the first children's novel to show what it was truly like to be from a poor family. We have hunted high and low for this book for years, and it was only a shot-in-the-dark search at OpenLibrary.org that finally led to me finding and reading it. It was an added bonus that the book won the 1938 Carnegie Medal, making it possible for this to be the first book I will review for the Old School Kidlit Reading Challenge. 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?