I think before any further trips to Lewes I will have to re-read The Family From One End Street.Eve Garnett's 1937 novel The Family from One End Street might well read a bit too obviously episodically for those readers who always do desire and crave a specific and mostly straightforward plot line in a novel, and is also and indeed (as well as naturally) an object, a book of its time, of late 1930s England (and as such a time when there was still a very real and palpable societal and cultural attitude of not striving too much to rise above one's supposed station, one's place in a stratified society). When I first moved to England and realised that the countryside was full of picturesque villages with pubs with thatched roofs, I was completely shocked as I didn't know places like this existed in real life. I have to say it was nothing like the pub in our family which was a square Georgian house, slightly run down, with a far from benign landlady otherwise known as our granny. For a long time I fantasised about going on holiday to a country inn, the Dew Drop Inn to be precise, which was drawn with tiny casement windows and a thatched roof and had the kindest landlady ever. The book I liked best was the one where a number of the children have a holiday in the country.

The little girls were drawn with short bobs and knickers that you could just see underneath their dresses while the boys wore shorts and knitted ties. I loved everything about the books including the illustrations. There were seven children in the Ruggles family just as there were in our house and money was very tight. Obviously I had never heard of Virginia Woolf when I first read them. I thought the books were set in northern England and didn't realise that the river Ouse which featured in the stories was the same river that Virginia Woolf walked into with the stones in her pocket. Of course I didn't really understand them and certainly didn't appreciate how unusual it was, at the time they were written, that they featured working class children. I first discovered them when I was 8 or 9 and along with Enid Blyton these were the first big books that I read by myself.

I was terribly excited by this because Eve Garnett wrote a number of children's books about a family called the Ruggles who lived in One End Street which I read over and over again as a child. It has a plaque on it because it was once the home of Eve Garnett. This little house was on an impossibly steep street in Lewes.

The family from one end street