specialists in local books and authors inc. Hardy & Fowles

London Born
A Memoir of a Forgotten City

Sidney Day

Sidney Day was born and raised in 'a street where there was so much villainy going on, so many drunks and gambling and Gawd knows what, that at night the police would only come down in twos. Everyone knew it as Tiger Bay'

In a breathtakingly original memoir, Sidney Day, who is now ninety-three, remembers everyday life in a London now long gone. Growing up in grinding poverty, his Dad away in the trenches, Sid stole food and took every opportunity he could get to make a few coppers. From the age of six he learnt how to run rings round the local bobby, Ernie Costen. With relish, he relates how 'going out on the fiddle' as a young man sometimes put him and his friends on the wrong side of the law Breaking in to the tailors' shops to kit themselves out in fifty-bob suits was all part of keeping up appearances. As he says, 'we was all at it'.

He conjures up a world of pub brawls, of horse and cart journeys; of courting couples in Parliament Hill Fields; of public baths and washpots; of bread and dripping round the range. And he goes on to tell of the Second World War and his determination to survive for his wife and family - 'the only thing that ever counted'. Sidney Day is funny, irreverent, warm-hearted; a voice straight from the past.

Sidney Day was born in Highgate, London, in 1912. He cannot read or write, but his granddaughter, Helen Day, captivated by the stories he tells, decided to transcribe his words and shape them into this memoir. They both now live near Bridport in Dorset

authors own web-site www.londonborn.co.uk