World's End

World's End

Summary

World's End is the story of Donald Wheal¹s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War.

Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal¹s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho.

World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy¹s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.

Reviews

  • 'An overwhelmingly honest account of one boy's wartime memories'
    The Good Books Guide

About the author

Donald James

Donald James is the author of the bestselling novels Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and The Fall of the Russian Empire and also the Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich.
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