backstreet

Backstreet is a collection of stories which will transport the reader back to 1920s London - not to the thriving social scene of the Roaring Twenties but to the streets of Battersea, where a young Joyce Challis and her family lived in a tenement, with a shared outside toilet and a succession of lodgers and subtenants.

A cliché it may be but the streets were Joyce’s playground and the neighbours’ children an extended family of sorts. With a colourful cast of characters from the terrifying Old Coalie to the Sammonsies donkey, and the Rolls children with their assortment of ostentatious secondhand clothes, Joyce’s world comes to life through her own words.

For Joyce, her family, friends and neighbours, life held many risks, from health hazards such as the rats, lice and fleas which were rife in households, to common illnesses such as tuberculosis and scarlet fever, which Joyce herself had a terrifying brush with as a very young girl.

Nevertheless, the overriding - and often humorous - message is that family and community commitment enabled a lively and happy childhood.

This posthumous collection of Joyce’s stories has been compiled and edited by her son and daughter.