Two, in fact: The Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street, and Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, which were, if you can believe it, even better. Incidentally, the drawings are lovely - sweet, strong and deceptively simple, like the book itself.īut better even than the book was this: it had a sequel. Garnett had been an art student and the book grew out of her walks through the back streets of London as she searched for subjects to sketch. It was also the first book I owned that had been written and illustrated by the author. I just knew it was a relief to spend time with book-children who, like me, had more experience of a world bounded by building sites, patches of grubby parkland and knackered working parents than they did of one strewn with rolling moors, private islands and spies. Not that I knew or cared about any of this at the time, of course. Some critics detected a patronising tone towards Garnett's characters, but others praised her for avoiding both sentimentality and condescension and replacing them with what one called "a careful truthfulness" instead.
And it was the first book not only for me, but for all of its readers when it was first published in 1937, to make urban, working-class children its heroes. Episodically structured, it became therefore the first book I loved for its characters rather than its plot.
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