East End My Cradle is a classic, still as fresh, vivid and compulsively readable as when Willy Goldman first penned it seventy years ago. This remarkable book was written with first-hand knowledge of both the East End and its diverse range of impoverished and tough characters. Goldman describes the years of childhood and adolescence through to young adulthood spent around the streets and back lanes of the East End and its dance and boxing halls, tenements and alleyways, peppered with petty crime and prostitution. A truly vibrant account of a young life, in a world as joyful and boisterous as it was harsh and unforgiving.