This book is about family, neighbourhood and class. The author's interest stems in part from her family's own roots in this area of south London. She returns to Lambeth and looks at how women in this area have lived between 1913 and the present. Using oral material, the book tells of childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, keeping house, and of the infinitely ingenious ways working-class people have of circumventing and surviving poverty. It also chronicles the changes, looking at new migrants in the area, and the ways in which traditional means of survival - neighbourliness, street life, extended family ties, the pawnshop - have been eroded at a time of high unemployment and fierce economic hardship. This is a book about survival, about opportunities found and made, however great the material deprivation. Mary Chamberlain is President of the Oral History Society and co-founder of the London History Workshop Centre. From 1977-87 she was senior lecturer in cultural studies at the London College of Printing. She wrote "Fenwomen", "Old Wives' Tales" and is editor of "Writing Lives".