Source: Henry Turner, in The Island: The life and death of an East London community 1870-1970 (London: Centerprise, 1979), p. 19
Text: I can recollect my mother being up at past midnight making a pair of trousers for one of us kids … Goodness knows what time she got up in the morning, I suppose the same time as we did, 6 a.m. And she was on the go till midnight. She died when she was 69, absolutely worn out. I can never recollect her going to the pictures, or the “Empire” or anything like that. Never.
Comment: Henry Turner was born in 1902 and lived in ‘The Island’, Hackney, London. He wrote an account of his working class childhood for the Hackney Borough Archives, from which this extract is taken.
