Backstreet Child

Salmon Lane is a quiet Bermondsey backstreet lined with modest brick houses and paved with cobbles. For Carrie Tanner, it's home. She's worked hard to build her own business and has earned the grudging respect of her business rivals - even the Galloways, both father and son. Personal feuds, though, are overshadowed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which brings the terrors of the Blitz to the neighbourhood.

This close-knit community is forced to draw on all their reserves of courage and humour to survive the difficulties of poverty, rationing and nightly air raids. And even as the men are called up, go missing in action or are killed, and homes are bombed, their extraordinary Cockney spirit shines through...

Harry was born in 1931 in a back street off the Tower Bridge Road. He left school at the age of 14. Only when his own children began to ask questions about the war, did Harry realise how many stories he had to tell. In his fifties, he was given early retirement from his job as a brewery driver-drayman, and was at last able to devote his time to writing. He became known as 'the King of Cockney sagas', who wrote eighteen bestselling novels of London life. Sadly Harry died in 1999 and the Harry Bowling Prize was set up in 2000 in his memory.

Salmon Lane is a quiet Bermondsey backstreet lined with modest brick houses and paved with cobbles. For Carrie Tanner, it's home. She's worked hard to build her own business and has earned the grudging respect of her business rivals - even the Galloways, both father and son. Personal feuds, though, are overshadowed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which brings the terrors of the Blitz to the neighbourhood. This close-knit community is forced to draw on all their reserves of courage and humour to survive the difficulties of poverty, rationing and nightly air raids. And even as the men are called up, go missing in action or are killed, and homes are bombed, their extraordinary Cockney spirit shines through...

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