The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett

Serialized by the BBC in 1939, it won the Library Association’s prestigious Carnegie Medal – beating The Hobbit – and has been in print ever since. Despite publishers’ initial reluctance, it was an immediate success. In fact the book was probably the first ever British children’s book with working-class protagonists. Here was a story about an urban working-class family that detailed the endless struggles of Mr and Mrs Ruggles – a dustman and a washerwoman – to feed, clothe and shoe their seven children.

At least eight publishers had rejected it on account of its supposed ‘grittiness’. I don’t know how old I was when my mother first read the book to me, but ‘I can’t breve!’ soon became a family catchphrase.Įve Garnett’s children’s novel was first published in 1937, with her own illustrations. The accompanying line drawing illustrates the problem perfectly. Whenever I became trapped in one, arms waving helplessly above my head, my mother would tug it off crying, ‘I can’t breve! And the sleeves is all wrong!’ The line comes from a scene in The Family from One End Street, in which a young boy named Jo becomes trapped in a shrunken jumper and multiple members of the family have to ease him out of it. They were itchy and they tended to shrink.

As a child I wore a lot of brightly coloured jumpers, frequently hand-knitted by my grandmother.

The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett