A remarkable portrayal of an East End docklands community between the two world wars as it undergoes rapid and turbulent change.
Cotton Lane in dockland Bermondsey is one of the many small cobbled streets which serve the wharves. On the corner is Bradley s Dining Rooms, the favourite eating place of the rivermen, trade union officials and horse and motor drivers. Since her marriage to Fred Bradley, Carrie has been running the dining rooms, and trade has picked up since the end of the Great War. But all is not well between Carrie and Fred. For although they have a little daughter they adore, neither of them is truly content. Will they ever know true happiness?
Harry was born in 1931 in a back street off the Tower Bridge Road. Only when his own children began to ask questions about the war, did Harry realise how many stories he had to tell. He became known as 'the King of Cockney sagas', and he wrote eighteen bestselling novels of London life. After Harry died in 1999, the Harry Bowling Prize was set up in his memory.