What happens when Dad"s a calamitous boozer and spends all his money down the pub, when Mum has five other children and spends most her free-time on a sewing machine making clothes to pay the rent, when you don"t know where you"ll be living from one day to the next, when bombs are raining down and disease is everywhere, and when you come out of school, chances are you"ll have to go out scrounging to earn your next meal?. A. S. Jasper answers all these questions and more with animated gusto (and without a whimper) in A Hoxton Childhood, a thin volume of memoirs depicting life in a London slum during the First World War, seen through the eyes of a child.