Donald James – författare

On the morning of 24th February 1944 following a devastating Luftwaffe raid, Donald Wheal and his family were homeless refugees with bulging suitcases and faces blackened by soot blast. In World's End, the first part of his bestselling childhood autobiography, he told of his upbringing during the Blitz in the rough working class community which was Chelsea's World's End. The morning after the World's End bombing he realized that the ties that had bound him to the past were now broken -- a new world and a new fate awaited him.In White City he tells the story of how his family, now menaced by the V-bombs and rockets that were the last stage of London's war, were re-settled in a anonymous London suburb where later his adolescence was to began amidst post war privation, sexual yearning and first love. In these dark years the quest for new experiences took him all around Britain and finally to war-ravaged France. A testing period of National Service in Germany and Italy completed his journey to adulthood.White City is as funny, heartbreaking and engaging as World's End

Best-selling author Donald James grew up in World''s End, Chelsea during the Blitz years. Just on the edge of a fashionable middle class world, his childhood experience was in stark contrast to the privileged, bourgeois lifestyle glimpsed a few hundred yards away. He grew up in stark poverty and depredation, a hard existence yet shot through by the humour and courage of his family and neighbours. This was a now vanished world of grimy factories and generating plants, coal drays, flat caps and boozers, betting shops, dog tracks, ''Piccadilly girls'', Guinness Trust buildings and bare foot children. World''s End was a melting pot of the working class labourers who flooded to London in the previous century to make their fortunes, and Donald''s family was no exception. The story tells of the feud between Donald''s two grandmothers that meant that though they only lived a few yards away from each other, for a dozen years they never acknowledge one another avoiding even at Donald''s parent''s weeding, Christmases or birthday celebrations. Yet, though it was hard, Donald''s was a happy childhood until the war came. Donald was eight. The radio carried news of impending war and then the declaration of war, difficult to believe in the Indian summer of the 1939. But soon Donald''s world would be torn apart by school drills with gas masks and evacuation plans, evacuation itself then an uneasy return to London just as the Blitz itself began and the nights were spent in terror as bombs rained down through the Black Out. Then came the night that Donald''s world, did literally end and with it his childhood.

World's End is the story of Donald Wheal¹s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War.Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal¹s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho. World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy¹s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.