Tuppence to Tooley Street - Harry Bowling

As he lay in the mud on the beach at Dunkirk, young cockney Danny Sutton didn’t think he’d see his home in London’s docklands again. But he was one of the lucky ones.

Returning home wounded he is reassured to find things just the same: the smell of the wharves and warehouses in Tooley Street; and the usual hubbub in Dawson Street, where aproned figures stand in doorways discussing the war, the men are all down The Globe, and children play tin-can copper in the gutters. And at number 26 the whole Sutton family crowds round to welcome the hero home.

But, scarred in mind as well as body, Danny finds that much more has changed: at the Labour Exchange his war-wounds make him unfit for heavy work — and women have taken over the light jobs — so he’s forced to become one of bookie Tony Allen’s street runners. Worse still, his childhood sweetheart Kathy Thompson hasn’t waited for him — she’s taken up with local mobster Jack Mason...

Tuppence to Tooley Street is filled with all the warmth, humour and tragedy that made Harry Bowling’s first cockney novel, Conner Street’s War, an instant bestseller.