This book is part of the Flashbacks oral history series, which portrays Edinburgh tenement life, the generations of the authoress and her mother. Their reminiscences range from the Victorian period to the post-World War II era. Dorothy Slee's home was happy and secure, and a fascinating microcosm emerges: four little girls sleeping top to tail all in one bed, somehow not taking it amiss when the odd foot was thrust in a face; sent forth with a halfpenny to buy vegetables for soup, or blackleading the grate and emerying the fender. Goffering irons crimped the frills on linen caps; stone pigs warmed the beds in winter; wooden bath tubs were dragged in front of the fire for the weekly bath. Fleshing out the broader, historian's view, this is the very stuff of social and personal history: lively and detailed, and with all the authority of an individual's own experience.