To the East End manor born

On her seventeenth birthday, Jane Fulcher's mother leads her out of their house and down the street. When her daughter asks where they are going, Sarah Fulcher puts a finger to her lips. "Shh, enough questions." Eventually they come to a dingy shop front. "Hearing the bell, a stout man in his fifties emerges from the back room, his face scrubbed clean, the skin as red as cat's meat." He leads the way inside. Sarah leaves. It takes him three hours to pull all the teeth from Jane Fulcher's mouth.

Shortly after, Jane changes her name. From now on she will be Jenny. "She wanted no reminder of that day or the person it happened to." History, however, has treated Jenny Fulcher more kindly. Her granddaughter, the prize-winning author Melanie McGrath, has written a moving and poetic memoir of Jenny's East End life. It is the kind of posterity that Jenny - one of seven children, raised in two cramped rooms in Ullin Street, Poplar - would never have dreamed of. Jenny Fulcher was born in 1903, and the Poplar of her childhood was a town of ships, ropemakers and chandlers. Her father was a ship's carpenter with a decidedly short temper.

"If there is no work on any particular day, he will go home empty-handed and take it out on the kids. He is proud that way."

Jenny's only escape was into the world of Rowntree's treacle toffee, Fry's Chocolate Crème, Maynard's Rum 'n' Raisin, though for years, due to the extremes of the family's poverty, this remained fantasy-only.

Silvertown follows the arc of Jenny's life: her first job as a seamstress, aged 14; her marriage to Len Page, who takes her to the dog track, a place of ineffable sophistication, "where people have that elusive thing: Jenna Say Kwa"; the birth of her son and daughter and their interminable evacuation during the Second World War; the success of Len's postwar entrepreneurial venture, the Cosy Corner Café.

The portrait is so much more than the subtitle - An East End Family Memoir - would imply. There is much here that is universal. At the age of 29, Jenny, like many young women of her generation, knew nothing about sex.

After her wedding night, she ran in tears to her mother. Her response? "Wives is wives and husbands is husbands and there's the end of it." McGrath is also excellent on the narrative of London across the 20th century: the destruction of the two world wars, the resilience of its people.

Her eye for the perfect detail is flawless. During the Blitz, she writes, "St Katharine's Dock was razed, melted wax from the warehouses leaking into the quays, sealing the river with a hard crust ... From time to time, after a bombing raid, the trees would be covered in ribbons of human flesh ... In parts of the East End the vibrations from bombing raids were so bad that coffins rose up to the surface of the cemeteries and spilled their contents."

It is a book notable above all for its restraint: where other, vainer writers might have been tempted to mark their family's rise from the slums by concluding with their own successful career trajectory, McGrath lets the story end with the death of her grandmother. The story, and the struggles, are Jenny's: her struggles to be a parent, Len's eventual leaving of her. McGrath is left with nothing but admiration. "So there she was, at 91, a tiny woman with no teeth who had borne two children but had never seen a naked man; a woman who had been born in London but had never visited the Tower or St Paul's; a woman who would not talk to her local shopkeeper in case she had to pronounce her name. But a woman whose strong sense of place it is hard for me to imagine. Jenny Fulcher was someone who belonged."