Queen of the Rising Sun

Book excerpt: Life for East End families like Pat's was always a struggle. She worked for years in Tate & Lyle's sugar factory while her husband Charlie took on two jobs so their growing family could survive. Until one day Charlie came home with a brilliant idea - they should take over The Rising Sun pub in Bromley-by-Bow. In this charming memoir Pat describes her years as a pub landlady and vividly evokes the East End community she served in the 1960s, the extraordinary characters she encountered and the changes that swept through society at that time. She also reveals why she and Charlie moved to Essex, and what it felt like to become a star of The Only Way is Essex in her seventies.