'Joan's got something to show you.' She rummaged in a drawer for a moment, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. 'Constance Street,' she said. 'As I remember it.' And as my great-aunt showed me the hand-drawn plan of Constance Street in the 1930s, so began the stories of one street and the true-life tales of my family, a tight knit group of working-class women in Silvertown in the East End of London, all set against a backdrop of hardship, struggle and war.