World's End is the story of Donald Wheal s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War. Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho. World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.