I am from Tyne and Wear and as a child Catherine Cookson lived just a few doors away from my late grandad. She wrote extensively about our region. Too many books to name them all but most of her books contain "real" characters and were set in and around the places she and my ancestors grew up in. Her book The Fifteen Streets was sadly only too realistic. Set in 1910 in the poverty stricken streets of Tyneside, it shared the often shared a common theme of "above stairs" and "below stairs" or rather people who were who they were, because of circumstances.