28 NOVEMBER 1931, Page 30

A Tenement in Soho, by George Thomas, with an intro-

duction by John Oxenham (Cape, 7s. 6d.) is the diary of a young man hopelessly crippled with progressive muscular atrophy, a disease from which his mother, sister and brother also suffer. The sound members of the family are the father,

dustman under the Westminster City Council, Albert a chauffeur in good employment, and the youngest, Alfie, aged fourteen. The household for some years was installed in three dilapidated rooms overlooking Berwick Market, and the volume includes the story of their lives with the reactions of the crippled author, who has assuaged his sufferings by edu- cational courses, writing jazz music, studying psychology. It is a record of amazing fortitude, with gleams of a humour which unremitting pain and mental anguish have not blunt6d.