Silvertown: An East End family memoir

Silvertown: An East End family memoir Melanie McGrath Melanie McGrath’s critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in ebook format.In this remarkable book, award-winning writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath spent years wondering about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives Poplar, East Ham and Silvertown – are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, long since dead and already half forgotten.Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and lanes of Poplar in 1914, where eleven year old Jenny watches the men go off to fight; the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; the London docks, then the largest port in the world; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Caf?, opened full of hope by Jenny and Len – later a home to their troubled marriage – and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close knit community.The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End and the struggles of those who live there. SILVERTOWN An East End Family Memoir Melanie McGrath Dedication (#ulink_e157c65c-9244-5e32-ad50-9494f36c27ee) In memory of my grandparents, Jenny Fulcher and Leonard Stanley Page Contents Cover (#ubfcee93d-0b6f-5fc0-83e0-1752d1527aea) Title Page (#u60e0207e-b7d5-5dcf-86e1-48fdd219746d) Dedication (#u971fec03-d496-505b-a5e6-3166297ed951) Preface (#ub29ee0ec-3f57-5f97-a934-3e2f08002190) Part One (#ua3cd2048-d6e0-591d-afe9-edaa6ce88d5b) Chapter 1 (#uaf6091a6-e905-57f2-8533-b777bc184921) Chapter 2 (#u76129992-9b75-5c12-8dc3-e2c31792294d) Chapter 3 (#u339d75a7-ea3a-52f0-b7d7-eb9adc45b4f0) Chapter 4 (#ua86ecb9f-c5c9-59a0-b24f-6a3affb47dfc) Chapter 5 (#u4450541a-ec0f-51b6-80ea-f1d85abbfdcd) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) Part Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Out of the strong came forth sweetness Judges 14 and motto of Lyle’s Golden Syrup Preface (#ulink_238f81a6-ba5a-541a-881e-ac1678baff52) You could say that Jenny Fulcher led a very ordinary life. She grew up, worked, married and had children. Her life was subject to the usual disquiets and worries. She fretted over her debts. She worried for the future. Every so often, lying in bed in the flat dawn light, she would wonder what the point of all the struggle was. And then she would get up and make a pot of tea and get on with it. Sometimes a voice in her head whispered that she was a bad wife and a poor mother. Other times the voice soothed and said she had done her best. From time to time, she wondered if anyone had ever really loved her. A few small comforts kept her going: tinned red salmon, cheap perfume and the scandal stories in Reveille magazine. She loved TV soaps and flowers – freesias and violets in particular. She knitted and sewed patchwork and converted the results into tea cosies. Over the nine decades of her life she made enough tea cosies to cover all the teapots of England. It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn’t. It belonged to Jenny. Jenny’s turn in the world began in 1903 in Poplar. The death of Queen Victoria two years earlier had ended an era, but remnants of the old century persisted. Women still wore corsets and horses still pulled hackney carriages. The streets still mostly unlit and as slippery as a snake pit. The East End had a grim reputation, and for the most part it was deserved. In the same year Jenny was born, Jack London visited the place and wrote a book about what he saw. He called it People of the Abyss. My grandmother Jenny grew up in that Abyss. To be an East Ender then was to be among the lowest of London’s poor, but Jenny never thought of herself as low. To Jenny, there was only respectable and common and by her own account she was respectable. This had nothing to do with money – no one in the East End had much of that; it had to do with blood and conduct. Jenny was salty and wilful, as thin and prickly as the reeds that once grew where she was born. Her heart was full of tiny thorns, which chafed but were never big enough to make her bleed. Vague feelings drifted about her like mist: bitterness, resentment and rage, mostly. Life was as much a mystery to her as she was to herself. She’d spend hours plotting how to squeeze an extra rasher from the butcher, but on the bigger issues she was helpless. She grasped the details without understanding anything of the general rules. She never had the means to manage her life and so was destined to be bent in the shape of desires, urges and ambitions greater than her own. All the same, when her face lit up it was like a door swinging out into sunshine. There was something irrepressibly naughty about her. You’d imagine her standing behind your back poking her tongue out at you. She revelled in playing the martyr but was comically bad at the part. She’d insist on giving you the last piece of cake, then reach into her handbag when she thought you weren’t looking, pull out a huge bar of chocolate, stuff it in her mouth all at once and pretend she had a cough and couldn’t talk. Her luxuriant moaning had to be witnessed to be believed. On bad days everything from her kidneys to her knitting cost too much, ached like geronimo or was doing its best to rip her off. No life is without its joys, though, and Jenny Fulcher harboured two great passions. The first of these was the crystallised juice of an Indian grass, Saccharum officinarum L., otherwise known as sugar. She favoured the bleached, processed, silvery white stuff, in crystal form or cubes. She spooned it into her tea in extravagant quantities and whenever she thought no one was looking, she’d lick a bony finger, dunk it in the sugar bowl and jam it into her mouth. She was partial to biscuits, cakes, marmalade, tarts and chocolate too, but sweets were really her thing. Over the course of her life, thousands of pounds of Army and Navy tablets, barley sugars, candyfloss, Everton mints, Fox’s glacier mints, humbugs, iced gems, jellies, liquorice comfits, Mintoes, nut brittle, orange cremes, pralines, Quality Street, rhubarb and custards, sugared almonds, Toblerone and York’s fruit pastilles, met their sticky end on my grandmother’s sweet tooth. Sugar was both lover and friend. It had the capacity to seduce, and also to keep her company. Her life went sour so quickly she relied on sugar to lend it sweetness. Sugar was the only thing she had the courage to make a grab for. Even after her hearing went she was never quite deaf to the rustling of humbug wrappers. When her sight failed she could still spot a Fry’s Chocolate Cr?me bar lying on a table top. Though she didn’t realise it, my grandmother’s other great love was the East End. She moaned about it constantly – the cramped streets with their potholed pavements, the filthy kids and the belching factories – but she hated the thought of leaving, even for a day. She rarely ventured west and seldom troubled herself with whatever lay on the other side of the Thames. Her list of disgruntlements was long but she never really hankered to be anywhere else. The East End was a mother to her, and she had no means to imagine herself without it. She gave up her health for sugar but she gave up everything else for the East End. Jenny Fulcher had a husband, my grandfather Leonard. He was not one of her passions. On the surface, they didn’t even have much in common. She was the product of the low-lying lanes and turnings of Poplar, where the Thames coils into a teardrop. He came from the sodden terrain of mud and reeds further to the east, from a hamlet sprinkled over the flat fields and rush beds of southern Essex. He was the son of a farm labourer, she the daughter of a journeyman carpenter. She grew up among the factories and tenements sandwiched between the Thames and the West India Docks. He passed his childhood among clouds and a sweep of cabbage fields. All the same, they shared something beyond the everyday. There was something of the east of England about them both. Their beginnings were bogged down in poverty, their prospects tarnished and their horizons low. They began life on the flat. For years they both looked up at the world, and the world, in its turn, looked down on them. On the surface, Len Page was all charm and muscular wit. Anyone who didn’t care to look too hard would see a diamond bloke, smartly kitted out, with a military swing to his step. People said he was a bit of a laugh. A right old type. In fact he was several types at once. The guv’nor, the back-slapper, the all-round card, but also the trickster, the slippery fish, the spiv. To tell the truth, Len Page was whatever type would get him where he wanted to go. He was as ambitious as the weeds that push up through concrete. To watch him closely was to watch the hatching and execution of unspoken plans. Len also had two passions: the country and a woman called June. But there will be time for them later. PART ONE (#ulink_5ebdeb23-226a-5bb3-9361-1d59f127f277) CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_fc3a05f4-260a-5146-be24-6691ebc1d5df) Poplar was built on the back of the sea trade. About six hundred years ago, the place was marked by a single tree standing on lonely marshes and pointing the ancient route from London to Essex. The loops of the Thames at Limehouse Reach in the west and Blackwall Reach in the east protected the area from the worst of the river floods, and in 1512 the East India Company took advantage of its sheltered position to establish a ship-building business at the eastern edge. Very soon after, houses went up on the sloppy soil, craftsmen moved in, then shopkeepers. Oakum merchants arrived, followed by gluemakers, ironmongers, outfitters, manufacturers of naphtha, turpentine, creosote, varnish, linen, tar, timber boards, linseed oil and rubber goods, and Poplar became a town of ropemakers and sailmakers, chandlers, cauterers, uniform-makers, seamen, carpenters, ships’ engineers and, of course, ships. Poplar was once a place that counted. It was from Brunswick Wharf on its eastern edge that the Virginia Settlers sailed. In 1802 the East India Company, frustrated by the small size of the upstream docks and wharves in the London Pool beside the Tower, carved out two spectacular corridors of impounded water, the East and West India Docks, one on each side of the mouth of the Isle of Dogs. Two-masted tea clippers, brigantines, colliers, packet boats, screw steamers, schooners, riggers, cutters, whalers, wool clippers, shallops, four-masters, dromonds, barges and lighters moored at the quays and wooden dolphins of these broad new docks, half-sunk with barrels of molasses, boxes of bananas, silk, pineapples, parrots, spices, tea, rice, sugar, grain, coffee, cocoa mass, ballast, monkeys, macaws, ivory, alabaster, basalt and asbestos, and discharged their cargoes safely into the warehouses inside the dock walls. It was a great time for trade and the East and West India Docks grew so fast that the bigger ships, the tea clippers and steamers, often found themselves moored for as long as a month at mid-stream anchor, waiting their turn to discharge. My grandmother’s ancestors were tidal people, Huguenots who were washed first into the East End then into Poplar during the persecution of Protestants by Catholics in France in the 1680s. Afraid for their lives, they sailed up the Thames and found sanctuary in East London. Many gathered in Spitalfields near the City walls; others fanned out among the numerous little villages along the river, hoping to lie low for a while then move back to France once the troubles were done. But over the years of their exile their number multiplied and they stayed. Fuelled by the frantic energy of immigrants with something to prove, they evolved quite naturally into entrepreneurs, working as ragmen, clothiers, silk spinners and dyes-men. At Spitalfields they built silk weaveries and found a way to fix scarlet dye into silk which they then sold back to Catholic cardinals for robes. For more than a hundred years the River Lea ran red with their labours. They developed English habits and their names gradually Anglicised, but after three hundred years you could still spot an East Ender with Huguenot blood. Take Jenny Fulcher. She was tiny, sallow, with the horse-brown hair of southern women. Her skin would only have to see the sun to turn brick brown. It was an embarrassment to her family. Fer gawd’s sake git some powder on yer face, you’re as black as a woggie-wog, her mother, Sarah, would say whenever the summer came. Having no money for powder, Jenny would salt her skin with bicarb of soda, because there was nothing worse than looking foreign (except being foreign, which was unthinkable). Poplar is a mess these days. It has lost its civic quality and become little more than a scattering of remnants and cheap offcuts sliced through by the rush of the East India Dock Road and the Northern Approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. The workhouse has gone, and the East India Dock, but if you look carefully, what remains tells a story about how Poplar used to be. At the bottom of Chrisp Street, where a very fine market once stood, the monolithic pile of the Poplar Baths still stands, though the building is derelict and surrounded by razor wire. Along the High Street, between the new-build housing developments and shabby Sixties shopping parades, there remain the architectural remnants of Poplar’s marine and trading past: a customs house, some ancient paintwork advertising a chandlery, an old seamen’s mission. Further east on the Tunnel Approach, the magnificent colonnades of Poplar Library gather dirt from the traffic and its boarded up windows furnish irresistible spaces for taggers and graffiti artists. By the time Jenny (or Jane, as she was then) is born, Poplar has become filthy and overcrowded, a victim of its own success. Those who can afford it have moved out to more spacious environs further from the dock walls. My great grandfather, John Fulcher, or Frenchie as he was known, his wife, Sarah, and their children live in Ullin Street, between the Cut and the River Lea. Ullin Street is near to Frenchie’s place of work, the Thames Ironworks at Orchard Place. Poplar is jammed with terraces of shabby lets and subdivisions put up by speculators as housing for dockworkers. There are a hundred, even a thousand similar streets stacked along the eastern flank of the city like so much left luggage. They are ugly, redoubtable places, but by no means the worst the East End has to offer. If you are born there, the docks are the language you speak, the smells you know, the ebb and flow of your life. And so it is with Jane. She grows up beside queues of drays, moving slowly towards the dock gates; beside the twice-daily rush of men struggling to find day work; beside the crush of seamen and foreigners, their strange languages breaking from beneath turbans, yellow faces, pigtails, ice-blue eyes. Jane is aware of the tidal pull of the water before she can even read the tide tables flyposted on the sides of every public house in Poplar. The phalanxes of Port of London Authority policemen, the pawn shops, the bold glances of loose women, the rat nests and dog fights, the boozed-up sailors of a Saturday night, the bustling tradesmen, the drinking dives and gambling holes, the deals made, the greetings and the farewells, the dockers’ pubs and pawnbrokers and seamen’s missions: all these are familiar to her. In 1903 the Fulcher family are living in the upper two rooms at number 4 Ullin Street. At the southern end of the street sits the bulking, red brick mass of St Michael and All Angels church and beside it, a gloomy vicarage set in a dark little garden. The remainder of the street is lined with poky terraces where it is common for families of seven or eight to be packed into a single room. There are men in Ullin Street who are forced to work night shifts because there is nowhere for them to sleep until their children have gone to school and the beds are free. And not unskilled labourers either, but craftsmen and artisans. The 1891 census shows sailmakers, foundrymen, glass blowers and carpenters, all living on Ullin Street. Having two rooms between them, the Fulchers are among the more fortunate. The larger of these rooms is an imperfect square of about twelve feet containing an iron bedstead with an ancient horsehair mattress where Frenchie, Sarah and the younger children sleep, a large fireplace in which a coal stove burns whenever there is money for coal, a gas lamp, a table fashioned by Frenchie from fruit crates, a decaying wicker chair and two fruit crate stools. The room is for the most part mildewy and cheerless, smelling of the family’s activities: cooking, bathing, smoking and sex. It is rarely warm enough to open the window and the wooden sashes have in any case swollen with damp and stuck in their frames, though the draught still sails into the room like an unwanted relative. During the autumn and winter Sarah has to lay newspaper over the panes to keep the cold out, and for six months of the year the family live more or less in darkness, the gas lamp on the wall having been deemed an extravagance they can do without. The second room is much smaller, little more than a box really, and houses another horsehair mattress which has to be shaken of its bedbugs every morning and rolled into a bolster to serve as a seat and a table. All but the youngest of the children, as well as an older female cousin, sleep on this mattress, and though the room has no fire, its small size and busy population keep it warm. In keeping with their relative sizes, Frenchie and Sarah’s room is known as Main Room and this second room Little Room. On occasion, when there is no money for coal or even for a bucket of coal dust, the whole family is obliged to move into Little Room just to keep from freezing. Downstairs live another family, the Smileys – Jack, Violet and their nine or so children, the number varying according to whether there is a new arrival that year to balance the one or two carried off by the whooping cough or TB. The Smileys are permanently unlucky. If there is a bout of pneumonia going around, then one of the Smileys is bound to get it. If a neighbour’s boy runs amok with a football, then it will be the Smileys’ window which gets broken. If the vicar is doing his rounds, he’ll always knock first on the Smileys’ door. Jack Smiley works as a hatchman in the East India and his wife takes in washing and sometimes cleans the ships’ galleys at the East India, but it is never enough. The tallyman is a regular visitor at the Smiley residence. So is the rent collector. And the bookies’ boy. Every Monday morning you can set your watch by the appearance of the Smiley children lumbering up the pavement carrying the family sheets and coats to Nathan James Ltd, outfitter and pawnbroker, where they will remain until Friday payday. The Smileys and the Fulchers share a small concrete back yard with a privy and a standing tap, from where the Fulchers take their water. The privy is a dirty business. In the summer the smell draws egg-filled bluebottles and in the winter the wind sneaks in and freezes their buttocks to the seat. At some point during the previous decade the privy door worked part-way off its hinges leaving a gap the size of a toddler’s hand. But for all that, the plumbing is solid, there are rarely any overspills or seeping pipes, and most of the rats stay away. For those that don’t, the Smileys’ liver-coloured mongrel Bobs does a grand job of disposal, leaving rat tails and other remnants about as proof of his efficacy. Frenchie Fulcher works as a ships’ carpenter at Thames Ironworks on Bow Creek, and sometimes at the West India dry dock. He is a journeyman without a permanent job and has to shape up each morning before seven in the hope that the foreman at the Ironworks has room for him. If not, he’ll go down to the West India and try to pick up something there. Fulcher is not a heavy man. All the same, he is an angry man and his neat little body conceals the strength of horses. Among dockers with their sloping shoulders, their rickety legs and half-broken backs, Frenchie the carpenter appears upright and dignified. His manner, too, sets him apart. Men less fastidious than Frenchie go to lengths at shape up, laying on their Irish/Polish/Scots origins and playing the blue-eyed boys. But French is above all that. If there is no work on any particular day, he will go home empty-handed and take it out on the kids. He is proud that way. On a day when he is feeling right with the world Frenchie looks almost regal. His features are neat and well-made: a slender nose, domed a little in the middle but with a thin pinch at the end; wide-set, peaty eyes with a good measure of white in them, the kind of eyes in which daydreams have space to hide; and a generous but not excessive forehead – a testament, so Sarah says, to his good blood. His voice is high but his laughter, when it comes, is unexpectedly deep and clanging, not unlike an anchor dropping on its chain. Sarah Fulcher is Frenchie’s opposite, a coarse-grained, flap-fleshed woman of wholesome temperament. She is pliant and sweet, with no obvious vices and a handy array of virtues ranging from dressmaking to midwifery. Most important of all, Sarah Fulcher is thrifty. She can sniff out a rotten swede or a poor potato at ten yards. No Chrisp Street costermonger will dare to slink a slimy cabbage or dud carrot into Sarah’s bag because they know her shrieks of latherish rage will echo halfway to the Thames Estuary. Taking money from Sarah Fulcher’s hand is as hard as prising the ring off a rigor mortised finger. This small reservoir of fierceness is all the more remarkable because in other ways Sarah Fulcher is soft as snow. Her skin is soft and her hair is soft. Her ears have a wispy bloom of hair and fudgy lobes. Her body is as spongy as sausage meat, her lips as plump as spring chicks. Her disposition, too, is spring-like, fresh, sunny and innocent. A little insensitive, even undigested, but never, ever cruel. So sweet is she that the Smiley children all wish she were their mother, because, unlike Mrs Smiley, Sarah only thumps her children when she can’t think of any other way to make them do what they are told. Sarah’s love for Frenchie is sweetly na?ve and unshakeable. Her life is divided into two eras: Before and After Frenchie. Before Frenchie, Sarah Quelch toiled in a scullery for a family Up West. The family was miserable and the scullery was worse. Then Sarah met Frenchie, married him and found herself living in the bright new world of After Frenchie. In the wide open spaces of Sarah’s mind Frenchie is a kind of a god, or at the very least, a saviour. So unquestioning is Sarah’s devotion that she seems not to sense her husband’s deep sighs, his eyes rolled to the heavens. In an obscure corner of his heart Frenchie resents her. Resents his children, too. The wastefulness of them! The toiling that has to be done to keep them all from the poorhouse. Without Sarah and her brood of guzzling children just think where Frenchie might have ended up! As the owner of a timber yard, perhaps, or a chandler’s, or a leather business, or even a cabinetmaker’s shop. Occasionally, when he has had too much to drink, he’ll give voice to his disappointments, but Sarah only smiles at that and blows him a kiss and says, San Fairy Ann, dear, San Fairy Ann, and he will give up trying to explain. Sarah gives birth to seven children: William, Rosetta, Frances Maud, John, Jane, Edith and Arthur. The eldest, William, is born premature and doomed. He survives for two days and his body is buried without ceremony in the cemetery not far from Ullin Street. (Rosetta does not grow to adulthood either, but we’ll come back to her.) William is never mentioned and the remembrance of him surfaces only occasionally as a faraway look in Sarah’s eye or a twitch on Frenchie’s face, and so Jane is born into a family with a missing part. No photograph of William exists, no sketch or representation of any kind. It is almost as though his very absence is shameful and must not be acknowledged. But acknowledged it is, of course. When Jane is about five or six, she comes across a wooden soldier wrapped in a piece of old sheeting and hidden at the back of the cupboard beside the fire. It is a beautifully carved, old-fashioned kind of soldier with painted eyes and woollen hair and a red wooden jacket around his broad shoulders and Frenchie’s mark carved into his base, and from then on the soldier is William, a little wooden brother who lives in a cupboard and will never grow up. The Fulcher children are not the most handsome brood. Edie gets most of the looks: arched eyebrows, deep blue eyes and a mouth made from strawberry jam. Jane’s older sister Frances Maud, her older brother John and younger brother Arthur are like their mother, squashy and bovine and big-nosed. Only Rosie and Jane take after their father, though Rosie has inherited her mother’s soft outlines. By contrast, Jane is a tiny, reedy thing, with bones as skinny as a shrew’s. A meagre, curved nose juts from cheeks that would these days be prized, but in those days simply emphasised her thinness. The zooming eyes are a lively blue, though apt to be inspecting. The teeth are good and even. There is nothing wrong with any of her features. It’s just that when put together they are uneventful. What does stand out is Jane’s extraordinary hair, a huge, mobile clump of mahogany brown, so soft that it sails in the wind like a bank of seaweed under waves. I’ll say one thing for her, says Frenchie, shaking his head, she musta bin standing in the giant’s line when the hair was given out. It looks more like an explosion than a bonce. Mum, where’s the End in East End? The Docks, Janey love, the Docks is the End. The East End is the Docks. But Mum, where’s the Beginning then? Oh Janey, Janey, the questions you ask! How should I know? You knew where the Finish was. But it’s harder to say where the Beginning is. Ain’t no East Beginning s’far as I know. There’s only an East End. In Poplar, the day is divided not into twenty-four hours but into the two shifts of the tides. Since this isn’t so much a practical circumstance as a feeling, it would be more accurate to say that the day is divided into two feelings. A kind of thickness in the air signals high tide. Low tide has the sapping quality of a rainy Sunday afternoon. When the river is low the air is thinner and pulls on the hairs of the skin. As the tide rises, do does the mood; as it falls, the mood falls too. Aside from this dependence on the tides, the typical Fulcher family day is like that of any other poor London family. Morning begins at dawn when the knocker-up wakes Sarah and Frenchie and the babies with a pebble at the window. Rising from the bed, Sarah goes downstairs to the tap by the privy to fetch water for Frenchie’s shave and, lighting three coals with a handful of kindling, she boils in the copper three tin cupfuls for the shave and a further eight for tea, before waking the children in Little Room. A child is despatched with two pennies and a tin jug to Neal Charles’ dairy in Cottage Place, where there is an outside pump in the shape of a cow’s head. While her husband scrapes his beard, Sarah slices half a loaf from the day before and spreads it with dripping or jam for the older children and soaks a little in sugared milk for the toddlers. If there are leftovers from the day before, then Sarah will fry them up for Frenchie. They eat on their laps with their breath pooling in the cold air of the room, the younger ones sipping warm sugary water, the older ones washing down their bread with sweet tea from the tin mug. At six-thirty Frenchie joins the procession of men heading south towards the docks to the bomp-on for work, men in quiet waves, whistling against the cold. The Fulchers will not see him again till teatime at seven, or if it is a Friday, not till he rolls in from the pub singing ‘Mother Brown’. A little later the coal man, the beigel man, the cat’s meat man, the haberdasher, the tinker, the pie man and the rag and boner begin making their way along St Leonard’s Road, while in the neighbouring streets, doors fly open and women spill out on to the pavement, their hair all done in rags and curlers, eyes beady for a bargain. Back at Ullin Street, the children scrub their necks and faces at the tap in the yard then the older ones sling on their jackets and head towards the red brick box at Bright Street, which serves as a school. By midday they will be back for lunch, to warmed rooms smelling of their mother’s chores. After school the girls will be sent out to fetch saucers of pickles or an egg or two from the grocer’s and the boys will be sent to the coal yard for coal dust at a farthing a bucket to make the coals go further. Then Frenchie will sail home hard and sweating from the day, a pilfered orange or a few raisins in his pocket. Look what old Frenchie found in the docks, nippers. Sarah will make sweet tea and put a new half-loaf on the table with marg and jam. Sometimes they will have a few potatoes with gravy or a hard-boiled egg with vinegar pickles and then, unless it is raining very hard or the cold is unbearable or they are sick, the children will play in the street – rope games, ginger, blind man’s bluff. Frenchie will sink into his dilapidated chair with his Daily Mirror and quarter ounce of shag and shake his head at the injustices of the world, while his wife sits beside him, mending rips and holes. And when the children are in bed and their overcoats are spread over their warming toes, Frenchie will tell them stories. Frenchie’s head is a cargo of stories. He’ll tell them about the docker who was pushed into the oily water by a side of beef swung from a ship, and how his fellows made a fire right there on the quayside and roasted that side of beef in tribute to their lost friend. He’ll tell them about the parrots which came in on a boat from Uruguay and swore in fourteen different languages, or about the performing monkeys which could write the alphabet. He’ll tell them tales of everyday life on the docks. He’ll tell them about the sugar porters whose flesh is so raw from the sharpness of their cargo that the bluebottles get in underneath their skin and lay their eggs. How on a summer’s day you can tell a sugar porter by the clouds of tiny flies bursting from his limbs. He’ll tell them about the tarantulas they pull from banana hands, scooping them up into tobacco tins to give them to their dogs to kill. He’ll tell them about the oilmen, whose skin is like thick, black leather from the tar they scrape from the inside of the oil ships, about the potash haulers with faces white as ghosts coughing bloody spume into cloths; about the corn porters with their flour rashes and the sulphur men whose hair stinks of rotten eggs. Frenchie knows things. He knows that London was once under the sea and there are shells embedded in the stones of Poplar Library. He knows where the plague pits and the bear-baiting dens used to be. He can point out where the Vikings thundered up the Thames in their longboats and where they got befuddled by the eddies and drifts at Bow Creek. He knows that the body of a whale was dug up out of the marsh at the West India. He’s witnessed dogfights. He knows where to find bare-knuckle fighters or nancy boys. Jane Fulcher’s favourite story, one her father often tells, concerns two mastiffs and a cow. The cow had been left to graze on the marsh south of Poplar in the loop of the Thames. The dogs, whose job it was to protect the cow from hungry poachers, were chained to the animal’s feet. Every week a marshman came along and left meat for the dogs and between times they dug for worms and pounced on any small thing that crossed their path. But a mist came down as mists often did in the marsh and the cow, wandering about and unable to see its feet, stumbled on its chains and fell into a nearby bog, catapulting its unfortunate protectors into the quicksand. After a struggle the cow sank into the slime and died but, being lighter, the dogs remained on the surface for a while longer. For four days and nights the residents of Poplar heard a terrible wailing, but were too frightened to go down to the bog and see what was afoot. Rumours rushed around that the devil had landed in the marsh and was taunting them before making his move. When the marshman eventually returned to check on his charge he found two mastiff heads preserved in the marshy brine, their jaws open as if in a long, last howl of injustice. And that is how, Frenchie says, the Isle of Dogs got its name. The stories have a fearful power. Whenever his children are defiant, Frenchie threatens to abandon them on barges that will carry them out on the tide beyond Southend to the Black Deep where their bodies will be consumed by whales and sea snakes. Whales and sea snakes, nippers, whales and sea snakes. CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_9af774e9-a519-50f6-bfcd-c3baf0c9a150) Leonard Page’s early childhood is a good deal sketchier than my grandmother’s. It’s a matter of gathering what facts there are. Len was born in Corbets Tey, a hamlet ten miles north of the Thames in southwest Essex. Today, the place is an undifferentiated huddle of suburban housing perched on the shoulder of the London orbital motorway as it dips down to the Thames at the Dartford Crossing. The land is flat and scoured by the wind that pours into East Anglia from the Urals. Hedges of stunted elderflowers and crabs give some respite, but nothing is strong enough to contain the eastern blasts. The frost is often hard. On a particularly brisk morning you can wander around the copses, picking up the bodies of dunnocks and other small birds which have succumbed to the cold during the night. Most often the sky is obscured by shapeless cloud. You can go from one week to the next and not see the outline of the sun. It is good farming country though, the soil sodden and alkaline, perfect for brassicas and grain, and where there are still fields they are neatly ploughed, the soil blooming from powder fertilisers. A chemical smell mixes with the stench of petrol fumes from the ceaseless flow of traffic, but a hundred years ago, when my grandfather was born, Corbets Tey was as remote and peaceful a place as you could find. In 1903, the year of Len’s birth, Corbets was the smallest of the villages between the Ingrebourne River and the marshy edges of the Thames. To call it a village, even, is to grace it with a significance it did not have, for Corbets Tey was little more than a satellite of Upminster, which itself lay in the shadow of Romford, the nearest market town. You couldn’t miss it, exactly, but you could pass through and imagine you were still in Upminster because the two villages were only a mile or so apart, though there was in fact a world between them. In 1849 a railtrack was built through Upminster and Ockenden but it bypassed Corbets Tey, and by the time my grandfather was born the place had stagnated. The first bus to pass through the village in 1924 caused such a stir that children were let out of school to watch it trundle by. From Upminster, the Corbets road swung south, slinking between the flint walls of Gaines’ Manor across a watercress stream from where it climbed a rare hill into Corbets itself. Just before the centre of the village, such as it was, the road bent east towards North Ockenden and a few paces further south there was a turning on the right, then called Green Lane. The lane meandered past Great Sunnings Farm to Sullens Farm from where it rejoined the Ockenden Road at a sharp bend known as Cabbage Corner. On either side of Cabbage Corner there were neat rows of workers’ cottages, weatherboarded against the rushing wind, and it is probable that Len Page was born in one of these. It would be comforting to imagine Len Page playing along the reedy streams and among the bean fields, or hunting pheasants in the woods, wood pigeons in the fields, perch in Ingrebourne River and rabbits everywhere, the sky stretched over him as soft as a petal, his lungs filled with damp air. But the fact of the matter is he probably spent much of his early life wading through mud. There was a great deal of that in the lowlands. From November to March there was little else but wind and mud and spells of bitter cold when the roads turned to brown ice. The name Page conjures images of books and education, but the Pages had none of either. They were illiterate agricultural labourers who worked the land at Emery’s Farm in North Upminster. Len’s father, Jim, was a stern and silent man who passed his days among the dumb rows of cabbages. He was happier alone with his plough horses – Suffolk Punches and Percherons – than he was around people. He had no appetite for idle chatter or gossip and preferred to listen to what the breeze had to say. He was fond enough of his wife, Emily Nottage, but she didn’t really interest him. After their marriage in 1895 he discovered that a woman’s world was convoluted and women themselves hard to please, so he stopped trying. His children did not rouse him either. He and Emily had four: Thomas, Leonard, and twins Emily Maria (known as Ria) and Daisy. As a matter of duty he provided for them, but since he didn’t own a farm to pass on to them they were incidentals in his life. It wasn’t that he disliked them, just that he preferred his Percherons. The Nottages were labourers, too. They worked at Blush Farm in Chafford Heath and at Hawthorn Farm in Upminster. Emily’s father, Thomas Nottage, was as much a loner as her husband, and his wife, Jane, Emily’s mother, had learned to put up with it. Thomas and Jane had six children: Alfred, William, Thomas, Emily, Walter and Fred. As soon as they were old enough to pick up a shovel, the boys joined their father labouring, leaving Jane and Emily responsible for the endless domestic chores as well as the kitchen garden and the chickens. Things were not easy for the Nottage family. They moved around a great deal, Thomas never staying at one farm for more than a few years and the whole family having to up sticks and trundle their belongings to the next place. The children, Emily included, grew up to be independent-minded and with a sense of the impermanence of things. By all accounts, my great grandmother Emily made a disgruntled countrywoman. She chafed against the solitude and routine. Country life held no mystique for Emily. In her view, clouds were no more interesting than buckets of water and fields of wheat were simply unmade bread. Emily longed for the glamour of the town. She complained that there was nothing to do in Corbets Tey but work. He restlessness rubbed the family raw. Whenever she could she would dress in her best and take herself off to Romford Market. The market had been the social and trade hub of southern Essex since at least the mid-thirteenth century. Farmers from all over the area gathered at The Blucher’s Head in the market square to discuss the weather and the current state of their crops. On summer evenings men and women danced jigs together in the square. On May Day they ran around the May Pole, and that may well be how Jim and Emily first met. On the opposite side of the square from The Blucher’s Head stood The Windmill and Bells. The Windmill was rather downmarket, its clientele the poachers and the labourers who worked for the farmers. At The Windmill they would trade news of labouring opportunities and ferrets. Jim Page bought and sold his ferrets here and picked up poaching tips. Jim was a keen poacher and a generous teacher. As soon as they were old enough he taught his sons the art of setting traps and snares and hunting with dogs and ferrets, and from the age of ten or so the boys spent much of their spare time snaring rabbits and netting birds on the riverine marshes at Rainham, Wennington, Hornchurch and Aveley, or fishing for perch in Rainham Creek. It was illegal but the marshes were never much of a target for the law. Thomas and Len grew up with a poacher’s contempt for authority and a sense too that a world of plenty existed outside the confines of their current circumstance and they had a right to go out and get their share. They were desperately poor. In 1914 an agricultural labourer’s pay of thirteen shillings a week was not enough to buy food for a large family, and when the weather was bad Jim took home as little as half that sum. They were always insecure. If a labouring man got caught under the thresher and smashed his leg, or the crop failed or the farmer bought a tractor, the labourer’s family would be turned out of its tied cottage and left to fend for itself. In 1914 the Agricultural and Rural Workers Union began organising strikes all over East Anglia, calling for a stable wage and more security of employ. The strikes went on for months and became bitter. Disgruntled labourers began burning fields and cutting cattle loose. George Lansbury, the socialist MP for Poplar, travelled to Essex in the hope of encouraging the strikers to carry on, but these were tiny, rural communities and the strikes split them down the middle. It was then that Jim Page finally made up his mind to leave. However much he loved the country, life there had become too hard and he was in no doubt that the tractor and threshing machine, the new American grain ships he’d heard talk of and the growth of trade from the colonies were going to make it harder for labourers like himself. He decided to pack up the family and put them on the train to London. It was only thirty miles to the west but it might as well have been thirty thousand. In my family, East is where you start out and West is where you hope to end your days. For us, East has never been the east of the sunrise, of Eden or of new beginnings. East is nowhere glamorous or elemental or softly perfumed. The East we know is the east of the Anglian Marshes and the east of the East End of London. East is grimy city terraces in fog-plagued streets. East is biting winds and soggy ground and a dying livelihood. A wagon pulled by a Percheron takes the Page family from their flinty home in Green Lane to the train station at Upminster. Their few things – a couple of blankets, sheets, a rabbit fur cover and the bits and bobs of Emily’s trousseau – are slung in the back between hay bales. As they round Cabbage Corner, Jim inspects the familiar, loved terrain, his face dimming with tears, while Emily smiles ahead and the children play catch-what-can in the back. At the station they unpack the bags, pat the Percheron goodbye and stand on the platform watching the empty space along the track until, finally, when their eyes are growing sore from looking, the first intimations of smoke come into view, followed by the maroon carriages and the great green-panelled engine of the train itself. Oh look Da, says Len Page, only eleven then, and curious. It’s got ‘Upminster’ painted on the side. That’s the name of the train, ain’t it? Machines ain’t given names. Jim shakes his head at his son’s foolishness. Only livin’ things are given names. So that can’t be the name thar, see? That’s only where it’s from. Then the cloud of smoke rises, obscuring, for an instant, the family standing on the platform edge, and they heave their bags into the carriage and take their places on the hard wooden seats and the train begins to haul itself slowly westwards towards Upminster and Romford and on to London. From the seat beside the window Len Page watches the landscape of his childhood receding behind them. Then, feeling exploratory, he gets up and takes himself off along the aisle to the next carriage, where a fat man with a goitre is sitting reading a newspaper. He edges along the aisle and for a moment the combined swaying of the train and smell of coal smoke overtakes him and he does not notice a man in uniform bowling along the aisle towards him. You going somewhere, son? No, he says. Well get back to your seat, then, sonny boy. He follows Len to the carriage door. Hey mister, says Len, remembering the conversation with his father, what’s this engine called? This? The man in the uniform smiles. This is the Upminster, son. The number twenty-one. Thank you mister. The man in uniform ruffles Len’s dun brown hair. You interested in trains, sonny? No. Ah, says the man, darkening. You get back to your place then. Sliding on to the wooden bench, Len tries not to catch his father’s eye. He is glad when the Upminster begins to draw into Fenchurch Street on the eastern side of the City of London and with its brakes squealing and the smoke pouring from its funnel finally slows to a halt in the wide iron arms of the station. The journey from Upminster to London takes just under an hour but this is the first time that Jim Page or Emily Nottage or their children have ever made it. They hire a hackney carriage to take them east from Fenchurch Street. ‘As far as I could see were the solid walls of brick, the slimy pavements and the screaming streets,’ Jack London wrote in 1904, and the scene isn’t so different ten years later. The carriage takes them through the sullen alleyways and lanes of Aldgate and Whitechapel and out to the market stalls at the Mile End Waste which dot the road as far as the eye can see like a set of ragged flags. On either side there are more people than they have ever imagined could live in one place, even such a place as London. The Thames pushes east towards the sea, but the city’s wealth has for centuries drifted westwards, against the direction of the prevailing winds, to escape what Sir William Petty described four hundred years ago as the ‘fumes, steams and stinks of the whole easterly pile’. The booty of the docks flowed west too, along the wide East London arterials – Mile End Road, East India Dock Road, Commercial Road, West India Dock Road, Roman Road, Royal Victoria Dock Road – to more prosperous parts of London where people lived luckier lives. You move to the East End if you are desperate, and the Pages are. There is unskilled work to be had in the factories, in the finishing trades and around the docks, and a man with strong hands and an eager face can just about scrape by and, more to the point, feel that he is among those who understand as well as he does the predicaments of exile. Over the centuries, all Europe’s diasporas have met here: first Huguenots, men and women like the Fulchers, then Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Irish on the lam from the potato famine, and after them Armenians, Lithuanians, Poles, more Jews and other refugees from religious persecutions, and finally families like the Pages, the English rural poor. A hundred years on it is the same, though the mix has changed. Wander through any of the East End’s markets on a sunny afternoon and you will pass by Somalis, Polynesians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Liberians, Eritreans, Indonesians, East African Asians; most of whom are there because they were obliged to leave somewhere else. The Pages are just one point on a continuum stretching across the centuries. So they settle in East Ham, which is then a small suburb of ‘respectable’ working class homes beside the fastest-growing, poorest, most overcrowded and most heavily industrialised area in London. Emily has family in East Ham and for a while they are able to rent a room from them; six people, taking turns on the bed and with the sounds of another family leaking through the walls. Things are not as bad as they might be. Jim soon finds work as a labourer in a lumber yard and before many months have passed, they have a little money. Emily likes not having to travel to market. There are stalls and shops on every street corner. Jim takes comfort in small things. On his way to work every morning, he passes fields. Occasionally cows wander along their modest, tree-lined street and once in a while, if he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine he is back in Corbets Tey. CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_0cd35345-89fb-5e9c-8ff2-cc61036c8268) In the years before the first war, the Fulcher family concerns are the concerns of respectability – nits, bedbugs and the price of marg. They’re not on the rise, exactly, but they’re not on the fall either, and there is a pleasing steadiness to life. Frenchie is bringing home most of his carpenter’s wage and Sarah is able to top it up with the few shillings she makes from taking in the mending for James Looke’s laundry in Ullin Street. Not so far away, not so far at all, there are families whose children go about barefoot and shit in pits in the cellar; families whose lives are reduced to a matter of other people’s pockets and what might be in them; families who might go under altogether if it weren’t for Sally Army soup. Not the Fulchers. The Fulchers all have boots (with cardboard soles fitted periodically by Frenchie), and each is in possession of his or her own outer garment. The Fulcher children only have nits when they catch them from other children, and there is bread and marg at every mealtime. No Fulcher child has ever had to dip for a living, and not a drop of Sally Army soup has passed Fulcher lips. Not all the families in Ullin Street are so lucky. Among these are the Jorrocks who live at number twelve. Matty and Tom Jorrocks have to collect the horse shit off the roads to sell to the families with vegetable plots, and their mother Mary has been seen standing in the soup kitchen queue. Matty and Tom have boots, though they are taken from different pairs and Matty’s toes explode from his. Between them they share a ragged twill which they take it in turns to wear, Matty every morning on the way school and Tom on the way back. Their destinies are already set. At the age of fourteen they will leave school and if they are lucky they’ll find work in the docks, the factories or the sweatshops. Others will take their emptied places and so it will go on. All the children of school age living in Ullin Street are obliged to attend the same school, just a few roads away in Bright Street. The Bright Street School is a hulking, optimistic construction of red brick sandwiched between a terrace of houses and a forest of pubs, within whose damp walls the children of East Poplar are daily expected, by some mysterious means, to obtain an education. Mathematics: three times six is eighteen. Religion: the Seven Deadly Sins: greed, lust, gluttony, covetousness, etc. History: the Tudor monarchs: Haitch, He and Me. That’s Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward V, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Politics: the sun never sets on the British Empire. At eight o’clock every morning the doors of Ullin Street open and the children tumble out and make their way towards Bright Street. It is no more than a five-minute walk but for the Fulcher children it is the longest five minutes of their day because Matty and Tom Jorrocks have made it their young lives’ work to torment the Fulchers. The only Fulcher Tom and Matty never tease is Rosie and that is because Rosie is thirteen and pretty. Plain Jane. Plain Janey Foolshit, shout Matty and Tom at the gaggle of miserable Fulchers. Mouldy Maudie Foolshit, Johnny Pongy Bastard-Foolshit. Sometimes a stone will soar into the air and land thump on the back of one of the Fulcher children. Once, a dead rat comes at them. Another time a clump of horse shit. Banned by Sarah from talking to the Jorrocks, the Fulcher children have little choice but to carry on along Ullin Street, but nothing seems to discourage Tom and Matty. Foolshit. Plainey Janey. Mum, why do they call us names? asks Jane. Because they’re common. Why? says Jane. Her mother smiles at her girl and winks and shakes her head. Blimey, the questions you ask! C’m ’ere and drink your tea. Jane is an average student in every lesson with the exception of writing. Twice a day a single slate comes around the class and the children are expected to inscribe on to it whatever the teacher demands. However hard Jane toils over the slate, her right hand will not write. The left produces perfect scrolls, beautiful lines and slashes but the right is like a wayward child. Very often she can get nothing from it but squiggles and odd little polka dots. Only witches and imbeciles write with their left hands, Jane Fulcher, says Miss Whiting, the teacher. Which are you? Now, right hand, please. What are you waiting for? I can’t do it, Miss. A long sigh, eyes raising to the roof. How old are you, Jane? Ten, Miss. And you still can’t write your own name? What does that mean, Jane Fulcher? I don’t know, Miss. It means you are insubordinate and lazy, Jane Fulcher. Righty-ho, Miss. Miss Whiting sweeps from her desk clutching a ruler and, rushing forwards, brings it down on the knuckles of Jane Fulcher’s left hand. Sometimes she will use a buckled belt or a shoe. Every now and then Miss Whiting will add in the backs of Jane’s knees and elbows for good measure, reciting her indictments with each blow. Insubordinate. Whack. Lazy. Whack. At the age of ten, Jane’s left hand is a five-fingered callus, the right a ghost afraid of its own shadow. The right-handed children break into titters of relief and contempt. They fear the hand impairment is contagious. Whenever Jane goes near them they tend to peel away. When they arrive home of an evening Rosie will say, Never mind, Janey, I love yer, and Jane will feel better for a while, even though she knows that Rosie can afford to be nice because she is pretty. Janey got done in writing class again today, Rosie will tell their mother, fetching some salted water to bathe the stinging hand. I never needed no writing nor nothing and it never bothered me, Sarah will say, and giving her daughter’s hands a little kiss she will wrap them in a pair of old mittens so that Frenchie won’t be bothered by the sight of them. To avoid Matty and Tom, the Fulchers begin taking a different route to school, one that puts them in the way of the confectionery store of Mrs Selina Folkman on Zetland Street. To Jane, the store is a sugar palace. In the window are bricks of pink and white coconut ice sitting on a paving of cream fudge with cherry-spotted nougat arches. Get a move on, Janey, you can’t have none, says Rosie, each time Jane’s footfall slows as she reaches Selina Folkman’s store. But it’s no good. Within days, Jane can think of nothing else. Bit by bit the sugar palace consumes her. Rowntree’s Treacle Toffee, Fry’s Chocolate Cr?me, Mclntyre’s Toffee Tablet, Maynards Rum ’n’ Raisin. In her mind the names become exotic friends. Mr Treacle Toffee, stern and rather bitter; Miss Cr?me, delicate, soft and yielding; Mrs Rum ‘n’ Raisin, sweet and old and as drunk as Mrs Jorrocks. Her confectionery characters take up residence in Jane’s heart. On the first Friday of every month Frenchie comes home with a twist of brown paper bought from an Indian toffee seller who stands on a busy crossroads on Frenchie’s way home. Who’s after a bit of toffee? cries Frenchie. Me! Me! The children cram around. Only a penny’s worth mind, says Frenchie, and you’ll have to work for it. Righty-ho, name four ships, says Frenchie. Patonga, Port Vindex … The words roll around the children’s mouths. His Majesty’s, says John. Uruguay Star, Leeds City … Frenchie fetches the stub of a cigarette from behind his ear, lights it and leans back luxuriantly, the smoke playing in curls around his face, while his children throw anxious glances at one another, the fruit box table, their mother. I don’t know why you have to put them through it, says Sarah. If you don’t know the names of things, how you gonna call on nothing? Frenchie says. Sarah stares at him and shrugs, returning to her mending while the children sit bolt upright on the bed, imagining the feel of the toffee, the smell, the long, sensuous melt. Their father draws again on his stub. What kind of name is His Majesty’s anyway? It ain’t a name at all, says Rosie. Correct, says Frenchie reaching for the twist of brown paper in his pocket. And what do they make from tin, Janey? Tins? says Jane. Voila! says Frenchie. Now, who’ll be having a bit … ? Just after Jane turns eleven, a dirty-skinned, yellow-haired girl appears in Miss Whiting’s class. In itself, this isn’t much of an event. Children come and go. A bitter winter is enough to take off one or two. All the same, there is something about this particular girl which attracts Jane. Perhaps it is her confidence, the sure set of her jaw. Perhaps it is the faint smell of violets she gives off, recalling violet cr?mes and violet dragees and violet lozenges. Perhaps it is the vague sense of familiarity. Perhaps it is a thousand things. All Jane knows is that it is. The yellow-haired girl senses this too and at the end of the second day she is waiting for Jane at the school gates. Who’s this then? Rosie asks. Guess, says the yellow-haired girl. Can’t, won’t and shan’t, says Rosie, pulling her sister out into the street. The yellow-haired girl follows them across Bright Street and out into St Leonard’s Road, singing in a jangly voice: Poplar is popular but Wapping is topping. At the crossroads Jane turns and says, So, why pick on us to tell? Pretty soon the party reaches Ullin Street and there, ahead of them, standing beside the alley that runs along the church, are Matty and Tom, gazing at something lying in the mud. What you got then? asks the yellow-haired girl. The matted body of a black and white cat looms from the shadows, still alive but with the legs splayed at unnatural angles. The eyes are out and its mouth oozes blood mixed with an ill-looking foam. We din do the eyes, says Tom. They was done already. There is a moment’s pause while all parties take this in. Wanna look? asks Tom. At that moment the creature lifts its head and slowly begins to drag itself towards the deepness of the alley. That’s disgusting, says the yellow-haired girl. Gis a penny or we’ll stamp on it, says Matty. Drop dead, says the yellow-haired girl. Matty Jorrocks raises his boot and grins. The poor thing, says the yellow-haired girl and, reaching for a broken piece of brick on the pavement, she darts in front of the Jorrocks boys and brings the brick down hard on the creature’s head. There, she says, brushing the brick dust from her hands as Tom and Matty tumble down the street. Jane and the yellow-haired girl find themselves alone above the body of the cat, each taking the measure of the other. How’s about we play ginger? says the girl. In ginger you tie the one doorknob to its neighbour, ring the doorbells and speed off to the nearest vantage. My mum says ginger is common, says Jane, sensing a surge of bad feeling running through her belly. Please yerself, says the girl, drawing herself up, the yellow hair falling across her face like sunlight. I don’t care anyway. And that, over the years, is what Jane Fulcher finds most thrilling about her friend Dora Trelling. Dora Trelling really doesn’t care. Jane begins meeting Dora after school. They walk together to Mrs Folkman’s emporium on Zetland Street and discuss the relative merits of sweets they have never tasted. Cough candy, now, there’s a nice little tablet, says Jane. They fall silent for a moment, imagining the crust of sugar on the outside, the damp, welcoming interior. Dor, wha’s your all-time favourite sweet? They scan the rainbow piles in the shop window. I ain’t never had none of ’em. Wha’s yours? Lemme see, says Jane, running her mind across imaginary tastes. Liquorice comfits or montelimar? Fruit gems or marshmallow? Tell the truth, Dor, I’m a little bit partial to the lot but all considered, I think montelimar gets it. Liar, liar, says Dora. Liar, liar, pants on fire. CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_e670a4c1-0b0f-5f01-8bc4-4a38fef0c7e7) On a hot June day, just before the war, and sensing their lives are about to change, the Fulchers take a trip, their first, to the Royal Victoria Gardens on the riverbank between Silvertown and North Woolwich. Dressed in their Sunday best (which is also their Sunday worst and their Monday best), they make their way across the Lea Bridge where they stop for a while to admire Frenchie’s boats at Orchard Place. They are not technically Frenchie’s boats, of course, but it was Frenchie who laid their decks and Frenchie who panelled their cockpits and Frenchie has names for all of them. There’s the Rosetta, nippers, ain’t she a beauty? And the Edie down there, a lovely slender little ship. Beyond it in the grey coat, the Maudie. Ah me boats, me boats. Where’s the Janey, Da? Oh the Janey. Frenchie rubs a hand over his hair and shakes his head. Well, I don’t know as there is a Janey yet, poppet. Not yet. They wander over the bridge into Canning Town. The younger children, Artie and Edie, are joyful and pestering. Can they have an ice cream, a gobstopper, a penny bag of Indian toffee? The elder four, Rosie, Frances Maud, John and Jane, drag their heels a little, as if by walking more slowly they might keep the day going on for ever. Opened in 1851 for those who could not afford the Great Exhibition, the Gardens are one of the few spots of green between the docks and the Thames and the only place to the east of the Lea, aside from Lyle Park, where there is an unimpeded view of the river water. Despite their reputation for being unsafe and swampy, the Gardens were generally crowded with women and children marking time while their men drank in the vast dockers’ pubs on the North Woolwich Road. Decades ago they had been famous for staging Monster Baby shows, where babies with swollen, scarlet heads, or three hands, or rows of nipples like pigs, were displayed for the edification of paying onlookers. The monster babies had long since gone when the Fulchers arrived, replaced by the fortune-tellers, jugglers and cardmen, but the Gardens still had a sinister reputation and there were rumours that they were haunted after dark by the souls of those who drowned nearby when the Princess Alice went down at Gallions Reach thirty years before. Each spring and summer throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Princess Alice, a steam-driven pleasure boat, had ferried city-worn families to the pleasure gardens at Rosherville and Gravesend, stopping off at the Royal Victoria Gardens to pick up passengers on its journey eastwards. On a Tuesday in September 1878, at about teatime, the Alice left Sheerness as usual. Just after dusk the boat approached Tripcocks Point, at the northernmost crick of Gallions Reach. It was only as she turned the point that George Long, the Alice’s first mate, spotted the Bywell Castle, an 890-ton collier ship bound for Newcastle, heading towards them at speed and only 150 yards distant. There was nothing to be done but wait for the impact. Within four minutes, seven hundred and fifty men, women and children were in the water just east of the Gardens’ jetty and almost directly on the spot where the Northern Outfall Sewer opened to discharge north London’s sewage into the Thames. It was only a few yards to shore but the Thames is fast at Gallions Reach and the sewage poisoned those desperately trying to reach land. Within twenty minutes, six hundred and fifty men, women and children had drowned, their soiled bodies drifting in at the Victoria Gardens. They were buried in Woolwich Old Cemetery but it was said that their ghosts still inhabited the waters at Gallions Reach and cast curses and spells on Silvertown and all those who had failed to save them. The Fulchers aren’t thinking about the Alice on this day. They are too busy considering where they might eat the picnic they have brought and whether they will have ice creams or shrimps from one of the food stands afterwards. Finding an empty bench beside the rose garden (Sarah and Jane are especially fond of roses) the children settle themselves around their parents and fall on fish paste sandwiches made from yesterday’s bread and a bit of drip mixed in. They wash them down with cold, black, sweet tea from an old beer bottle with a ground glass top while Frenchie spins yarns about the baby monsters he remembers as a small child and how for months afterwards he would check himself on waking to make sure he hadn’t become one of them during the night. And when the business of eating is done, the girls skip off to inspect a crimson parrot tied to a post which bobs up and down and croaks ‘Daisy, Daisy’ in exchange for a penny, and the boys join the crowd gathering for a demonstration of a fire pump given by two smiling London firemen. On their return Frenchie buys them all an ice cream from Delamura’s ice cart and they wander down to the river and wave at the pleasure boats passing by with the ice cream melting down their chins. Frenchie lifts the youngest two on to the Woolwich Free Ferry to gawp at the pauper children shouting ‘throw out your mouldies’ to the passengers on the steamers tied up at Woolwich Pier. They watch the scattering of coins from ship to shore, while Rosie, Frances Maud and Jane feed the pigeons on the pier. The afternoon is hazy, the sun emerging every so often to flood the Gardens with its polished light. The youngest Fulcher children play hide and seek and grandmothers’ footsteps between the trees while their father smokes on a park bench by the river and reads his paper. Their mother dozes and the older children watch the passage of ships along the river, trying to guess their names. Then, much too soon, the sun begins to take cover behind the afternoon clouds and Frenchie Fulcher rises to signal it is time to start the long walk back home. And that is the last really happy day any of them can remember. By the autumn the Great War has begun and by October the first German bomb has fallen on London. A stifling afternoon in early September 1914 finds Jane Fulcher and Dora Trelling hiding behind a postbox on the East India Dock Road while several thousand men in uniform thump along the granite in the direction of the ships that will take them off to war. It is rather overwhelming, this column of marching men, and rather thrilling too, to two young girls who have never ventured from their birthplace and who cannot know what any war – let alone this one – will bring. All along the route, men and women are leaning from windows laced with bunting, waving and whistling. There’s a band playing rousing military tunes and everywhere people are fluttering little Union Jacks on sticks and clapping. A few, women mostly, are hurrying alongside the marchers, delaying the moment when their husband or brother or son will finally slip from sight. One or two are crying, but only one or two, because the papers say it will be the shortest of wars and how could anyone who has witnessed the ineluctable power of the great British Empire think otherwise. Me dad says signing up is for the birds, says Dora. The men continue to march by, their faces sombre and set in patterns suggestive of faraway thoughts. D’you think they’ll be getting theirselfs killed, Dor? asks Jane. Nah, no chance. It’s the Germs what’s getting theirselfs killed. Dor, says Jane, you got some coinage on yer? Dora shakes her head. Nothing. Why? Every week they go through the same routine. The answer is always the same. Jess thinkin ’bout sweets, is all. They peer out from behind the postbox at the khaki-coloured column in the road. When we win the war, do you think we’ll have more money, Dor? Sure as eggs is eggs, Janey pet. They make their way south then east to Bow Lane and find themselves in a small crowd outside number 278 – William Utz the butcher’s. This crowd is quite unlike the one waving on the soldiers. There is something ugly about it. One of them, a young man with a reddened face, has grabbed a brick and is looking as though he means to throw it at Utz’s shop window. Some of the crowd appear to be egging him on; others are standing back, shaking their heads. What’s goin on, Dor? says Jane. Don’t ask me, Janey girl. I suppose he ain’t paid the tallyman. I suppose that’s it, Janey. The two girls pass through the crowd and out the other side, but the air has changed, as though a high wind had moved through the Poplar they knew and set everything at an unfamiliar angle. Jane doesn’t mention the incident at home, partly because she doesn’t know what to say about it and partly – and this is the puzzling bit – because she feels somehow responsible. She hopes the thing – whatever it is – will go away, and for a few hours it does, until at tea that day when Sarah puts a glistening slab of headcheese on the table next to the customary bread and jam and marg. I got it at Utz’s place, explains Sarah, settling herself on the bed next to her children. A chap was selling everythin’ off cheap right out at the front. He had a little trestle going there, with Utz’s meat piled up, bits of glass all over everything but nuffink you couldn’t pick out. I dunno where Utz was but when things is going off cheap you don’t ask questions. The family stares at the headcheese sitting on the plate, glowing in pink loveliness, with its little jewels of brain, ear, cheek and snout meat. How long is it since they had meat of any kind? None of them can remember. Since the start of the war, everything has become so expensive. I ain’t gonna eat no Hun meat, Frenchie says. Not now. Silence falls. The children bite their lips and stare at their laps. Me neither, says John eventually, sliding away from the table. Nor me, says Frances Maud. And that is when Jane notices Frenchie’s eyes on her. Now she is sure that the whole business at Utz’s is her fault. Sarah gets up from the bed and moves the headcheese over to her side of the table. Oh you are silly billies. Go on, Edie, you take some, pet. Edie shoots her mother a look then shakes her head. Me and Artie are going out to play now, she says, dragging her little brother out of the room and down the stairs. Frenchie gets up from the table, goes to his chair by the fire and lights a cigarette and now there are only two people left sitting beside the table with the slab. Silly billies, repeats Sarah, slicing the slab in two. Here you go, Janey. Jane sits there for a moment, thinking about the boy with the brick and the ugly words spilling from the crowd, and every part of her is saying no except the part that counts, and suddenly she can hear the headcheese saying, I know how badly you want me, Janey, and then it’s too late and her tongue is lapping around the jellied crust and her teeth are sinking into the pillow of blushing flesh. Later, when she and Sarah are down at the yard tap washing the jam jars, and the headcheese is making grunting noises in her stomach, Jane says, How big is the war, Mum? It’s the size of the world, pet, her mother says, poking at some greasy mark. Does that mean it’s going on in Aldgate and Whitechapel? Course it do! Is the war going on in the Empire then? Sarah Fulcher shakes the water off her hands. The concrete of the back yard is thick with city heat. It is too hot to work, too hot to think much. Even Bobs has excused himself from his ratting duties and is lying in the coolest corner of the yard, panting. I wouldn’t know nothing about that, Janey dear, sighs Sarah, rubbing her moonish face with the damp on her hands. Mum? says Jane. Her mother sighs and tightens her lips. Oh, you’re a right little Miss Why this evening. What is it now? Don’t the sun never set on the war then? They make their way up the stairs, avoiding the gaps in the banisters where someone has broken pieces off for firewood. Their room still smells faintly of the headcheese. Well now, I don’t suppose it ever do, says Sarah. Jane rescues a few hairs escaping from her plait. The war is a puzzle to her. If Britain rules the waves, then what is there to fight about? Why is Mr Utz bad now? They’ve been buying tripe off him for years and he wasn’t bad then. Has the badness got something to do with the brawn or has it got more to do with Utz himself, with the very name Utz maybe? Mum, we ain’t foreigners, are we? Janey, how can we be foreigners? Sarah returns to her sewing for a moment but Jane’s brow is so furrowed and her face so perplexed that even her mother, the most unobservant of women, is driven to wonder what kind of storm is collecting in the girl’s mind. Ah I see, Sarah says, her lips squeezed round pins. Yer thinking about how yer dad come to be known as Frenchie, ain’t yer? French ain’t foreign, love. It’s on the same side as us, innit? Ask yer father when he comes home from the pub and he’ll tell yer. She glances at her daughter momentarily. Probly give yer a good clumping, though, an all. There were anti-German protests all over the East End that week. In some parts things got so bad that traders with German-sounding names put up boards outside their shops saying ‘Lewis Hermann is English’ and the like, but still it went on. Utz returned but was run out of his shop; in Silvertown boys threw bottles at the houses of German glass blowers and there was much discussion about whether the Lithuanians who lived in the same street were really only Germans by another name. And then, after a few days, the whole thing blew over, because when it came down to it there were a great many foreigners in the East End and you couldn’t throw bottles at everyone, and in any case it would be a waste of the deposit on the bottles. To Jane, the Great War had begun as an enigma and it stayed that way. On her way to the market she’d see women streaming from the munitions factories with faces yellow from picric acid, the local boys running after them shouting ‘Chinkie Chinkie Chinkie’. Policemen rode around the streets of Poplar on new bicycles with sandwich boards over their chests reading AIR RAID, TAKE COVER, but no one ever did because they were more interested in gawping at the bicycles. In the winter of 1917 she was woken by a dreadful thunder, throatier than any bomb and deeper than the sound of shelling. The sky went red, then green and the smell of burning flour came over. The Brunner Mond Munitions plant at Silvertown had blown itself to bits and taken half of Silvertown with it. Afterwards, she discovered that the blast had hurled metal across the Thames into East Greenwich, where it had ripped apart a gasholder and sent a blue flame jetting fifty feet into the sky. She recalled how odd it was that this news had left her cold and unmoved, with neither fear nor anticipation. Other memories had no particular feelings attached to them but remained with her all the same. She remembered a man slumped in the doorway of a pub, blood snaking down his chin. She remembered men returning from the front, their eyes and legs and arms bandaged and their faces closed. She recalled seeing an enemy aeroplane which had been at the People’s Palace in Mile End. But somehow these were abstract things. The winter of 1915 is bitter cold, there never seems to be enough coal dust to keep dry and warm, and day after day the inhabitants of Poplar have to go about their lives in clammy undergarments with their socks half-frozen between their toes. Frenchie is working all hours at the boat yard. One particularly frosty day he is fitting out a barge with his docker’s neckerchief at his throat and his cap wedged down over his head and a cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips when a rattle starts up in his lungs. By seven o’clock his breath is as heavy as rock. All night Sarah simmers onions in milk and holds the warm halves to her husband’s chest but by morning he is worse, and his breath is like broken bellows and the children are afraid and begin to harbour a secret hope that by the time they come home from school he will have disappeared. Still, he insists on trudging to work, but just before midday a clerk’s assistant brings him back, staggering and incoherent. He ain’t no use, the clerk says. Had to carry ’im ’ere almost. Sarah makes sugared tea and puts her husband to bed, still wearing his neckerchief and protesting his fitness, but halfway through the night he wakes up afraid. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, not this, he cries. What’ll become? Shh, says Sarah. You’ll be right as rain in a jiffy-jiff-jiff. But Frenchie doesn’t get better in a jiffy-jiff, or anything like. When his foreman pays a visit to the house at Ullin Street three days later, Frenchie Fulcher is worse, the breath lathing off his lungs and his nightsweats so torrid that you can smell them from outside the room. His eyes are red bowls, his skin the colour of custard. When he coughs, greyish sputum veined with blood oozes from the corners of his lips. He’s awful watery, says Sarah. The foreman says it’s more like pneumonia and advises Sarah to call a doctor, though he already knows a doctor will not be called. Never mind, Mrs F, he says, patting the soft wodge of Sarah’s arm. Don’t you worry ’bout nothing, there’ll be work in plenty waiting for Frenchie the moment he’s well enough to do it. We got a war on, after all, ain’t we? A week drifts by, then another, and Frenchie’s nightsweats begin to lose their putrid smell and dry up, and instead of the bloody sputum, great green gobbets of mucus appear whenever Frenchie coughs. From then on he is a little better every day but it is a long recuperation, marked by downturns and surging fevers. Ah, Frenchie, you’re a credit to us all, the foreman says when he next visits. Sure as eggs is eggs you’ll be up and at it in no time and there’ll be plenty of work ’cetra ’cetra. Seeing the foreman to the door, Sarah braces herself and says, Listen, mister, we’ve had to do a spot of belt-tightening. I don’t suppose … ? Ah yes, says the foreman, shaking his head. Belts tightening all over the East End. Can almost hear ’em creak. I’m sorry, Mrs F, I really am. But belts is a family’s business and none of mine. For a week they live on the tuppences Sarah has put in a jam jar for Christmas. A cousin sends round soup and the odd half-loaf, a neighbour takes in the washing and Tarbun the grocer and Harwood the greengrocer are good enough to ease the Fulcher’s credit. But once a poor family in the East End is taken with illness or unemployment there is no backstop that can prevent their fall, no neighbour or relative who can do more than slow its pace a little. The Fulchers are reduced to soup and bread scraped with lard, until the soup and the lard run out and then it’s just bread. Hearing of their distress, the vicar’s wife brings round porridge and, hovering over the bed where Frenchie is heaving, says, So I’ll be seeing you in church, then? And Sarah replies, Right enough, Missus, but after the vicar’s wife has left there is nothing she can do to persuade her husband. Sarah, old girl, I ain’t never been righteous and I ain’t gonna start pretending now. Mebbe I’d be moved to do a spot of praising if the vicar’s wife had turned up with pasties instead of porridge. For a month the children go hungry every day. Their insides rumble through their lessons. In the evenings Sarah mops their tears and feeds them stale bread made soft in sugared water, but the sight and sound and smell and memory of food plague their waking moments and their dreams. The whole family is set to work. John junior brings in six shillings a week loading wagons at the coal yard, Frances Maud and Rosie find jobs in a munitions factory. The younger children run errands, mind horses and stand beside the queues for the music hall in Mile End Road fetching ices and beigels for those that want them. All the same, they live in a twilight of hunger. At night they hang around the dustbins at the back of Harwoods watching the pauper children rummaging for remains. We’ll never be like that will we, Rosie? asks Jane. Never. Because we’re respectable, ain’t we? Because we are. Their mother, who knows nothing of their night-time excursions, says, We ain’t reduced just yet. Ee’ll be as right as rain in no time and the foreman says there’ll be more work for ’im than a man can do in a month of Sundays. Six weeks after his first attack, Frenchie Fulcher wakes up one morning without a temperature. He feels his lungs, coughs experimentally and rises from the bed. Then he shaves, puts on his jacket and goes down to Orchard House. Calling for the foreman from the gate he shares a cup of tea with the guard there. He waits ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two. After four hours the guard takes him to one side and says, The foreman ain’t coming, sonny boy, now why don’t you go home? For the next eight months Frenchie does whatever he can, shouldering sacks for coalmen, heaving barrels off the brewers’ drays, lugging carcasses at the abattoir, sorting cow bones for glue, but the work is lowly and piece-rate and Frenchie can’t go at it as he might have done before his illness. His lungs still feel rackety and sometimes it’s a terrible trouble just to catch a breath. At night they sit in the cold and dark, with no coals and no money for the gas lamp, their stomachs burning empty. In the space of a year their world fades to grey. Frenchie grows bitter. He misses his friends at Orchard House; he misses his small luxuries – his Daily Mirror and his smoke. Most of all he misses the life of a craftsman, a man with a skill to bring to the world. His heart boils and rages. He begins to spend more time in the company of a tuppeny pint at The Wellington Arms than with his family. It ain’t your father’s fault, says Sarah. Ee’s from carriage people, but blow me if the carriage ain’t rolled clean away. To keep her children warm when winter comes round again, Sarah smears their chests in goose grease and sews them into brown paper like jars of potted meat. The thought of losing another of her babies keeps her up nights and makes her hair go grey. They look so tired, now, and thin. At Christmas that year, 1916, the vicar’s wife brings round a jug of soup with a piece of pig belly in it but Frenchie sends it back saying, She ain’t buying us a place in heaven, we’ll get there on our own. And so Christmas dinner that year is a plate of larded boiled potatoes and cabbage mush. On New Year’s Day they wake to the hollow horns of the ships in the West India. What do you think they’ll be cargoing? asks Jane. Scrag of lamb and sugar pie, says Rosie. Walnuts and marzipan, says Frances Maud. Stuffed hearts and candied peel. Faggots and mashed ’tater. Bacon pudding with fruit junket. Watch out, says Rosie, I’m gonna be sick. The day turns cold and then gets colder. By night-time the ice has crept along the window panes and gathered in great ranges across the walls of the rooms. They go to bed struggling with their freezing breath. In the small hours, Rosie really is sick; by the morning she cannot eat or drink and her skin is as hot as coals. She’s watery, says Sarah, mopping her girl. But it isn’t enough. Rosie begins to leak like a piece of bad piping. By the afternoon she’s shaking so hard it’s a wonder she doesn’t shatter. Red spots have come up and she’s moaning from the terrible pain in her stomach. Woolwich Free Ferry’s the thing, volunteers Mrs Smiley downstairs. Engine room warm as toast, don’t cost you nothing and the captain lets the women with their sick ’uns ride all day. There’s an idea, says Sarah, but a kind of fatalism has set in and she does not take Rosie to ride the Woolwich Free Ferry. Most likely it would have made no difference anyway. After school that day, Sarah sends the children to a cousin, except Jane who will not leave Rosie. The following night Frenchie goes out to fetch a doctor. The doctor shakes his head. Watery, see, says Sarah. Typhoid is my guess. Doesn’t help that she’s so thin. Got malnutrition too most like. Her parents gaze at their girl, the beautiful Rosetta, green skinned and dull-eyed but still beautiful in her going. Little Rosie. Ah no, not this one, says Sarah. She reaches out for Frenchie’s hand. It’s always the good-looking ones. The doctor is not unsympathetic but he has seen it a hundred times. He is hoping it will all end quickly so that he can sign the death certificate and get back to bed in time to catch a few more hours’ sleep before dawn brings the next round. But Rosie hangs on another three days. Three torturing days and nights with Jane, sitting beside her sister on the bed, listening to the sound of her failing breath, smelling the musty odour of her sweats and telling her stories of Miss Cr?me and Mr Toffee and all the other inhabitants of Mrs Selina Folkman’s. CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_413fc315-2404-58b2-b9d1-0afa5ea8aeb1) In 1917, the year of the Silvertown explosion, Jane leaves Bright Street School for good. Through a cousin of Dora’s she hears there are vacancies for seamstresses at Moses’ outfitters in Stepney, just east of the Mile End Waste, and a few days later Jane and Dora find themselves in front of an old brick house propped up with a makeshift scaffold made from telegraph poles and a peeling sign reading M. Moses, Quality Tailoring. Pushing through the entrance, they clamber up broken stairs into a shabby hallway and knock tentatively at a damp brown door marked Office. The supervisor, a grey-faced man in his fifties with a voice like an old hinge, confirms that their information is correct and that yes, indeed, Mr Moses is thinking of taking on a couple of youngsters. Moses prefers boys, whom he can apprentice, but there seems little point in taking on anyone who might be drafted in a year or two’s time should the war go on that long. So, girls it is, says the supervisor, if girls it has to be. They can come back and speak to the proprietor himself on Friday afternoon when Mr Moses is always in the office sorting out the week’s wages. ’Ere, Dor, says Jane, on the walk back to Poplar. D’you reckon Mr Moses is a Jew-Boy? Not much! says Dora. Clot! What else’d he be? They make their way down to Commercial Road, past the alleys of Stepney. Me dad says all the Jew-Boys will end up in the poorhouse in the finish. Not us, though. Ah no, Janey, pet. Well we ain’t common, see? We’re respectable, Dor. We is that, Janey. We is that an’ all. Respectability takes up a great deal of Jane Fulcher’s time. How to be it, how to show it, how to live it and how to keep on living it. The fact that her grandfather had once owned a carriage necessitates the upkeep of certain standards of respectability. Respectability is, after all, a thin path around the Abyss. The Respectable are able to hold their heads up high at the grocer’s and the butcher’s, and get credit, too. The Respectable do not find themselves turfed out on the street when they cannot pay the week’s rent. The Respectable don’t wake to the early morning knocks of the tallyman and the loanshark and the bookie’s boy. Dor, says Jane, when we start working, will we be rich? Sure as eggs is eggs. How rich? So rich that we’ll eat headcheese and corny beef and sweets. They are walking along the towpath at Limehouse Cut, beside the gypsy boats with their brilliantly painted cabins. When I’m rich I’m gonna walk through the door of Mrs Folkman’s and say, So Mrs F, what have you got in today that is particularly good? And Mrs F will say, Well, Miss Fulcher, it’s funny you ask because only this morning I made up a batch of violet cr?mes and there’s some splendid fudge an’ all. And I’ll say, Very good, Mrs F, top hole, make me up a half pound of both. I shall be paying, as usual, in cash. Before the war Mark Moses turned out high class coats and bespoke suiting for the shops in the West End. His was one of the thousands of sweatshops littering the East End, but, unlike those which functioned solely as middlemen for the distribution of fabric cut-outs to women working from home, Moses employed a handful of men and women to work full-time in his premises and actually paid them a decent wage. It was a successful business, not that you would have known it from the premises, which were two filthy rooms above a grocer’s shop in a terrace of black-bricked workshops and tiny factories. In the first of these rooms a dozen women sat in rows before treadled Singers and sewed piece-rate, the least experienced seaming linings and sewing gold galleon between the layers of coat fabric, and the most skilled working on buttons and hand-finishing cuffs and collars. In the second room pressers and basters hemmed and pressed the garments as they emerged from the machines, then hung them in steam to set the seams, and in a small antechamber between the two rooms a cutter laboured on the band-saw machine, cutting out pieces from stacks of cloth. The worst of the sweaters treated their workers as little more than slaves, obliging them to pick up their cut-outs twice a day and paying them nothing for their trouble or their tram-fare. They demanded impossible deadlines and fined their workers for lateness, so that by the end of a week women who were working fifteen-hour days at their machines and travelling two or three hours to the sweatshops to pick up their pieces would find themselves only three or four shillings in pocket. From this they were expected to feed their families, buy their buttons and pay for their threads. The worst of the sweaters worked in cahoots with sewing machine salesmen. The salesmen would provide the sweaters’ outworkers with machines on hire purchase, then, without warning, they would double the hire purchase rate and the sweater a cut. The buyer would eventually be unable to meet her payments, the salesman would then take it back, leaving the victim of his greed with no means of supporting herself or her children. Charles Dickens estimated that in his day between twenty-five and fifty per cent of the women working in sweatshops were resorting to prostitution in order to survive. Even so, there were many who favoured sewing over laundry work, which left you with leg ulcers and bronchitis, or packing flour in the mills where your lungs would bleed from the dust, or getting raw-skinned and stinking from the glue factory or half-crazed and fossy-jawed from the matchmaker’s. By the time my grandmother became a seamstress, sweating had improved a little. At least it was an established practice with established rules. None of the rules favoured the women who laboured at the machines, but there were rules, at least, and Moses, Quality Tailoring generally kept to them. The following Friday afternoon, Jane and Dora return to the Mile End workshops. A bulbous woman in a matt brown wig ushers them up the broken stairs with their covering of torn lino, and into the main workroom. Then she sets them down in front of a sewing machine and takes ten minutes explaining how to lift and drop the foot, how to feed in the fabric, thread the needle, control the speed of the sewing line with the treadle, and finally how to reinforce seams and remove the pins and basting. Then she hands each of the girls two small scraps of fabric and says she’ll be back in ten minutes to inspect their work. For what seems like the longest while, the girls sit speechless before the pitiless contours of the machine. Blow me if I know where to start, says Dora, poking cautiously at the needle. I ain’t been this scared of nothing since me mum cut a loaf and there was a rat baked inside. But at least the rat was dead. She brings her foot hard down on the treadle and the needle begins a mad jerking. Janey, she says, we ain’t never gonna be rich unless we get them seams done. I think you ’ave to do it slower, Dor. With the greatest caution, Jane eases her foot on to the treadle, and the needle floats upwards. Like this. Five minutes later Jane has put an elegant, forceful seam across the fabric. How d’you get it straight, then? asks Dora, struggling with a fishing net of knotted threads. Finish this off before Mrs Wig comes back, will yer? Right-o, Dor. And Janey, you won’t tell, will yer? Jane Fulcher shakes her head and smiles. Not in a million years, Dor. The two girls clamber back down the broken stairs with the promise of a job picking pins and clearing away the threads for six shillings a week and all the sugared tea they can drink, start on Monday. At fourteen they can already see their adult lives stretching out before them: work, marriage, children, a home to look after, tea cosies to sew, and all Mrs Folkman’s sweets they can manage. Marching across the Mile End Waste they feel as though they have grown a foot in an afternoon. They wander back down through the Waste Market, past stalls laden with ripe beef ribs and belly lamb, past trestles laid out with cabbages and haberdashery. Stopping beside the beigel bakery, Dora whispers, Me dad says them Jew-boys is a bunch of cowards the way some of them have gone on the conscientious to get out of fighting. Me dad says they don’t mind killing things when there’s some killing to be done. To see them out on a weekday evening at the back of their little shops cutting creatures’ throats and letting the blood run out and me’ Dad says that ain’t right. And most of them ain’t half canny in the business way ’cos me dad says you can always strike a deal with a Jew-boy. She meanders on, but by now Jane isn’t listening. She is thinking about six shillings a week and what you can buy for it if you get the bargaining right. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/melanie-mcgrath/silvertown-an-east-end-family-memoir/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.