War heroes my arse. Ain’t our dad a war hero? Don’t he deserve hiscrippled son start bringing in a bit of a wage?
Harold hadn’t considered this argument but, considering it now, a flush of pride blossomed on his face.
Don’t you worry, Crip, Jack said. Ever since the accident he had called his younger brother Crip, though never in public. We’llsoon sort it out. Jack turned away and moments later his snores were rattling the mattress.
The following morning, on Jack’s instructions, Harold limped to the door of a friend of Jack’s, Tommy Bluston, and asked to borrow his bicycle. The wheels wobbled and the bicycle swung wildly about but he managed to remain on the saddle. For an hour or so he practised, pedalling faster and faster up and down the quiet terraces. Pretty soon he had gathered his confidence sufficiently to venture out into traffic and was bowling along the granite sets as though he’d been born to it. It was exhilarating. The rough air of Poplar whipped his face and he had the sensation of being pulled, but the best part of it all was that, on the seat of the bicycle, Harold ceased to be a cripple. On the contrary, he suddenly became someone people admired or even envied. He had only to ring his bell and women would hurry out of the way, dogs would bark, children would point and sometimes even run behind him. So wrapped up was he in his new-found freedom that he lost all awareness of time. Suddenly, becoming conscious of the twelve o’clock chimes, he pedalled as fast as his legs would take him along the East India Dock Road towards the docks. As he pulled up, Jack was standing beside the police sentry box at the entrance to the West India with a cigarette in his mouth.
You’re late.
Harold followed his brother, pushing Tommy’s bicycle past the workhouse and into an alleyway beside The Resolute pub. Jack tapped on the pub window and nodded to someone inside, then the two brothers went around the back to a latched gate. A dog chained up beside a shed started barking, then, seeing Jack, it quietened down, slapping its tail against the dim concrete of the yard. From the inside pocket of his jacket, Jack produced a key with which he unlocked the padlock to the shed. Immediately inside the door stood a few wooden crates, their outlines dissolving gradually into the gloom.
Now this Spicer cove, Jack said, finally. He sell black treacle? Coconutmats?
Harold closed his eyes and tried to reimagine Spicer’s shop. It seemed to him that Spicer’s sold everything, so much and in so many varieties that he couldn’t put names to them all, but he thought he could remember green tins of black treacle sitting beside the sugar loaves wrapped in blue paper.
Good, said Jack, ’cause we got consignments of them both. He dived into the shed and reappeared with a large basket which he attached to the front of the bicycle with rope. Into the basket they loaded half a dozen tins of treacle and six mats.
You tell that Spicer, this is for free, but he takes you on there’ll bemore: black treacle, coconut mats, rum, the lot. He’ll have to pay, mind,but not half what he’d pay the wholesaler.
Harold stood beside the bicycle, committing this message to memory. Then, for no particular reason, he heard himself say:
Mr Spicer’s got a mynah what sings ‘Laddie Boy’. He’d heard Jack and Henry singing the song. He don’t know all the words, but hecan sing the chorus.
Jack looked interested. Oh, our man likes birds, do he? Well, I’llgive him birds. Wait here, then, Crip. He went into the pub by the back door and emerged a few moments later holding a crude wooden birdcage inside which sat a startlingly large white cockatiel with a bristling yellow crest.
Some tyke give me this for a card game. Spotless, this bird. Lovelysinger. Tell Spicer if he gives you the job, it’s his for six shillings.
Jack tousled his brother’s hair.
Listen, Crip. All this cargo what you see here. This is a family matter,all right? Just a little bit of duck and dive. Your dad and me, we liketo keep it private, so only tell that Spicer fellow what I said you could.
Harold reassured his brother and went to mount the bicycle. With the mats and the treacle in the basket and a large birdcage hanging from the bars, the bicycle was a good deal trickier to manage than it had been, but Harold set himself to the task and he was soon pedalling north again and hearing his brother calling after him:
And don’t forget to tell him your dad’s a bleedin’ war hero and all.
He made his way back to Spicer’s feeling upbeat. His brother’s words had settled him. Jack was right. Everyone in the East End made a big play out of being neighbourly, and they were. If you were in some kind of crisis, your neighbours would always do what they could to help you out. That was how the East End was. But no one confused that with family. Family was the core, the essence. Family was what you were, and if that meant doing whatever it took to get a job, knowing there were one-eyed men and limbless veterans who might need the job even more than you did, then that’s what you had to do. Ultimately, it was family that counted.
Presented with the treacle, mats and cockatiel, and persuaded that Harold’s father was indeed a war hero, Mr Spicer decided he was running a business, not a charity, and hired Harold Baker on the spot for a weekly wage of five shillings and a direct line to his brother’s unorthodox grocery wholesalers. Harold’s duties included sweeping and dusting, stocktaking, the afternoon deliveries and occasionally helping Mrs Spicer with her books.
The Spicers proved themselves to be kind and reasonable employers and Harold quickly and happily made himself indispensable. In the mornings he mopped and swept the pavement in front of the shop, then dusted the shelves and washed and polished the floor, before feeding and cleaning out the mynah bird. In the afternoon, he hitched up the delivery trailer to Spicer’s bicycle and took off along the streets of Poplar, delivering packages here and there. From time to time he would cycle down to the pub beside the West India to pick up consignments of molasses and black treacle, bananas and spiced rum from Jack and Henry’s store.
After some months, Spicer sold the bristling cockatiel and bought a breeding pair of Cumberland fancy canaries, and it became Harold’s responsibility to put out their white grit and seed every morning and to change their water, wipe their cuttlebone free of droppings, and lay new paper on the cage floor. There was no more talk of war heroes, nor of crippled boys. May never called her younger son fishlips again, and even his father seemed to treat him with a new respect. The Spicers, who had no children of their own, developed an affection for their errand boy and were touched by the care he took with everything, and in particular with the birds. Spring came round and Spicer made a breeding box and offered Harold a cut of the sale price of every canary chick he could bring to adulthood. Pretty soon the hen laid eggs, each of which Harold carefully removed with a spoon and replaced with a clay dummy. Once the clutch was complete, he put all the eggs back in the nest together and waited for the hen to settle on them. Of the first brood, he lost three chicks and managed to bring up two, but he was picking up tips at the bird market in Sclater Street now and he knew where he had gone wrong. With the money he made on the two he sold, he bought another breeding pair and successfully raised six chicks. He sold the males, which were the only singers, and kept the females for breeding on.
Summer passed into autumn and on 11 November, the Armistice was signed and, despite the ravages not only of the war, but of the influenza which came in on its coat-tails, the whole of the East End devolved into one giant street party. Young men not yet drafted laughed with relief, children boasted about their fathers, and wartime sweethearts schemed to extricate themselves from their promises.
The curtains opened, the lights came on and everyone remembered their lines. Life was on again.
There followed the briefest of booms as the economy picked itself up from the war and then a deep depression hit.
How’s about I pay yer next week, sonny boy? women would say when Harold turned up to deliver their groceries. Mr Spicer won’t minda bit. Sunken-eyed mothers would come into the shop with their crying children carrying the most pitiful array of shabby goods – a baby’s rattle, a spinning top, a rabbit’s foot good-luck charm – to trade for food, and Spicer would have to take them to one side and remind them sternly that it was a business he was running and if they wanted charity they should apply to the Sally Army.
Them politicians have got a lot to answer for, Mrs Spicer said. Ain’t those poor women got enough on their plates? Half of them widowsand all.
But that’s just it, Mrs Spicer, Spicer replied, shaking his head at the way of things. Most of ’em ain’t got nothing on their plates at all.
Things got so bad that on one day in 1921, four members of Poplar council were arrested for diverting the rates into a food voucher scheme designed to protect Poplar’s poorest residents from starvation. When news spread of the councillors’ arrest, men and women in the docks and factories began putting down their tools and taking to the streets. Spicer watched them moving slowly past the shop windows and tutted with disapproval. Things were bad, he knew, but there was no need to make a public scandal of it. Besides, the demonstrators were putting off his customers.
At lunchtime that day, Mrs Spicer put on her coat and brown cloche hat and announced she was going to the post office. Spicer tried his best to persuade her not to go, but she was insistent. By late afternoon, when the demonstrations and street protests had spread across Poplar and even the rookeries and turnings were jammed with aggrieved men and women, jostling for a view of their leaders, and Mrs Spicer had not returned, Spicer sent Harold out on the bicycle to look for her. For several hours, Harold slowly pedalled through the throng, along the Commercial Road, down the East India Dock Road into Poplar High Street and farther east to Blackwall and the oxbow of land at Bow Creek where the river Gypsies lived, weaving his way through the tides of people, but he saw no sign of Mrs Spicer until, making his way home, he was bicycling down Poplar High Street when he thought he spotted her brown cloche hat among a group outside the town hall. He clambered from his bicycle and, leaving it in the care of a boy in return for a farthing, he made his way through the throng of people until finally there, over on the other side of the street, next to the slipper baths, his suspicions were confirmed. Mrs Spicer was standing with the protesters. She had a banner in her hand and was shouting. He knew then she had never intended to visit the post office but needed an excuse to leave the shop. In her own quiet way Mrs Spicer was a rebel; most likely she’d been a rebel all her life. Harold found the idea exotic. Until that moment he had thought that rebels were all like Jack.
He reported back to Mr Spicer that his wife was nowhere to be seen and that she was probably caught up somewhere in the tide of people, but he saw no need to worry because no one seemed to be much in the mood for violence. It was all right to lie to keep a secret, he thought, to avoid hurting people. Sometimes, it was probably better than telling them.
Later on that week, he lifted his new clutch of young canaries into an old wooden port box, tied it to his bicycle with string, and pedalled along the Commercial Road, past the soup lines at the Sally Army, past thin men standing smoking on the corners, past sallow-skinned women and tearful children to the animal emporium in Sclater Street, where he sold all four, and throughout the whole journey it never once occurred to him that it might be an odd thing, in the midst of such poverty and misery as there was in the East End of the 1920s, that men and women would happily give what little money they had to possess just one of those tiny, yellow gems, whose song recalled sunshine and laughter and better times.
CHAPTER 4 (#uf3bfef64-43a4-5f3e-a263-b196d8cb80d9)
On their return from Kent and all through the war years, Daisy and Franny visited Elsie at her Wanstead Flats asylum once a month with Joe. Sometimes they’d take a rock bun or a piece of Mrs Anderson’s tea loaf, but after Mrs Anderson and Maisie left for alternative lodgings nearer to Mrs Anderson’s sister, there was rarely anything worth taking. Elsie didn’t seem to bother one way or another. Every so often her face would beam with recognition, but most times she seemed confused and mildly irritated, as though their presence interrupted her peace. No one had any real idea what was wrong with her. The diagnoses ranged from nervous exhaustion to hysterical grief and melancholic disorder. She was prescribed complete rest for an indefinite period. Whether she would recover or not was anyone’s guess. Still, the asylum was warm, the nurses seemed kind and the food was plentiful, and Daisy often thought her mother was happier in her walled prison, shorn of memories, than she had been on the outside, though she knew enough never to say this to her father.
Without Elsie’s luxuriant moaning and numberless afflictions, life at number 7 Bloomsbury Street felt oddly amputated but it, too, was happier, especially for Daisy, who had always suffered the hard edge of her mother’s misery.
While she remained at Bloomsbury Street, Mrs Anderson was drafted in to help out with the domestic chores and Mrs Shaunessy was taken on to do the cooking and watch Franny when there was no one in the house. The most immediate practical consequence of Elsie’s absence was that, with medical bills to pay, and Mrs Anderson and Mrs Shaunessy to compensate for their time, and with no income from laundry and flower-making, the Crommelin family found themselves very short of money. Joe took on extra shifts, leaving the house before the gas lamp man had snuffed out the street lights and returning long after the last lamp had been lit for the night. He no longer brought treats home on Fridays. Gone, too, were the Saturday afternoons in the park.
In 1915, six months or so after her return from the hop fields, at the age of twelve, Daisy went out to work on the half-and-half, spending her mornings at school and her afternoons at an assortment of factories, sweeping floors and sorting cans. The arrangement brought in a few shillings but it put an end to her evenings with Lilly and to the possibility of another summer visit to Kent.
Notwithstanding the downturn in their own fortunes, the Crommelins never ceased to count their luck. They had only to look next door to see what wreckage the war had left in its wake. Since his return from the front limbless and half blind, Pat Shaunessy had been reduced to selling kindling on the street and Mrs Shaunessy had started putting in long days washing and mending, ironing and darning, cooking and looking after children in order to try to make ends meet. Even so, they sometimes had to resort to the Relieving Officer, and Mrs Shaunessy would have to send Billy round to number 7, shamefaced, clutching bags of linen and tins of corned beef, for the officer would not issue food coupons to any family who had anything left to sell.
The Shaunessys’ slide into poverty made Billy Shaunessy meaner and angrier than ever. Now he would lie in wait in a turning for Daisy and Franny as they walked to school every morning – from 1916 onwards Franny also attended Culloden Street School – and spring out, taking a pinch out of the both of them and shouting:
Your ma’s as mad as a stick. Yes she is, yes she is. Me ma says so andme dad says so and all.
Billy Shaunessy, you stop that! Daisy would cry, but to no effect. Billy relished the upset he caused and her protests seemed only to encourage him further. For weeks together, he carried on in this vein until, one day, deciding to take things into her own hands, Franny finally turned about and, marching up to him, stood on her tiptoes and flipped him so hard on the nose with her tiny fingers that he froze to the spot in sheer bewilderment, leaving Franny the space she needed to announce that Billy was a fine one to talk, whose so-called dad was a Patty-no-legs what begged in the street for his living.
After that, Billy Shaunessy left the Crommelin girls alone and they saw him only when he slunk in, red-faced and arms full of corned beef tins, in advance of a visit from the Relieving Officer.
The Crommelins’ luck – if you could call it that – ran out one morning in 1917, when Joe returned from a visit to the asylum with bad news. Though no one seemed to be able definitively to say what was wrong with Elsie, the doctors had agreed the longer her ‘turns’ went on, the less likely she would be to make a recovery. This meant that further cutbacks were necessary. Daisy would have to leave school and find paid work the moment she reached fourteen. In the meantime, Joe would have to tell Mrs Shaunessy that the Crommelins could no longer afford her services. He was loath to do it – the Shaunessys had been good neighbours and Mrs Shaunessy had helped out when Elsie had first been taken ill. For weeks he wrestled with himself, struggling to find some way to soften the blow. Until, one afternoon, Mrs Shaunessy did the hard work for him.
She came round as usual at five, carrying a piece of brisket for the Crommelins’ tea. While Daisy put on the kettle, Mrs Shaunessy began carving paper-thin slices of meat to make into sandwiches, chattering inconsequentially as she worked. As instructed, she’d bought a sixpenny piece of brisket, which would usually be enough for tea and for Joe Crommelin’s sandwiches in the morning. While the girls were eating, Mrs Shaunessy fussed about at the sink for a while before making as if to leave. As she moved towards the door, she hesitated and, in a casual voice, said that brisket had been particularly dear that day and that Daisy was to tell her father that she hadn’t been able to buy enough for his morning sandwiches. For a moment she put down her basket and turned to put on her hat, and in that moment the cloth she’d used to cover the basket dislodged itself and both Daisy and Franny saw the unmistakable remains of the brisket wrapped in wax paper wedged beneath.
Daisy didn’t want to tell her father that Mrs Shaunessy had stolen the meat, because it was hard enough for the Shaunessys what with Mr Shaunessy having no legs and Billy Shaunessy being the crybaby that he was. She figured that if they just repeated what Mrs Shaunessy had said it couldn’t really be called lying, since it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told the lie. But Franny, who was fast developing into a telltale, ignored her older sister and Joe was barely in the door, taking off his blue serge overcoat, before she was breathlessly relating Mrs Shaunessy’s crime.
Wait up, wait up, girl, Joe said, while Daisy unwound the string strapping up the hessian he always tied around his shins to protect his trousers, your tongue’s got caught on the current, but when he saw there was no meat for his sandwiches the following morning, only a couple of pieces of stale bread, he was very angry and started grumbling about ‘interfering’. It was the excuse Joe needed. He told Mrs Shaunessy that very evening not to come any more and asked Mrs Anderson as far as possible to keep to her room, and from then on the Crommelin girls were left to bring themselves up more or less alone.
Low though they might have sunk, though, even the Shaunessys hadn’t suffered the worst of it. By the end of the war the same could not be said of all the inhabitants of Bloomsbury Street. One of the Lumin boys at number 47 was killed in action, and Mrs Lumin’s young nephew was blown to bits when a bomb dropped on Upper North Street School in June 1917. A French polisher and his cousin, who shared lodgings in The Deep, were both killed at Ypres. Two or three others in the street contracted typhoid or dysentery, one went mad from shell shock, another was gassed and then, if that weren’t enough, the Greenbergs lost two children to the influenza epidemic and several elderly men and women in Bloomsbury Street were cut down the same way.
In March 1917, only a week or two after her fourteenth birthday, Daisy left school for good and found work at the Apex Laundry. Lilly’s elder sister had worked there for some years and had put in a good word for her younger sister, who had started there a few months before. When the Apex’s formidable forewoman, Mrs Bentley, mentioned that there might be another vacancy for a hard-working, honest and healthy girl direct out of school, Lilly had immediately thought of her best friend. Daisy was not new to laundry work. Like any East End girl, she’d been expected to assist her mother with the weekly wash from a very early age. Elsie Crommelin did her laundry the old-fashioned way. She owned a buck, a wooden washing trough, inherited from her mother, who’d no doubt inherited it from hers. This she kept in the yard, and it was large enough to enable her to earn a few pennies taking in neighbours’ washing. On washing day – invariably Monday – she would set a copper of water on to boil, then fill the buck with the water, fold the clothes and linen to be washed into the buck with a scoop of ashes and one of hen dung. She’d turn the lot over with a prosser then finally leave it to soak. This was an old technique to save soap, which, at least when Elsie was a young woman, was an expensive luxury. After an hour or so, she’d drain off the lye and dung through a spigot in the buck, rub each piece of cloth with shavings of pig fat soap and work up a lather on the rubbing board before filling the buck once more with cold water and rinsing the lot in it. It was this washing which was hanging to dry when Franny took it upon herself to raid her mother’s sewing box with consequences everyone, except possibly Elsie herself, now knew.
The Apex, which took in sailors’ uniforms and the linen from several West End hotels as well as a hospital or two, was rather more up to date. It was situated in a once-red-brick, now blackened building which was part of a huddle of small factories and workshops just off the East India Dock Road. The laundry itself was divided into three principal rooms, each serving several functions. Of these, the washroom was the largest, containing vast copper cauldrons set on gas burners and a state-of-the-art Victress Vowel turner operated by levered wheels, with an area at one side devoted to stain removal and special treatments, and another at the back where the mangles and hanging racks stood. The washroom gave on to a separate ironing room. Beyond that lay the finishing and packing room.
The Apex Laundry hours were from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. The pay was poor, six shillings a week for a junior girl, and there were no paid holidays or sickness benefits. The laundry seemed to run by a set of rules designed to transfer as much of the weekly wage as possible back to its owners. Any infraction of these rules – which Mrs Bentley was careful never fully to explain – resulted in a docking of the guilty party’s pay. Among the infractions included grating the soap too finely, or too thickly, using too much or too little, bleaching or starching any fabric not intended to be bleached or starched or in any other way damaging fabric or fixings, however inadvertently; insufficient mangling, sneezing or coughing on newly ironed laundry, failing to fold correctly, speaking when not required to speak or failing to speak when required to do so, illness, lateness and other assorted malfeasances as and when required.
