When the laundry arrived at the Apex, it was first inspected then, if necessary, taken to the soaking and stain-removal area, where it was the responsibility of the stain workers to remove any marks on the fabric with hot flour and water or ground pipeclay, ashes or lime chloride, or salts of lemon and cream of tartar, depending on the stain. The stain-free laundry was then placed in hot water with shredded soap and soda in one of the cauldrons, and turned with a Victress Vowel operated by levered wheels. Every kind of fabric required a different treatment. Coloureds were set with salt and vinegar, prints soaked in liquor boiled from ivy leaves, and blue and black silk fixed with gin. After its wash, the laundry was lifted out with dolly sticks, and, in the case of linens, boiled, then rinsed three times, in warm, cool and blued water respectively, before being moved to the starching area, to be stiffened with rice flour or size made from boiled hoofs and glossed with borax. It was then mangled in huge, multiple-rollered mangles operated by a set of giant wheels and levers, and set on the drying racks. While still moist, linens were transferred to the ironing room, where they were ironed with turps, then polished with glass calenders on a hardboard, and, finally, sent to the packing room to be finished and folded and from there dispatched back to their owners.
Because her sister was a good worker, Lilly was assigned to the packing room, the least arduous area of the laundry, where she had only to fold sleeves and pin shirts and set fancy work in tissue before bundling each customer’s order together in brown paper and tying it up with string. Daisy, on the other hand, was put to the mangles. Her job was to fold the newly washed laundry, then feed it through the rollers, turning the levered wheels with one hand, using the other to catch the newly mangled fabric as it appeared at the other end, then transfer it to the drying racks. If the laundry was insufficiently mangled it would drip on to the floor and dry unevenly; if too dry, the ironing room would complain that it was unmanageable. It was, quite literally, grinding labour. At the end of each day, Daisy’s shoulders and elbows would throb from turning the wheels. After the first few weeks, the sensitive skin between her fingers opened up, leaving itchy wounds which never healed, then the skin on the back of her hands developed a bloom from exposure to carbolic and soda and the hands themselves throbbed from the constant damp. Several months in, the muscles in her mangling arm began to swell beneath taut, roped veins.
That’s more like an elephant’s trunk than an arm, Lilly said one day as they were sharing their midday sandwich. Careful, or they’llthink you’ve escaped from the circus or else… She whispered this with her hand to her mouth so that only Daisy could see…. or they’ll think you’re one of them.
Them were the nancy boys who hung around the docks at night dressed in women’s garb. Some worked as dockers by day and by night their thickly muscular bodies, granite legs and leather faces looked rather comical dressed in silk skirts and daubed with rouge and beauty powder. They were tolerated, even pandered to so long as they took in good part the jokes made against them, but you wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of them, not for any amount of money, not even if you did have an elephant’s trunk for an arm.
Later Lilly apologised, pointing out that her own arms were none too clever, neither, so she had no right to pitch in on anyone else’s, and the two girls were as thick as any two girls can be once more.
It didn’t occur to Daisy to resent her friend for her easier lot, just as it didn’t occur to her to resent her sister for being pretty. Things were as things were. There was nothing to be done about any of it. In any case, Daisy quite liked her work. Her walk to and from the laundry took her past Charrington’s and the Anchor Brewery, from whose streaming chimneys forever came the delicious, bitter, spicy scent of hops. There was a certain satisfaction in turning the wheel and seeing wet, sloppy fabric emerge the other side flat, crisp and evenly moist, and the camaraderie between the laundresses made up in part for the laboriousness and monotony of mangle-turning. The East End was full of filthy work in glue factories, meat processing plants and paint and gas works. The laundry at least had the advantage of being clean.
More than anything, though, the twice-daily exposure to the smell of hops kept Daisy going, because it reminded her of the happiest times, during those weeks of late summer and autumn, she’d spent in Kent at the beginning of the war. She looked back on that period as a procession of brilliant, sun-drenched days, each bringing more happiness than the last, and she’d returned to Poplar with a new and uncomfortable perspective on her home patch. The crush of people, which had once seemed so comforting, now grated, and the speed of everything made her anxious. She started to feel penned in and longed to see the thin turban-blue stripe of the sea once more. But she knew that until Franny had left school and was bringing in a wage and could be trusted to look after their father, she would not be returning to Kent.
It pleased her to be able to make a difference to the family economy, though, and by the early 1920s, the Crommelins were once more on an even keel financially, and Daisy was even able to save a shilling or two for entertainments for herself and her sister.
From the mid-1920s, picture houses sprang up across the East End as fast as dandelions through paving stones. By the early 1930s, there were eight around Poplar alone, among the largest of which were the Pavilion, the Hippodrome, the Grand and the Gaiety, each capable of seating thousands. The Troxy, which opened in the early 1930s, seated 3,500 alone. For a while they competed furiously for custom, each decorating its foyer and viewing room more elaborately than the next, with velveteen, crystal chandeliers and gilded gesso. The sisters loved them, but Franny found their blend of magic and luxury particularly enchanting and would have happily spent every waking minute in one or other picture house had she not had school to attend and a concerned older sister to make sure she went. The picture houses soon became a major part of the sisters’ weekend routine. Every Saturday morning after her shift at the laundry, Daisy would walk to Chrisp Street to wait for her sister to emerge from the morning children’s show; the two girls would go and do their shopping in the market and as they made their way home Franny would entertain Daisy with descriptions of what she’d seen. In the afternoon they’d head for the matinee at the Gaiety or the Hippodrome and they’d walk home with heads full of stars and stories.
Franny began to become quite obsessed with pictures and stars, and when she wasn’t actually watching a film, or talking about it, she’d be memorising lines of dialogue, cast lists and plots, or standing in front of the mantelpiece mirror in the living room, styling her hair and doing her film make-up and talking about becoming a star of the screen. No entreaties by her sister or scolding by her father could make her give up her fantasies. No laundry could contain her, no factory feed her talent. Joe and Daisy would see. She was meant for better things. In a year or two Franny Crommelin intended to be at least as famous as Louise Brooks, as glamorous as Gloria Swanson and as rich as Mary Pickford.
And so, when Franny was finally released from her schooling aged fourteen, the first thing she did was to wave her hair and dab rouge on her cheeks and lips, don her Sunday dress and present herself at the staff entrance of several of the larger picture houses requesting a screen test. Mostly, the picture house managers would say there weren’t any openings for picture starlets that week, but a few, noting Franny’s lush hair and bonny features, would tip her a wink and tell her to come back after the night’s performance and discuss matters over a drink.
Cheeky bleedin’ cusses, Daisy would say, I catch them taking anyliberties with my little sister, I’ll give ’em a clip round the ear so hardthey’ll be seeing stars all right.
Finally, after months of persistence, during which Franny fended off the managers of half the cinemas in East London, with varying degress of success, the manager of the Pavilion, Freddy Ruben, offered her a position as a junior usherette. This she accepted, though not in the best grace, on the assumption that, before the year was out, her true talents would be recognised and rewarded. When, after three months, then six, then nine, she was still sweeping peanut shells and cigarette butts off the floor, with no prospect of advancement, Franny Crommelin decided to change tack. If the world wouldn’t come to her, she would have to go out to the world. She began adding face powder and lipstick to her already rouged face and took to curling her hair with rags and irons. When Joe wasn’t looking, she would sit in the living room making alterations to her clothes, putting in tucks here and there to accentuate her curves. On her fifteenth birthday she came home sporting a fetching new hat, swearing she’d picked it up for pennies from Flitterman’s misfits, even though Daisy could see it had come from somewhere more expensive, like Selwyn’s. A few weeks later, a silver-plated filigree brooch appeared on the lapel of her coat, and not long after that, she returned home carrying a new pair of tan kid leather gloves. All of these things, she said, she’d bought from her wages, but Daisy had seen how Freddy Ruben had begun to watch her sister and she sensed trouble ahead.
Trouble there was too, but this time it was out on the streets of Poplar. On 2 May 1926, Joe arrived home from work with the news that a General Strike had been called for the next day.
The bosses had it coming,was all he’d say.
Daisy knew nothing about workers’ rights or trade unions. She was vaguely conscious of the fact that, from time to time, Lilly attended union meetings, but Daisy believed it was better not to make a fuss about anything if you didn’t have to. Her heart went out to men like Paddy Shaunessy, who’d given their legs for their country only to be abandoned by it, but to her way of thinking men like Paddy were precisely why more fortunate families such as the Crommelins, who really had nothing to complain about, were better off keeping their gripes to themselves. There was something unfair, even unseemly, complaining about working conditions or even about unemployment when there were so many people worse off than herself. Life wasn’t fair on anyone, but it had been a good deal fairer on those who still had the legs to march than it had on men like Paddy Shaunessy.
On the other hand, Daisy always obeyed her father, and Joe Crommelin was a union man. If there was a General Strike, Joe said, the Crommelins would stand alongside their fellow workers.
The following morning was the strangest since Daisy had come home to find her mother locked in the understairs cupboard with Mrs Anderson yelling at her. After Joe had left, Franny didn’t want to leave the house, but Daisy decided to venture out. It was as though a huge tide had broken during the night and taken away everything familiar. Instead of the usual morning bustle, there were no omnibuses, no wagons or delivery boys on bicycles on the streets, and what few men were making their way along the street in their work clothes kept their own company. Most of the shops along the Commercial and East India Dock Roads had been padlocked and some had even been boarded up, and the routes to the dock gates, which would usually at this time have been aflow with dockers in flat caps and serge suits with neckerchiefs for collars, were oddly empty, as though a strong wind had whistled through and blown them away. The factory gates were padlocked and, along her habitual route to the Apex Laundry, Daisy could no longer smell the rich tang of hops. As for the laundry itself, the door was barred and someone had pasted up a notice, around which a number of laundresses were clustered, gossiping in muted voices.
Daisy returned home past gaggles of men, grouped at the corners of the street, subdued-seeming and anxious. Some of the women had already taken out tea and pieces of bread and dripping to them. Every so often a boy would arrive with a message, which would spread between the groups of men, drifting finally into the houses, where the women passed it on among themselves.
In the afternoon, with Joe still absent, Daisy persuaded Franny to come out with her. The locked shops and barricaded frontages were obscured now behind a phalanx of men and women carrying placards and banners and shouting for jobs and justice. Volunteer policemen, many of them mounted, surrounded the marchers on all sides and the streets were as tense as barrel straps.
I don’t suppose no one much will be at the pictures today, Franny said, tossing her hair in a peevish gesture, as if all the shenanigans on the street had been done somehow deliberately to thwart her.
I don’t suppose, her sister said.
No point in turning up for me shift, then. I wouldn’t mind goingto the pictures myself, though, later. If hardly no one comes, they mightsell the posh seats for tuppence.
But there won’t be no one to buy the tickets off, Daisy pointed out, nor no one to show people to their seats if you ain’t there. Norno one even to project the picture.
Oh, said Franny, I hadn’t thought of that. A man in a suit walked by and Franny followed him with her eyes, adding in a distracted manner, Closing the docks is one thing, but say what you like, it don’tseem right, closing the pictures.
When they got home, Joe was sitting in his chair, smoking, and there was a smell of beer in the air.
Where you been? he said.
Round and about, said Franny. It wasn’t my idea.
Well, from now on you’re staying in. Ain’t no place for a gel outthere, all sorts going on, Joe said.
Daisy knew he meant a pretty girl. A girl like Daisy went largely unnoticed. He finished his cigarette then reached into his pocket and, pulling out the lining to find nothing hiding inside, he went to his jacket, which was hanging on a peg in the passageway, and, fishing out a coin, he turned to Daisy and said:
Fetch your old dad a half-ounce of tobaccer. Ain’t no one open butold Settle up the road at number seventeen, I seen him selling shag toa docker, so knock on his door. He knows me.
Later, after a tea of leftovers boiled into soup, Joe rolled Settle’s tobacco into newspaper and sat smoking and shaking his head.
I ain’t saying I’m for that Lansbury cove, nor for socialism neither,but I’ll tell you this for free; it ain’t right what’s happening and that’sthat.
The strike lasted nine days and the Baldwin government did everything they could to stop it. In the London docks they continued recruiting volunteer militia police, including some pretty disreputable men, and brought in two navy submarines into the Royals to act as generators for the refrigerated warehouses where 750,000 beef and lamb carcasses were going nowhere. On the fifth day, lorries driven by soldiers broke the picket line and on 12 May the Trades Union Congress admitted defeat and called the strike off. Though the action was a failure, it proved to be iron ore to Joe Crommelin’s moral compass. From that day in May 1926 on, he was almost always to be found at evening meetings of one kind or another: trade unions, workers’ education committees, strike committees, fringe meetings and hustings. Joe didn’t talk about these meetings much, though he often brought home pamphlets, which he kept in the locked drawer in the chest into which Elsie had once placed Daisy and Franny when they were babies. Every so often he would unlock the drawer and remove a pile of leaflets, but he never spoke about what became of the leaflets or of his meetings for that matter, and Daisy did not care to quiz him. It was enough for her that for the first time since before the war, Joe Crommelin seemed happy and, for short periods at least, to be able to forget Elsie’s absence. Unionism had given him a cause less painful, less puzzling and certainly less hopeless than his wife.
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