Читать книгу Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End - Charlie Connelly, Charlie Connelly - Страница 9

Nellie Greenwood was my great-grandmother and I never knew her. At least, I never knew her in the sense that she’d died before I was born. Such was her legacy, however, such the force of her personality and the mixture of affection and fear she’d instilled in those who grew up with and around her, that I’ve almost manufactured false memories of Nell of my own. So powerful was her character that photographs familiar from albums and mantelpieces move and talk in my mind.

Nell was ‘Gran’ to everyone, whatever their generation, the matriarch, the central node around whom all family business and life was conducted. A formidable working-class woman who’d forged a business from nothing, who’d worked hard all her life, asked for nothing and expected nothing, bore thirteen children of whom five didn’t survive to adulthood, while informally adopting at least one other, and who despite knowing hardship, frustration, tragedy and loss, and never being less than forthright, opinionated and frank, never lost the deep and innate kindness that underpinned her life.

It’s thanks to Nellie that Silvertown was, is, and will most likely continue to be, for another couple of generations at least, regarded as home by my mother’s family even though none of us has lived there for more than seventy-five years. Between the wars Nellie was the heart of the family and the heart of Constance Street, which in turn was the heart at the centre of Silvertown, a community in east London isolated between the docks and the river where Nellie and the rest of the Greenwoods allowed their roots to embed in the marshy earth. Silvertown is, as my grandmother would frequently remind me, an island – because of the docks you have to cross water to leave – and an island mentality developed there. A closeness of kin and a bond to a place that formed ties so tight it would take something spectacular to break them. The physical ties would indeed be broken in such a fashion, but the spiritual ones linger and show no sign of weakening any time soon. ‘You’ve got dock water in your veins, boy,’ my grandmother Rose would tell me, ‘and don’t you forget it.’

When I was young, the way my grandmother and great-aunts – the daughters of Nellie and Harry – would describe Silvertown made it seem like a magical place. Even the name made it sound wondrous, the stuff of fairy tales, and the way these old cockney ladies, quick to laugh and masterly storytellers all, would talk about Silvertown did nothing to disabuse me of the notion that it sat on clouds with the sun glinting off a forest of golden turrets.

My first sense that Silvertown was actually somewhere real came one Saturday when I was about 10 years old. My mother had been out all day and arrived home as darkness was falling. She had, she announced, just been to Silvertown. She’d taken Nan and a couple of my great-aunts across the water to revisit a few old haunts and, what’s more, hadn’t come back empty-handed. She placed a lump of rock on the table in front of me on top of the copy of Roy of the Rovers I was reading.

St Mark’s Church, where my mother’s family had been christened, married and eulogised for generations, had been deconsecrated and was derelict when they got there, the victim of first a serious fire and then vandals. Our posse of nostalgics had snuck in through a side door and found the place in dusty chaos. The pews, on which successive generations of Greenwoods and myriad Silvertonians had sat for reasons both joyful and tragic, were either gone altogether or reduced to a jumble of splintered planks. The vandals had enjoyed themselves immensely, not least when taking a sledgehammer to the font and reducing it to a mound of shapeless lumps on the floor. One of these lumps now sat in front of me on the dining table, retrieved by my mother who had been the last of the Greenwood babies to be christened in it. I ran my fingers over it: there was a beautiful shiny white side, blemished gently by a web of cracks so thin it was as if they’d been drawn on faintly in pencil. It was slightly curved with a champhered edge, all perfectly smooth to the touch. It was beautiful even out of its context and destroyed. The rest of this piece of pilfered font rubble, the sides visible where it had been broken away from the curved symmetry and craftsmanship of the whole, was rough and ugly, the raw material beneath the carefully constructed exterior, the bits you weren’t supposed to see. In this piece of font was Silvertown, all right.

It’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve come to question or even explore the received wisdom that Silvertown was this Greenwood utopia, a lost land of green and plenty. A cursory delve into the history of the place reveals that Silvertown was far from bucolic; it was mercilessly, relentlessly, unpleasantly industrial and life there was hard. Constance Street was topped by the docks at its north end and tailed by heavy industry at its south: the sugar refinery, the chemical works, the rubber factory, the paint factory. Silvertown was noisy, dirty and dangerous. It had grown rapidly from empty marshland into the largest industrial manufacturing area in the south of England in a process that took barely forty years while the kinds of amenities we take for granted struggled to keep up, as did the law. Indeed, it flourished partly because it was outside the boundaries covered by the Metropolitan Buildings Act of 1844, which banned ‘noxious trades’ from London.

Yet that street, that one beloved street, seemed immune to the reality. Constance Street was a sliver of heaven, of pride, of scrubbed doorsteps and starched aprons, of kids playing, welcoming shops and the pub on the corner. Like the name Silvertown, Constance Street has a certain air to it: Constance sounds like the feisty younger sister from a Regency novel or the prim but kindly governess in a Victorian serial: there’s a propriety about the name Constance. Yet this was an artery between dock and industry, a typical street at the heart of one of the poorest areas London ever saw, and that really is saying something.

As I grew older and the pew of Greenwood sisters grew shorter with each funeral, we youngsters loosened the bonds as our lives began to look further outwards and our horizons widened. The modern world, in which industry and community were forced to beat a relentless retreat, meant large family gatherings became a thing of the past, yet I began to think more and more about Silvertown. As my grandmother and her sisters died I regretted not finding out more, not preserving their stories. Why had they spoken so fondly of the place? What was so special about Silvertown, and Constance Street in particular? How accurate were their memories of days where the sun always seemed to shine and every story seemed to end with screeches of helpless, eye-dabbing laughter?

My great-aunt Joan is the last of the aunts, the youngest of Harry and Nellie’s daughters, 91 years old now, widowed, sprightly, sharp as a needle and still the best and funniest storyteller I’ve ever heard. I was at her home on the Kent coast a couple of years ago and the conversation inevitably turned to Silvertown and Constance Street. ‘’Ang on, boy,’ she said at one point. ‘Joan’s got something to show you.’

She rummaged in a draw for a moment, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.

‘Constance Street,’ she said. ‘At least as Joan remembers it.’

On the sheet in front of me was a crudely drawn row of buildings, each numbered, each inscribed in unmistakable old lady’s shaky handwriting with a name, a street number and, where appropriate, the nature of their business. It was a plan of Constance Street as it had been in the 1930s.

Railway Hotel Cundy pub, said the first in line, the pub at the end of Constance Street that, despite being named for the station opposite, was always known as Cundy’s after the landlord at the turn of the twentieth century right up to the building’s recent demolition. All the shops were there, the butcher, the grocer, hardware shop, fish and chip shop, right up to the dairy at the far end of the street. And there, in the middle of the row, ‘Greenwood laundry’.

Joan had been barely 17 years old when the Greenwoods left Silvertown for ever, yet here, three-quarters of a century on, was as vivid a manifestation of a lost community as you could wish for.

Joan’s diagram stayed with me and I began to project the half-remembered stories of my grandmother and the aunts onto it, trying to work out what it might be that makes Silvertown my spiritual home even though I was born miles away, three decades after we left, and why all of us, Connellys, Millers, Whites, Burkes, Gileses, Hickfords, Busseys, Mitchells and the rest – why all of us are, and will always remain, Greenwoods of Silvertown.

I often think of my grandmother’s instruction never to forget the dock water coursing through my veins. I will never forget it, but to find out why this specific briny fluid flows in my arteries and understand why my roots are so firmly embedded in Silvertown I needed to use Joan’s diagram as a key to unlock the story of the Greenwoods and take myself back to the very origins of Silvertown itself.