Читать книгу Hopping - Melanie McGrath - Страница 4

A few years ago I wrote a memoir of the lives of my grandparents, Jenny Fulcher and Leonard Page. In the telling of my grandparents’ story I wanted to capture the essence of two ordinary lives and to tell the story of the East End of London during an extraordinary period which saw it transform from what Jack London called the ‘abyss’– a hive of poverty and deprivation whose dimmed population toiled in sweatshops, factories and in the docks – to the less impoverished but more socially fragmented place it is today; a place associated not so much with economic deprivation (though there is still far too much of that) as with a hip art scene, vibrant Banglatown, Canary Wharf city slickers and, most recently, with the massive regeneration programme in disguise that is the 2012 Olympics.

Having told that story in Silvertown, the most obvious next step would have been to have continued my family story into the present day. To have done that, though, would have been to ignore completely one of the greatest of the East End’s many great traditions: hopping. Every summer throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of East Enders made the trip to the hop gardens of Kent to pick hops. My own family were among the minority who didn’t regularly go on these trips. My grandmother, Jenny Fulcher, regarded hopping as common and, as concerned as she was with respectability, avoided it. My mother went once or twice, but the hop never became part of her life.

But it was at the centre of the lives of many, if not most, East Enders; so much so, in fact, that the annual hop was referred to, not without irony, as ‘The Londoners’ holiday’. It would hardly count as one today – the hoppers, mostly women and children, worked long hours in sometimes difficult conditions – but the annual hop constituted a break from the smoke and grime of the East End and as such it became the nearest thing to a holiday that most would ever see. Mothers, in particular, looked forward to bringing their children down to the countryside for their health, and for many East End children the annual hop was their only opportunity to run about unhampered by roads and vehicles and noise, to breathe air uncontaminated by factory waste and smoke, to watch the sun go down and look out across wide open spaces to the horizon beyond. The money East End women earned by picking hops was usually the only part of the family income over which they had control, and it was often used to buy children the boots and coats they would need for the coming winter.

The tradition of employing Londoners to pick hops in Kent began in the mid-fifteenth century when Flemish weavers first began cultivating the bines in the Kentish weald, though it’s possible that cultivation itself began long before, since we know that the Romans, who marched into Britain through Kent along what is now the A2 Dover-to-Canterbury road, brought hops with them. The first recorded hop garden in Britain was thriving at Westbere near Canterbury in 1520, and hops were still growing on the same site more than 450 years later.

The hop plant, Humulus lupulus, a relative of cannabis, is a fast-growing herbaceous perennial which dies back to its rhizome in the winter. Although vine-like, it is strictly speaking a bine, the stout stems being covered with little hairs to assist in its clockwise clambering habit. Though hardy, it requires deep, well-draining loamy soil and shelter from the wind, and in the soft undulations of the Kentish downland, Flemish weavers found the perfect growing conditions. At that time, hopped beer was virtually unknown in Britain, but it had long been popular in central and northern continental Europe. All over medieval Europe, beer was a relatively safe substitute for water, which was often contaminated. In Britain, people tended to drink ale, a much heavier, sweeter drink, brewed without hops. Adding hops to beer not only imparts a grassy, bitter flavour and a spicy aroma, but the acids in the hop resin have a mild antibiotic effect which assists the work of the yeast and, along with the alcohol itself, helps preserve the beer for longer. Hopped beer can thus be brewed with a lower alcohol content than ale, which makes it a more practical substitute for water.

There were numerous early attempts to restrict hop production in Britain – Henry VIII forbade his own brewer to use such foreign fripperies and his Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, condemned the hopping of beer as a nasty Protestant habit. All the same, the popularity of hops grew with the practically minded British, and many growers also became brewers, planting hop gardens for use in their own breweries and building drying oasts, the word taken from Flemish. During the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, gardens were planted all over southern and central England, but the hops continued to flourish best in Kent, where there was a ready supply of sweet chestnuts with which to make poles to support the bines, the enclosed fields provided shelter, and the hops did not have far to travel to the vast breweries of London. So important did Kent become in hop production that in 1681 the London hop market moved from Little Eastcheap to Borough to be nearer to the main thoroughfare to Kent.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, troops of indigents, Gypsies and Irish and a few Londoners poured into Kent to pick the hop crop, staying on to pick the apples, pears and plums that also flourished in the ‘garden of England’, but the real inflow of Londoners began after the mid-seventeenth century, when Londoners took to drinking beer rather than the gin they had previously favoured, and Kentish farmers began to plant more hops to meet the demand. At first, only the poorest and the most desperate for work came, either walking the fifty or so miles from the East End of London to the Weald or, for the few who could afford the passage, travelling by boat as far as Gravesend and on foot from there to the gardens in north and east Kent. On the way, these new migrants slept in cart and cow sheds and in pigsties on mattresses of old hopbines, or, if there were none around, under hedges.

By the end of the seventeenth century Britons were consuming 300,000 hundredweight of hops every year, more than half of which were grown in Kent. A hundred and fifty years later 40,000 acres of Kentish loam were being put down to hop gardens, each acre requiring 200 pickers, numbers that could be met only by bringing Londoners down in their thousands.

As luck would have it, the hop boom coincided with the development of the railways. By the 1850s the Southeastern Railways company and the East Kent Company were putting on special hoppers’ trains in the season, using cattle trucks as carriages, and the Joint Transport Committee of Railways and Farmers began printing postcards that farmers could send to London hoppers, allocating them a picking spot and a place on one of the ‘hoppers’ specials’. By 1867, demand was so great that Kentish farmers started using hiring agents actively to recruit hoppers from the poorest districts in London: Poplar, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Bow, Stepney and parts of Hackney to the north of the river and Bermondsey and Southwark in the south.

Families began returning to the same farms every year, often giving up their jobs and homes in order to do so. Whole neighbourhoods came en bloc, and set up their London streets in the rows of hop huts. By 1878, 72,000 acres of Kent were laid to hops and 250,000 mostly women and children were making the three- or four-week trip into Kent every year to pick them. Of these, nearly half were Londoners. And so a social and cultural event unique to Britain was born.

As I was researching the ‘Londoner’s Holiday’ and thinking I would like to write about it, a letter arrived from a man who had read Silvertown and knew of my grandparents. For the purposes of this story, I am calling this man Richie Baker. A relative of Richie’s had worked in my grandparents’ greasy spoon for a while, and his aunt, who I’m calling Daisy Crommelin, counted my grandmother, Jenny Fulcher, among her friends. At some point in the 1970s, Daisy and my grandmother stopped seeing one another. Whether they disagreed over something or the friendship simply ran its course, I don’t know. Jenny Fulcher outlived Daisy Crommelin but I’m pretty sure Jenny did not go to Daisy’s funeral; the friendship clearly died some considerable time before Daisy herself.

From such seemingly tenuous connections, Richie and I established a regular correspondence, during which Richie began to reveal, bit by bit, his family story.

Daisy and her husband Harold Baker, Richie’s uncle, led ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Using Richie’s letters and doing some research of my own, I began to piece together the story of their relationship. For Daisy, the annual hop was a kind of Oz, the place where life meted out most of its magic. It is no exaggeration to say that, along with her family, hop picking was one of the central pillars of Daisy’s life. Harold had other pleasures, as we shall see, but he was no less of a family man. On the surface, the marriage between Daisy and Harold could be seen as a pact between two people driven together by common wounds and a shared sense of fragility, the feeling that they were never more than a beat away from disaster. The contrast between the delicacy of their position and the harshness of the conditions in which they lived was one of the habitual ironies of survival in the East End in the first part of the twentieth century. As I dug around further and came to understand them more deeply, though, I realised that pain and practicality alone could not explain the bond these two people shared.

Theirs was, I believe, a great love affair, not in the Hollywood style, an explosive melange of sentimentality and sex, but in a much more profound and, perhaps, old-fashioned way. Harold and Daisy lived by the same principles. To survive and flourish in a place and at a time that offered little other than fellow travellers and almost nothing by way of second chances, they understood that happiness in life was to be found by making the most of whatever small, bright joys might flit by. For Harold and Daisy, as for many couples, the joys were not always to be had from the same things, but they tolerated each other’s small claims on happiness and thereby created much for themselves. Theirs was a marriage of affectionate solidarity. Like all couples, they made compromises, but unlike many, they kept each other’s confidences. They proved their love through unshakeable loyalty.

The story here belongs first and foremost to Daisy and Harold. They are not here to give their consent to my telling their story but, knowing their lives are worth the telling, I have taken the liberty of doing so. To protect their posthumous privacy I have changed their names and many others of people in this story. Like many people living in straitened circumstances in the East End of the twentieth century, Harold and Daisy did not leave a written record of their lives. There are no diaries or extensive correspondence, few official letters or documents. Richie knew them, of course, and there were others who remembered them and the events of their lives, but no two people’s recollection of any event is ever identical. My correspondence with Richie and subsequent investigations are the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. Had I stuck strictly to the knowable and verifiable facts, the lives of Daisy and Harold, and many of the other people in this story, would not have been recorded on paper. To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story. The lives Daisy and Harold led were in some ways emblematic; they were lives that, in their broad sweep, could have been lived by any number of hundreds of thousands of East Enders born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Their struggles and triumphs were, if not the same, then similar enough to countless others to allow Daisy and Harold in some way to stand in for those who left no records and who may already have been forgotten.

Harold Baker and Daisy Crommelin were good, ordinary people. They were not celebrities or champions of anything, they achieved nothing of public note and left little behind when they died. Their lives were the most ordinary, least likely kind of lives to be put down on paper. That is why I have chosen to record them.