Читать книгу Silvertown: An East End family memoir - Melanie McGrath - Страница 11

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 Crème and Mr Toffee and all the other inhabitants of Mrs Selina Folkman’s.