by Beezy Marsh
Someone hooted with a laughter at that. Rose was scowling and gave Joan a look that could curdle milk.
Joan leaned forward, so that I could smell her rancid breath: ‘Personally speaking I would never have turned you over to the cozzers. You’re just too lovely, ain’t you?’ Her hand crept around my waist and gave me a little squeeze. ‘Up close, Nell, you’re ever so pretty. It don’t matter to me that your soiled goods and a fella got there before me.’
The Governor’s cat came around and rubbed itself against her leg, purring.
‘I’m here for you, sweetness, any time you like; you come to Joanie and I’ll look after you,’ she said.
‘Pipe down and get back to work!’ the warder shouted, trying to impose some order on the women, who were cackling with laughter. It was clear to me who ruled the roost in the laundry, and it wasn’t the screws.
‘Oh, alright, keep your hair on,’ muttered Joan, ‘I was just being friendly, that’s all.’
She returned the iron to the pagoda stove in the corner, to get it hot enough to press the sheets again. ‘We’ve had our fun, haven’t we girls?’
For me, the nightmare was just beginning.
My stomach was growling with hunger as we traipsed back up the stairs in twos, to go to the mess hall for supper.
A dollop of stew with a few lumps of gristle in it and some semolina that you could have plastered a wall with were slopped into metal bowls for us to eat in silence while the screws patrolled the long benches where we sat. I was so hungry, I scoffed the lot even though it looked and smelled like pig swill and I nearly broke my tooth on a lump of stale bread.
After that, it was up the spiral staircase to our cells on B block. I’d heard stories about women having to sleep on bare boards which had to be put up during the day, so I was grateful to find an iron framed bed with a thin mattress and a pillow like a lump of rock. The sheets were stiff with starch and a scratchy nightgown had been laid out. The cell was no more than six feet by ten, barely room to swing the Governor’s cat, and there was a single shelf, and a washstand and a chamber pot under it. The thought of slopping out in the morning was gut churning so even though I wanted to go, I bottled it.
The sounds of the prison settling down for the night filled the air. Metal doors slamming, keys being turned in locks and, in the cell below, someone weeping. A hatch on the door was thrust open and a tin mug of cocoa was passed through to me.
I sipped at it, feeling it warming me, as I shivered under the thin blanket.
As I lay there, looking up at the moon which was just visible through the bars on the window, I had only one thought: getting even with Alice Diamond for putting me inside.
I pulled out my hairclip and began to scratch a little notch on the wall, imagining that I was cutting a deep gouge into Alice Diamond’s broad, smiling face.
I’d be suffering for the next six months, but she’d be paying the price for a very long time if I had anything to do with it.
Chapter Ten
ALICE
Waterloo, London, June 1946
I don’t know what the world is coming to since this blooming war and the young folk are the worst of it, if you ask me. The girls have no respect for authority like they used to.
‘No respect at all,’ said Molly, as I grabbed the factory girl by the hair and dragged her to the rickety wooden chair in the scullery. Molly had already told her friend to take a seat, in a manner of speaking. We’d met them at the factory gates down in Waterloo and walked them home for a nice little chat about what they’d been up to.
It was amazing how helpful the neighbours were, making themselves scarce as we turned the corner into their street. Children were pulled indoors, and men hastily beat a retreat to the pub. The cobbled street was quiet as the grave while we went about our business.
‘I hear you’ve been quite busy at the cloth factory, Peggy,’ I said.
‘There ain’t a law against it,’ she said, bristling with anger at the way she’d been frogmarched down the road. She was putting a brave face on it, but her hands were shaking.
‘We just wanted to try to help our families,’ her mate piped up.
I gave her a slap for her trouble.
‘Nobody asked you,’ I said, smiling sweetly at her, as tears sprang to her eyes. ‘I want to hear it from Peggy here.’
I put my face right next to Peggy’s so that I could see the smoothness of her skin: ‘What made you think you’d wrap yourself up like Tutankhamun’s sisters under your clothes in your lunch break and waddle out of that factory and fence your ill-gotten gains without me finding out?’
‘It weren’t done deliberately, to cut you out,’ said Peggy, in a small voice, staring at the table. ‘We just thought you’d be too busy in the shops to notice or care.’
Well, that was like a red rag to a bull.
‘You thought I wouldn’t care!’ I said. ‘Oh, that breaks my heart that does.’
I knew then, I’d have to up my game to keep control of things and there was only one person I could turn to in my hour of need: Mrs Tibbs.
I’d put her into retirement after Britain declared war on Germany because it seemed a bit unpatriotic to use her against our own when we were fighting the Nazis but now, well, I really had no choice.
The girls had brought it on themselves.
I pulled her out of my pocket and the pair of them started to weep, like babies. ‘Shhh,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself by getting her angry, she don’t like a fuss.’
Quick as a flash, Molly grabbed Peggy’s face to hold her steady. Mrs Tibbs is cold and hard but she’s razor sharp, if you catch my drift. She just gave her a small stripe to be getting on with, but scars are so much more difficult to cover up when face powder is rationed, aren’t they?
We let her friend go. She ran screaming from the house, which is good for business, really.
It was all over very quickly.
Peggy clutched her hand to her face, and I threw her a tea-towel to stem the flow of blood; I’m not all together heartless, you see.
Crimson seeped through the white cloth, like the petals of the reddest rose in bloom. I always find it fascinating to watch how blood does that. It really is a beautiful sight. I gazed at it for a moment and when I’d seen enough, I turned to go.
‘I’ll be seeing you around,’ I said, tucking Mrs Tibbs away in my pocket. ‘And if you get any bright money-making ideas, remember to come and find me.
‘Or I’ll find you. And so will Mrs Tibbs.’
Apparently, you don’t feel the pain of it at first, just the shock. Mrs Tibbs is fast, drawing down over the flesh. Fellas like to take their time, draw it out and maybe to do a couple of stripes when they do a chivving, cos it makes it harder for the doctors to sew two flaps of skin together when you’re cut like that. Some jokers do it on the bum, so that a man can’t sit down without splitting his stitches, but I never saw the funny side of that. It’s just toilet humour, typical blokes. Mrs Tibbs prefers it neat, quick and to make her point. We women don’t need to overstate matters with a six-inch cut when a nice, deep three-inch one will do.
I’m told that the pain comes later, when you’re in the hospital, trying to eat or to talk. And then there’s all the worry about what a mess your face will look; those kind of concerns really get to a woman more than a flesh wound, don’t they? Not that I’ve ever been one to trade on my appearance. Oh, I know I can still turn heads, but you should have seen me when I was younger.
I was known for my good looks and my beautiful curls around the Seven Dials, where I grew up. People say that part of Covent Garden is a thieves’ kitchen, a real slum. Any Londoner worth their salt will tell you it’s famous for the seven dark passageways leading to some of the poorest tenements in the city; places where most folk are afraid to tread. The houses we lived in had been thrown together on the cheap in Queen Victoria’s day, so that the damp rose, and the bugs crept into the cracks between the peeling plaster and the dan
k wallpaper, adding to the misery of every poor sod who had to live there.
Don’t let anyone tell you about the good old days in the Seven Dials because they are lying through their teeth. I’d bet you a tenner they’d never even set foot in the place if they can find a decent word to say about it. It was a pit of utter despair, never mind Roll Out The Barrel, and raise a glass to London town.
There were three floors in those buildings and maybe one lavvy between all the families who crammed into two rooms a piece, with water from the stand-pipe in the yard.
The fellas round there said they were costermongers, bricklayer’s assistants and cabbies but I mostly saw them leaning on lampposts or falling down drunk. Women went out charring if they could find someone to mind their babies and there were bloody loads of them, crawling in the gutter, being bounced on a neighbour’s hip or careering down the lane in an old orange crate on wheels pushed by some little tyke who was supposed to be in school.
Women dragged themselves to and from the communal laundry or the market during the day with the weight of the world on their shoulders. The only time I truly saw them come alive was on a Friday night when they dished out a tongue-lashing to their husbands because they’d punched a hole in the week’s housekeeping with one pint too many down the boozer.
That would see her pawning her clothes on Monday morning and putting on a sack until the next payday. The anger of how they were living, how they were forced to live, seemed to energise the women on my street and even now I can feel the crackle in the air that used to come before a really good domestic.
We were poor but at least I had shoes, unlike some of the kids. Perhaps because we had nothing to steal from each other there weren’t any point in locking our doors. That’s where I began my life as a thief but I’m getting ahead of myself because before I became a hoister, I had a different partner in crime. I’ll let you into a little secret. This one was closer to home, my brother, Lim.
It’s short for William, but I named him that when I was a baby and he was looking after me. So, he was Lim and that was that. Lim, with his big, dark eyes and serious face, always trying to work an angle on something, even if it was just to find a way to break me of out my cot when my dad put a lid on it to keep me in there. Even as a toddler I was feisty, and I didn’t want to be behind bars. God, I loved the very bones of my brother Lim and he thought I walked on water.
He was the eldest by two years and it was his job to look after me while my dad went out to work, burgling houses up Mayfair and Mum was charring in Belgravia. I’d play with Lim for hours. He’d sit twirling his fingers around my curls, singing me the songs he’d picked up from the hawkers. Some of the language he taught me was a bit ripe for a little ’un but I had a fine pair of lungs on me, and people would toss us a ha’penny for my efforts if we hung around the theatres, which was the start of our partnership.
Sometimes our dad would come home drunk and knock seven bells out of Mum but she was always popping out babies, like shelling peas, and before we knew it, we had a houseful. Lim and me would save our coins and buy buns as a treat from the bakery round the corner. We’d sit down on the step and plot how we were going to make our fortune together, be rich like the toffs and stroll arm-in-arm down Pall Mall or ride about in a fancy carriage on Rotten Row on Sundays. Then the Great War came, and Dad got conscripted and that was when the trouble really started.
Suddenly I had a load of uncles visiting that I never even knew existed, turning up at all hours of the day and night. Such a large extended family, don’t you know? Mum was forever shooing us out in the street with the babies, even when it was dark and cold. Next thing we knew, the Poor Law was banging on the door and Mum had to put the little ones in the workhouse because she couldn’t feed them, that’s what they said, and so she had them adopted. There were raised voices in the scullery and more than one of the do-gooders from the Poor Law said something about her being an ‘unfit mother’ which made her weep. Well, maybe she was unfit, but she was our mother.
Whatever they said, whatever she had done, she spent all her days crying for the children, especially the baby, and when she weren’t crying she was spending whatever money she could lay her hands on drinking and still I had more uncles visiting than most people had hot dinners. Lim spat at one once and got a thick ear for his trouble.
We went out to work thieving from fruit and vegetable stalls up in Covent Garden just to make ends meet and I ain’t ashamed to say I picked a pocket or two outside the theatres. Lim would do card tricks, he loved magic and was lightning fast with his fingers and while the punters watched him, I’d sneak around and see what I could dip. I know it’s the lowest of the low in terms of thieving, but I was just a girl, so I didn’t know any better. Besides, Mum was pleased when we brought a few bob home, praising us and thanking God to have such lucky kids.
We could have carried on like that but then the bad news came and that changed everything.
We’d never had a telegram sent to the house before and I was excited when I answered the door to see the postman standing there. The only other letter we’d had was an eviction notice, if memory serves, but the look on Mum’s face said it all. She sank to her knees before she’d even opened it. It said ‘War Office’ on the back of the envelope.
I read the words: ‘I regret to inform you…’ and then she snatched it away and threw it on the fire, wailing like a Banshee. Dad spent his life as a thief, but he died a hero fighting the Hun, not that it did us any good. There were times she couldn’t stand the sight of him but losing him like that, it broke her heart. I don’t think she got out of bed for a week and when she came to, she went down the pub at opening time and downed the gin until she rolled home or ended up in the gutter. That went on for weeks, then weeks became months and still the rent man needed paying.
Lim wouldn’t talk to anyone but me and he spent most of his time in the scullery, practicing his card tricks, over and over, his brow furrowed in concentration. He scowled at every bloke who set foot over the threshold but that only made things worse because they’d ruffle his hair or tweak his nose to try to make him speak. He had a way of looking at them, with eyes as black as the ace of spades, which left them lost for words. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it but there was something in Lim’s face that was pure evil when he was crossed and it brought a chill to the air and made men look away and leave him be.
We could have rubbed along like that: me and Lim hatching our plans to get rich and filching what we could, Mum drinking and opening her legs every time the pub landlord opened his doors but one day she got caught up in a fight about a loaf of bread the grocer said she’d nicked. In the fray that followed, she knocked a policeman’s hat off. Well, that caused quite a commotion. The next thing, she’d pulled out Dad’s old flick knife and stabbed him with it, right in the arm.
By the time the news reached the Dials we heard she’d cut his throat from ear to ear and the whole neighbourhood charged around there to see what was happening. People loved a good fight, especially if it involved the law and my mother did not disappoint. She was like a wild animal, howling, scratching and biting and there was blood all over the cobbles and the policeman was nursing a nasty cut on his forearm.
It took four cozzers to hold her down on a barrow and wheel her off to the police station. Men stood around cheering her on, admiring her strength, yelling: ‘Go on, Mary, give ’em hell!’
They locked her up in an asylum. She weren’t mad, the shock of losing me Dad is what done it, but I never saw her again.
After that, it was me and Lim against the world, nicking bits of fruit from the barrows up in the market, doing dances outside the theatres to earn our keep but it was never going to be enough. I was fourteen when the war ended and we were on our uppers and things were looking bad, but Lim had a plan. We were running out of options, the cozzers knew my face too well and I had a few close shaves with posh ladies saying I’d stolen from their handbags.
&nb
sp; ‘Don’t worry,’ said Lim, as we sat by the grate warming our toes on the last of our chairs that we’d chopped up for firewood, ‘there’s something else you’ve got that’s worth more than pennies from people’s purses, Alice.’
That’s what he said.
And like a fool, I trusted him.
Chapter Eleven
NELL
Holloway, London, November 1946
‘Christ, it’s freezing!’
I poked my nose out from under the blanket in the hospital wing and prayed that Ma Doherty hadn’t heard me take the Lord’s name in vain.
She was a Catholic and quite serious about all that religious stuff and though it weren’t my cup of tea, I didn’t want to upset her because she was nicer than the screws and gave me extra cocoa at bedtime.
She was busy shaking the other girls awake.
‘Come on, you’ve no business to be lounging in bed. Get up! It’s six thirty! You’ll have the Governor after you!’
Any transgressions meant extra chores, and nobody wanted that, not in this weather. Our hands were already cracked and blistered from the carbolic soap and the cold.
I gingerly placed a toe down on the linoleum floor and steeled myself to go over to the washbasins. There was ice on the inside of the windows and the water for the morning wash was brought up in jugs the night before. That had iced over as well these last few days, but we were still expected to strip off and get clean before breakfast.
I shuffled my slippers on. I hadn’t seen my feet since the weather turned the month before and now I was only a few days away from giving birth. The hour’s exercise we had in the prison yard every day, walking round and round in single file, was more like a trek to the North Pole, but I did it anyway just to feel the wind on my face, and remind myself that there was life beyond the prison walls.
One by one, a row of bodies sat up, groaning and heaving their huge pregnant bellies before them. We were a mass of swollen ankles and heavy legs and the piles, oh my God, no one warned me about that! If someone had, I might have kept my knickers on. It would have been better contraception than a French letter.
