by Maggie Ford
A Brighter Tomorrow
Cover
Title Page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
About the Author
Also by Maggie Ford
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
One
The narrow width of Gales Gardens captured and held the reek of cooking, stale cabbage and urine. Men leaving the Salmon & Ball pub close by often used this ill-lit street as a convenient alley in which to relieve themselves of the pints they’d drank. Some women, too, standing astride the grated drain out of the light of Bethnal Green Road to drag aside a bloomer leg, their errand hidden by a long skirt, trying to appear as if they’d merely paused for thought.
Ellie Jay, christened Alice Elizabeth but called Ellie, stood at her front door that opened directly from the single living room on to the cracked pavement and peered through the darkness towards the more brightly lit main thoroughfare. Her neighbour next door, Mrs Sharp, had gone for the doctor it seemed ages ago, but he was taking his time. No rush over a dead body.
There was singing coming from the Salmon & Ball, quickly drowned out by the rumble of a train passing over the railway bridge spanning the main road, its smoke drifting lazily through the curve of Gales Gardens to add another layer of sooty smuts to already blackened brickwork and the peeling paint of window sills.
A figure entering the street made her straighten up in anticipation, but it was just someone slipping into the shadows on a call of nature, his frame positioning itself for a second to face a wall. But seeing the light from her doorway he hastily adjusted his dress and hurried off.
Ellie pulled her short jacket closer about her against the cold, early-March evening. If the doctor didn’t come soon she would have to go back indoors and start on the job herself, washing and laying out the body before the limbs set rigid. She’d seen it done, but this would be the first time she had ever done it herself. So far she had put the pennies on the eyelids to keep them closed and fastened a piece of cloth about the chin and forehead to prevent the mouth falling open; but the thought of stripping and washing the body made her cringe. Her mother had been a decent woman all her life, would never have dreamed of allowing anyone to see her naked, not even her husband, and would have been appalled at her own daughter looking upon her private parts in death. Mrs Sharp next door might have done it, being around Mum’s age – forty; but she had no intention of letting a neighbour stare at her mother’s nakedness, even with the best of intentions. If only the doctor would arrive.
She glanced down as the hand in hers tightened fractionally. She’d forgotten her thirteen-year-old sister standing beside her. Dora was three and a bit years younger than her, equally slender, dark-haired and green-eyed. Tears were glistening in those eyes and her voice was small.
‘Do yer think Mum’s orright on ’er own in there?’
Ellie wanted to retort that Mum had no cause any more to care if she was on her own. Instead she gripped the girl’s hand a little tighter. ‘Ain’t a lot we can do till the doctor arrives.’
As if in reply to her remark, another figure turned into the street, this time his silhouette against the gaslight of the main road showing him to be carrying a sturdy doctor’s bag. Ellie let go her sister’s hand and hurried the few yards to meet him.
‘I’m so glad yer’ve come,’ she burst out. ‘I’ve been waiting.’
‘Yes, well, I’ve been busy with patients.’ By his tone he might as well have said he’d been busy with the living. ‘Where is your mother?’ he asked brusquely.
‘In the bedroom upstairs,’ Ellie returned. Where else would she be?
He’d been told how ill she was and must have known that someone with pneumonia would be at death’s door. But, with no money to pay for a doctor’s visit, she’d been palmed off with a bottle of cough mixture for the few pence she had and advised to keep her mother as warm as possible while the illness ran its course. That was the lot of most people living in areas like this if they had no money. At least she hoped there’d be no charge to officially declare Mrs Jay deceased and write out the death certificate.
With Dora standing forlorn by the street door they went on inside the empty house. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked. ‘Where is your family, your father?’
‘Gone,’ Ellie replied tersely. ‘He ain’t coming back, neither. Nor is me brother. I don’t know where they are so as to tell ’em me mum died.’
Saying no more she led the way upstairs to the larger of the two tiny bedrooms, leaving Dora downstairs on her own. At the doctor’s enquiry a surge of bitter hate had raced through her against her father, walking out of the house two days earlier, leaving just her and Dora to cope with a sick woman. Her brother she could understand, after the fight, but her dad…
‘I ain’t sticking around ter catch ’er cold,’ he’d declared. ‘She’s been moaning on about ’er ill ’ealth ever since I married ’er. I’m off to enjoy me own life, nor will I be coming back. I’ve ’ad enough of ’er always being ill.’
It wasn’t true. Her mother hadn’t always been ill – only these last two or three years, worn down by childbearing, only three now living, having had three miscarriages, one stillborn, three dying in infancy; that and working herself to a standstill to keep her family in food while he did nothing other than a few underhanded dealings – money he’d spend on himself, mostly.
Mum did outdoor work for a local hatbox manufacturer, bringing home the thin cardboard to make the fine boxes in which silk top hats were sold. On a good week she’d do three gross if work was there, half a crown a gross, though it took Ellie’s help to achieve that. Repetitive, long hours sewing the bases to the sides and the same with the lids, Ellie pasting the white glazed paper to the finished article, stopping only for a midday meal and supper, Mum often working on into the night if she was behind with the work; and sometimes her fingers would be red raw from constant stitching. From what she earned she had to buy the paste, needles and thread herself, but she’d always try to put a little aside from what she earned, hidden away in case Dad found it. He’d never shown any appreciation of her hard work, and now his only thanks had been to up and leave her.
The real truth was that he liked not only his drink but his women too. Even at fifteen Ellie knew it. In his mid-forties, darkly handsome and always making sure of being well dressed while his family could go in rags for all he cared, on one occasion he’d brought home a fancy woman, taunting Mum and calling her an ugly, tiresome old bitch. Mum had cried.
True she was rake-thin, life’s ravages plain on her face, but a framed, sepia photo of her showed her to have been extremely pretty when young, as Ellie was now, and Dora too. It was probably why Dad, with an eye for a pretty woman, had married her, but he’d never made her married life happy.
She should have left him, but where would she have gone? Despite it being the turn of the century, with people talking about it being a new world, there was nowhere for a married woman except at her husband’s side, whether he was
a good one or a thoroughly bad one; and James Jay, to Ellie’s mind, was a thoroughly bad one with no scruples whatsoever where drink and women were concerned.
A couple of months ago he’d even turned his attention on her, his own daughter, reaching out to touch her young breast and remarking that she was growing into a beautiful girl. ‘Like yer muvver was but she ain’t no more. Always ill, no comfort to a man’s needs.’
At first she hadn’t understood, but as his hands began to grow bolder over the weeks, she soon had, dreading him coming near her and wondering how long before Dora took his eye.
Not long ago, her older brother Charlie had come home unexpectedly, catching his father with his hand up his older daughter’s skirt as he sat next to her on the sofa, thinking himself safe, with her mother out shopping, Dora at school and she too scared to stop him lest he hit her. He was good at hitting people. He had belted Mum before now. Dora had felt the weight of his hand many a time. So had Ellie. Only Charlie was never attacked, being nineteen, taller and quite beefy.
Had he not walked in then, with Dad fondling her, before taking her upstairs, which he’d done on two former occasions – that first time slapping her face for trying to resist when she’d cried with shock and pain – she’d have been taken upstairs yet again.
Charlie had let out an enormous yell of horrified fury and sprung at him, dragging him up by his shirt front. There had been bouts of fighting in this house before, with furniture knocked around, even broken, but this time his fist had caught his father full in the face, sending him flat on his back, blood pouring from his nose. Charlie had stood back saying he’d had enough of this bloody family. He was leaving. He’d not been seen since.
Now her father had deserted them. Ellie couldn’t blame her brother. Mum hadn’t been ill then; but her father had left a desperately sick woman. For that she hated him with all her heart and soul, and as she sat in the room downstairs with Dora waiting for the doctor to finish his examination upstairs, she vowed that one day she would seek out her father and find a way of avenging his desertion of her mum.
The doctor was making his way down the steep, narrow stairs, the bare treads creaking under his rotund weight.
‘Ah, there you are, my dears,’ he announced as he came into the room. ‘Your mother needs to be washed and decently laid out. I’ll arrange for a woman to attend to it straight away. She lives nearby, so you’ll not be too long on your own.’
Dora said nothing but merely sat staring bleakly into the low fire.
He turned to Ellie. ‘Would you boil a kettle of water while you are waiting, young lady?’
As she nodded dismally, he came to lay a hand on her thin shoulder. Cringing slightly, she looked sharply up at him, but the eyes half-hidden by podgy cheeks held sympathy, not lust.
As he surveyed this slip of a girl in her faded dress and pinny, Doctor Lowe felt only pity as he surveyed the wan but pretty face framed by its mass of uncombed, dark-auburn hair. In the sickly light of the room’s single gas lamp the eyes glistened clear and green with unshed tears. No doubt tears would eventually come as the enormity of her and her sister’s plight finally took hold.
‘Good girl,’ he said quietly, moving his hand away, suddenly and inexplicably embarrassed by the way she had shrunk ever so slightly from his touch. ‘If I can be of any help…’
He broke off as she shot him a strange look and gave a small, self-conscious cough. ‘Perhaps you will kindly show me out, child.’
The door was closed on him immediately he stepped into the street. He turned and stared for a moment at the now closed door, then up and down the street, narrow as an alley.
Gales Gardens – what a name to give a place like this.
Gales Alley would have been more appropriate, so why such a grand name for such a miserable street? A leftover from brighter times, maybe, when Bethnal Green had been country, before London had expanded to swallow it up. He had a vision of a curving little road lined by cottages with gardens; hence the name that had stuck.
Hardly wide enough to drive a brewer’s dray through, the pavements sunken and broken, little more than a foot wide, the street was curved so that from the far end the main road wasn’t visible at all and, at this time of night, dim with a single gas lamp to pierce its entire length. The two girls he had just left had probably known no other home. And now they were alone. Two girls, one still a child, the other barely a woman, to be flung out into the world, virtually orphaned, their mother dead, their father gone God knew where, probably with little or no concern for their fate. How would they manage? He recalled the feeling that had gone through him as he’d said, ‘If I can be of any help…’
Quickly he put the feeling behind him and, turning, hurried away.
* * *
The woman was there inside five minutes, just as Doctor Lowe had promised. Ellie had been sitting beside her sister on the old sofa, clutching her hand. Both sat in silence, Ellie staring into the low flame flickering in the grate beneath the kettle she had placed on a trivet over the coals.
She started violently at the dull rat-tat on the front door. Letting go of Dora’s hand, she hurried to answer it. The woman in a black, shabby coat over a black blouse and skirt held a stained carpetbag. She was quite elderly and had the look of someone who had laid out an army of dead in her time.
‘’Ello, love. I’m the person what the doctor sent to come ’ere. Orright if I come in?’
Without a word, Ellie opened the door wider and the woman stepped inside.
‘Me name’s Daniels. If you’ll just show me where yer mother’s lying…’
Ellie found her voice. ‘Upstairs in the front bedroom.’
‘Fine,’ the woman said and gave her a cheery, gap-toothed smile. ‘No need for you ter come up. I can deal with things. Just give me a basin with some ’ot water. I’ll let yer know when I’m done.’
Leaving the woman to her task, Ellie rejoined her sister, who hadn’t moved an inch. Taking Dora’s hand again, she listened to the movements and faint creaking of the floorboards above her.
After what seemed ages the woman came down and Ellie heard her go into the scullery to empty the basin.
‘I’ve done up there,’ she said cheerily as she peeped into the room, bringing Ellie to her feet. ‘I’ll be on me way now. I expect you’ll sort out yer funeral arrangements tomorrer. Doctor Lowe said you two was all on yer own, so if yer want any ’elp, he said ter just let ’im know. Orright then, love?’
She was hovering, looking a little hesitant, and Ellie realized she was waiting for some payment for her trouble. Ellie’s mind flew to the few precious shillings left in the house, all the more precious with Mum never again to bring any in. She pushed aside the catch of grief in her throat for her mother in order to think practically. Was there enough money to pay this woman?
‘How much do I give yer?’ she asked.
Mrs Daniels glanced around at the threadbare rug in front of the low fire, worn furniture, stained and faded wallpaper. ‘A shilling’ll do, love. From some I do ask more, but in your case, you two being on yer own, a shilling if yer can spare it. I wouldn’t ask, but I do ’ave ter live. Yer do understand?’
Ellie lifted her chin in a gesture of dignity. ‘Yes, of course.’
Going to the old sideboard she bent down and withdrew a flat tin from underneath it. It held part of next week’s rent, but fishing out the coin she handed it over.
She saw the fingers close about it and knew the feeling. Every penny mattered in this neighbourhood and now she was shorter of the rent by a shilling. She should have swallowed her stupid sensitivity and let Mrs Sharp next door see to her mother instead. A couple of pennies for a glass of beer for her help would have done. Now, instead of indulging herself in her grief for her mother, she’d have to face reality and set to bringing in the rent making the hatboxes on her own.
Dora would have to help. She’d teach her, as Mum had taught her. But even between them they’d never do the number Mum had.
Of course there’d be no men to look after. Charlie hadn’t paid his way either, like his dad, lurching from one casual job to another, in his case betting away what he earned. All this, of course, was if Mum’s employer thought fit to keep her on now her mum was gone. It could even be that he would dispense with her services with hardly a stab of guilt in his heart for her plight.
It was a thought, pushing away the grief in her. With no money for the rent she could be evicted. In fact she would be evicted. Landlords had no hearts either. Then where would she go?
Another month before she was sixteen, Dora not fourteen until the summer. They’d be classed as orphaned or abandoned children, homeless, to be taken by the authorities into one of the dozens of orphanages around East London or into that place in Bethnal Green Road that called itself the Home of Industry. Cheap labour more like. Boys taught a trade, it was said – blacksmithing and such; but more to become labourers, meantime working their little guts out for their keep. Girls went into the laundry, surrounded by steam, watched over by some soulless charge woman. They’d end up as kitchen skivvies in some better-class homes or in some sweatshop, sewing gowns for the wealthy for a few pence.
In her bitter frame of mind this was how she saw it. Other than that it meant sleeping where they could, going hungry, or worse. Two pretty girls could be picked up by the unscrupulous and sold into slavery. It happened.
Ellie tightened her lips and, with Dora having crept into their bed, she went to her mother’s room to allow Dora a moment alone to give way to her loss. She stood for a while in the doorway, gazing at the covers under which her mother’s body lay, still and silent, the sheet pulled up over the head.
Somehow it all seemed unreal. The whole room felt cold, dead. She too felt cold and dead. No tears, the only thought that came to her a practical one. First thing in the morning, she must go round to the undertaker’s.
Closing the door gently, as if reluctant any sound might disturb the silence of death, she went to her own room. Quietly she undressed, this time not to disturb the living – Dora asleep, worn out by her loss.
