From Whitechapel

by Clegg, Melanie

  My fingers tightened on the gold cord handle of my reticule and I turned my head to look out of the window, not trusting myself to answer straight away even if my aunt’s meaning had been all too clear. We were rattling down Kingsland Road now, a long and dusty thoroughfare which would take us directly from Highbury to Whitechapel and never having been there before I craned my head to look at the red brick houses and shops that lined the road, thinking how pleasant it all looked if a bit scuffed and battered around the edges. A description that suited the poor but respectable people of the area just as well as the buildings.

  This all changed though when we turned on to Shoreditch High Street, where the tall terraced houses and shops were much shabbier and the dirt and straw strewn road became narrow and congested with a mass of vehicles, horses and people, all shouting, gesturing and shoving past each other while stray dogs dashed barking between the horses’ legs and small grubby faced children, their lopsided grins revealing blackened teeth, shoved their hands into carriage windows and begged for pennies.

  I was just hunting in my reticule for some money to give them when we came to a sudden and rather abrupt halt that almost threw me forward off my seat and on to the floor. ‘Have we crashed?’ I asked, righting myself on the seat and straightening my hat. ‘Perhaps I should have a look outside and see?’

  ‘You will do no such thing, Alice,’ my aunt insisted in her most commanding tones as she adjusted her own bonnet and peered crossly out of the window to where a crowd of young boys was staring at us and pulling faces, crossing their eyes, pushing back their noses with their fingers and lolling out their tongues. She majestically turned away. ‘It would be most unseemly. Pray remain where you are and let the driver take care of it.’

  Ignoring her, I reached up and pulled the window down before poking my head out to see what was holding us up. ‘Two van drivers up ahead have had a bit of a collision and come to blows over which one is to blame, Miss,’ my aunt’s driver, Gideon, cheerfully shouted over his shoulder from up on his perch. ‘We’ll be moving again soon enough when they’ve either cooled their boots or knocked each other out.’

  I grinned, spotting the two drivers, a pair of middle aged men with decided paunches and greying whiskers on their ruddy cheeks, up ahead. They’d both thrown their dilapidated coats and waistcoats on to the filth and dust of the road and were squaring up to each other in their shirt sleeves, while several other men, most of whom were clearly drunk, roared at them to stop and tried to forcibly restrained them as they threw half hearted punches and hoarsely shouted challenges to ‘come on then, if you think you’ve got the sauce’ and ‘let’s have a taste of your fists, boy’ at each other.

  ‘I’d quite like to put sixpence on the one with ginger hair,’ Gideon confided in me, laughing. ‘He’s got a wicked punch on him. Just wait and see, if his friends will only let him go for a minute.’

  Most of the crowd of men, women and children that had gathered in the middle of the road to watch the fight was laughing at the two men but there were a few shaken fists too, mainly from drivers and passengers who were being held up by the impromptu and rather undignified spectacle, and there were some yelled insults as well, using language that made me go a bit pink and put my head back in the carriage before resolutely closing the window with a snap.

  Aunt Minerva was pointedly holding her lavender oil scented handkerchief up to her nose but her eyes, as I took my seat again, were amused. ‘You’ll have to get used to such robust language if you’re planning on coming here again,’ she said, her voice muffled by the handkerchief. ‘We’re very far away from Highbury now, my dear. We’re very far away from everything in fact.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t mind about that,’ I said, feeling decidedly mutinous and wanting to shock her a little. ‘Although Papa wouldn’t approve at all.’ With a shudder, our carriage started moving again, gradually picking up speed as it turned on to Commercial Street. In the distance, if I angled my neck sufficiently, I could make out the tall angular spire of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, looming white and faintly sinister over the smoking chimneys and grimy roofs of Whitechapel. For some reason the sight of it made me feel oddly uneasy, maybe because its austere beauty looked so out of place in such squalid surroundings - it ought really to have been presiding over Westminster or Kensington rather than one of the most down at heel corners of the capital.

  ‘Your father will come around eventually,’ Aunt Minerva said kindly. ‘Edwin has always had the most peculiar ideas about charity, believing that it’s far better and more dignified to throw money at a problem than roll one’s sleeves up and lend a hand. I entirely blame his parents for this as they were a shockingly tight fisted pair whereas he isn’t at all hard hearted really and nor are you.’ She gave me an approving nod. ‘I am sure that he will see sense in time.’

  I gave a faint smile. ‘He worries too much,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Which I suppose is entirely understandable in the circumstances.’ This was as near as I had ever come to mentioning Beatrice, the ever present spectre in the room, to anyone.

  My aunt looked momentarily confused then gave a sad little nod. ‘It was all very unfortunate,’ she said, which was the closest she had ever come to mentioning Beatrice to me as well. ‘At some point though one really must let go of one’s fears and try to live a little. It’s no good living in the past.’

  For a brief moment, I considered telling her all about the necklace and the real reason why I had decided to come to Whitechapel but then realised just in time that Aunt Minerva would almost certainly insist on taking the whole matter over and looking for Beatrice herself, pushing me quite out of the picture which was something I really didn’t want to have happen. I had taken this quest on and was determined to see it through to its end, whatever that might be.

  ‘Were you going to say something, my dear?’ Aunt Minerva was looking at me with a concerned frown between her eyebrows.

  I closed my mouth with a snap and shook my head. ‘No, aunt,’ I murmured before looking again out of the window.

  Our carriage rumbled past a large pub, the Commercial Tavern, which Minnie would have admiringly called a proper gin palace with green tinted windows beautifully embellished with an intricate design of vines and juniper leaves and richly carved and gold painted curlicues above the doors and window frames. As we drew level, the great double doors swung suddenly open and a man dressed only in his shirt and trousers was ungraciously thrown out on to the dusty street, his checked cap following him a few seconds later. ‘I ain’t done nothing!’ he bawled at the now closed doors before rounding furiously on a gaggle of women standing beneath one of the windows, glasses of ale in hand and a couple of them jiggling crying toddlers on their hips. ‘What you looking at, you bloody tarts?’ he yelled at them as they laughed at him before staggering away down the street, straightening his cap and shoving his shirt with an absurd and upright dignity into his trousers as he went.

  ‘It isn’t considered respectable for women to drink inside a public house,’ Aunt Minerva said in response to my enquiring look, ‘so they stand outside instead although how on earth drinking spirits in plain sight in the street can be considered more respectable is anyone’s guess.’

  ‘I think people down here have very different notions about what respectability means,’ I said, my smile hiding my sudden feeling of intense trepidation. It had all seemed so simple but now that I had actually seen Whitechapel for myself, I could tell that I was almost completely out of my depth. ‘It’s almost as if we have entered a different country not simply a different area of our own city,’ I whispered, my eyes taking in the poorly dressed women standing with their babies outside the pubs, the filthy barefoot children that ran in screeching gangs behind the carts that rumbled down the road to Spitalfields Market and the surly grimy men sitting on the pavements, pipes clamped between decaying teeth and caps pulled down low on their brows. The overall atmosphere was one of decaying hopelessness, of bleak despair. Was this really whe
re Beatrice, my lovely shining haired Bea, had ended up? ‘I can’t believe that people are living like this only a few short miles away from us.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Aunt Minerva said with a definite and most annoying air of ‘I warned you how it would be and you wouldn’t listen’.

  The road narrowed even more as we rumbled down Commercial Street and I began to feel oddly oppressed as I looked up at the endless rows of narrow, smoke darkened houses that pressed in on either side, which as Aunt Minerva now explained to me had once made comfortable and perfectly respectable dwellings for the Huguenot weavers that had made this district their home two centuries earlier but which were now either lodging houses where beds could be rented on a nightly basis or divided up into mean dwellings for the poor of the area, many little more than a single miserable room for an entire family.

  ‘This is the police station,’ Aunt Minerva said, pointing with her gloved hand to a tall wedge shaped building that stood on a corner. ‘God knows they need it. I’ve heard that some of the streets around Christ Church are so violent and riddled with criminality that the policeman are required to enter them in pairs lest they be attacked and woe betide anyone who enters them alone.’

  I looked up at Whitechapel police station, smiling when I noticed that someone had put some small terracotta pots of red geraniums out on a window ledge. As I looked, the window, which had been painted a bright cheerful blue inside was pushed up and a pretty girl with long plaited red hair popped her head out before producing a small battered tin cup which she used to water the flowers, giggling a little as some of the water spilled over the ledge and splashed a woman walking underneath.

  For some reason this sight cheered me up enormously, giving me a timely warning that even though things looked grim on the surface, scratch it and there was still happiness, simple joy and even love underneath. I was therefore in relatively high spirits again when our carriage turned on to Lamb Street and pulled up outside a tall red brick house, blackened by years of exposure to smoke and grime like all the others we had passed, with a chipped and peeling green door.

  ‘Here we are,’ Aunt Minerva said bracingly, pulling her shawl about her and preparing to get out of the carriage. ’The Whitechapel Women’s Mission. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, does it? I’m sure things are very different once we get inside though.’

  A crowd of small children, barefoot and dressed in the ragged remnants of what had once been clothes, had gathered to stare at the coach and one of the larger ones, a boy of about ten with straw coloured hair that stuck out untidily beneath his cap and a dirty red handkerchief knotted around his neck, tentatively reached up to pat one of the horses on the nose, talking soothingly to it the whole time. ‘I love horses,’ he said to me, his nasal accent one that I recognised immediately as Cockney. ‘This one is ever so nice, Miss.’

  I smiled at him, instinctively feeling in my reticule for a coin until Aunt Minerva reached across and put her hand warningly on my wrist. ‘If you start giving out money, you will never stop,’ she whispered. ‘You must find other ways to help these children.’

  ‘They look half starved though,’ I protested, hardly able to bear looking at their blackened, swollen and bleeding little feet or their eyes, which were drained and flat with hunger and exhaustion. ‘Surely a shilling to buy some bread won’t hurt?’

  ‘If you give them shilling then someone bigger will come along and take it from them, probably badly hurting them in the process,’ Aunt Minerva said, her hand still on my wrist. ‘Your shilling won’t go far in Highbury but here in Whitechapel it will buy enough gin to make someone forget their sore feet and the ache of hunger in their stomach for several hours.’

  For a moment, I considered ignoring her and emptying my entire reticule on to the pavement so that they could take their pick, but then gave a sigh and removed my hand. ‘I will have to think of something better then,’ I said coldly.

  My aunt shook her head. ‘Don’t take your anger out on me, my dear,’ she said softly. ‘Reserve it for those who truly deserve it - the employers who won’t pay a living wage, the men who drink their money away and leave their families starving and in need and the landlords who extort every penny from the poor just so that they can keep a roof over their heads.’ She fixed me with a look. ‘I could go on forever but I fear you will find it all out for yourself soon enough. These are dark streets, Alice. Are you really sure that you are ready for this?’

  My hand was already on the handle of the carriage door but at that I removed it and turned to look at my aunt, who continued: ‘You can always change your mind, you know. No one will think any less of you and I am sure that I can find some other worthy cause that requires your help. I know of a refuge in Westminster that is quite genteel and would be perfectly suitable should you wish to busy yourself with something less challenging. I know that your father would be relieved if you were to go there instead.’

  I hesitated, sorely tempted to give in and go home, but then I remembered the necklace and blood stained envelope locked up in the drawer beside my bed and resolutely straightened my shoulders. No matter what my own feelings were about the place, Whitechapel was the last link that I had with Beatrice and so in Whitechapel I would remain. I shook my head. ‘That is very kind of you, aunt, but I am afraid that I am quite determined.’ I forced myself to smile, feigning a confidence that I did not altogether feel. ‘Besides, I am expected here and should hate to let anyone down.’

  My aunt gave a brisk nod, that may well have been one of approval although I could not be sure. ‘Very well then,’ she said before tapping the ceiling of the carriage with the silver head of her ebony walking stick, alerting Gideon, who was happily chatting with the horse loving boy, that we wished to get out and that he should help us down. ‘They won’t thank you, you know,’ she said rather cryptically as we waited for the door to be opened for us.

  I gave a slight smile. ‘Perhaps I don’t want to be thanked,’ I said before getting out of the carriage.

  We were admitted into the entrance hall of the mission house by a very short maidservant with a snub nose, anxious expression and mousy brown hair straggling from beneath her none too clean linen cap. ‘Missus will see you in the parlour,’ she said breathlessly before bobbing up and down several times in what was intended to be an approximation of a curtsey. ‘Will you be wanting tea?’

  ‘Tea would be wonderful,’ Aunt Minerva said with a kind smile, looking about her appreciatively and sniffing the air, which smelt strongly of beef stew, lavender soap and clean laundry. The hall had been painted a pale sage green and there were still touches of elegance, remnants of its past life as a once very handsome family home, in the carved wooden bannisters of the staircase and plaster work on the high ceiling. ‘You’ll have to show us where the parlour is though as we’ve never been here before.’

  The maid went crimson with mortification. ‘Course you haven’t, ma’am,’ she said, looking as though she was about to burst into tears. ‘I’ll take you there directly.’

  I followed the girl and my aunt from the hall into a small cosy room overlooking the street. Like the hall this room had been painted pale green with matching curtains at the window and a bright but somewhat tatty Turkish rug on the floor. Although the maid had described it as a parlour, it felt more like a study with several crammed to overflowing bookcases lining the walls and a large cherry wood desk pushed up close to the window.

  ‘If you’d like to wait here, I’ll just go fetch the missus,’ the maid said, bobbing another curtsey before rushing from the room, slamming the door behind her.

  ‘How extraordinary,’ Aunt Minerva said to me, raising an eyebrow. ‘If they try to foist one of their inmates on you as a maid, I think it might be wise to gracefully decline.’

  I smiled and sat down on a shabby green velvet sofa by the fireplace. It was a fine day still and the window had been left slightly open, letting the noise and smells, not all of them pleasant, from the neighbouring Spit
alfields Market waft inside. As Aunt Minerva restlessly paced the room, lifting up ornaments to examine their bottoms, flicking through the books left out on the desk and peering at the old engravings that had been framed and hung on the green walls, I closed my eyes and let the sound of the market wash over me, enjoying the yells of the traders, constant rumble of carts and carriages and barking and growls of the dogs that hung about the stalls hoping for scraps.

  ‘Goodness, what a racket,’ Aunt Minerva said, closing a book with a slam and throwing herself down in a crimson leather upholstered armchair on the other side of the fire. ‘I don’t know how anyone can bear such a noise.’

  ‘Is it worse than our trains at Highbury?’ I said, opening my eyes.

  Aunt Minerva gave a snort of laughter. ‘Far worse,’ she said. ‘I’ll concede you that.’

  The door opened then and we both hastily got to our feet as two ladies, one tall and slender with cool blue eyes and blonde hair arranged in a neat chignon and the other short and heavy with dark intelligent eyes and untidily arranged jet black hair that seemed intent on escaping its pins and falling about her shoulders, entered the room, closely followed by the little maid who was struggling beneath the weight of a wooden tray laden with tea things which she noisily dumped on the desk before rushing from the room again. ‘You must be Lady Coudland,’ the tall one said in a clipped Scottish accent that belied her graceful appearance as she advanced to take Aunt Minerva’s hand. ‘What a pleasure to meet you at long last. I’ve heard so much about you.’

  ‘Likewise,’ my aunt said graciously before drawing me forward. ‘This is my niece, Alice Redmayne.’

  ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Redmayne. I am such a great admirer of your father’s work,’ she said with a nod. ‘I am Mrs Lightfoot and this,’ she gestured towards the other woman, who stepped forward and took my hand in a firm grip, ‘is Miss Lawler.’ She smiled then, revealing a lot of big white teeth. ‘We share the running of this establishment between us.’