A Soldier's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘I just ’ope Cissy ain’t ’ad much trouble from them kids of ours,’ she said as they made their way along Eastferry Road. ‘We’ve left it a bit later than we intended, starting back.’

  Charlie grinned down at her lesser height. A bit of a worrier was Doris. ‘Won’t take us long. Put our best foot forward, eh?’

  It was a longish walk back to Poplar. They started off at a brisk pace, her arm through his, she in her best blue crepe and her straw cloche hat with the cherries, he in his good suit and Sunday bowler. By East India Dock Road, their steps had slowed. A No. 67 tram took them the couple of stops to Canning Town and saved their feet, but it was still a plod the rest of the way to Fords Road and home, Doris sighing at her aching feet, Charlie moderating his pace to match her flagging one, lifting the arm she held to help take up her weight.

  ‘Soon be ’ome, old gel,’ he encouraged. ‘Not far now.’

  To which she sighed, ‘I can’t wait to put me feet up.’

  Compared to the bank holiday quiet of the river, the back-streets of Canning Town rang to the cries and laughter of children with minds on that last game before being called in for supper and bed.

  Charlie thought of the supper awaiting him. Boiled bacon and pease pudding – not butcher’s pease pudding but lovingly cooked by Doris herself. She’d left the small half hock to simmer in the same water as the potatoes she’d parboiled for yesterday’s Sunday dinner before going off to Greenwich, leaving Cissy to turn it off when done.

  They’d had a bit of lamb yesterday, enough left for cold tomorrow with bubble and squeak – leftover potatoes and cabbage mashed and fried together. Doris said the bacon and potato water would make a nice broth for another time. She was a thrifty woman and a dab hand at making the pennies stretch. All thanks to her they ate better than many of them around here. He often felt a little guilty for not praising her more.

  ‘We’re lucky you an’ me.’ He followed his train of thought. ‘Me comin’ through the war. Not like some – thousands ’n’ thousands – all gorn. Us gettin’ through that ’flu epidemic like we did. Remember that? Five, six years ago? Did away with ’ole families, that did. I reckon it’s your feeding keeps us so well, old gel.’

  Doris gave a whimsical smile as if to say, ‘Whatever brought that on?’ But she only said, ‘I just thank the good Lord for it.’

  He gave a deep rumbling laugh, ‘No, it’s thanks ter you, old gel. Supper for most of them kids’ll probably be bread and drip.’

  Perhaps with a bit of meat jelly in it which, as the week wore on, would degenerate to plain dripping. Few were able to afford meat enough for it, so dripping came mostly from the pork butchers: ’ap’orth without (jelly) or, if you were well off that week, a penn’orth with. Bring your own basin, large enough to last until next pay day, if your man was in work that was. Even if not, it was cheap on bread and filled hungry bellies.

  The man of the house might do better. As a special person, there was poached haddock for him bought, more often than not, by popping the family china into Uncles and making do with tin cups until it was redeemed. Bread dipped in the salty yellow liquid made a meal, the kids waiting for the earholes, the stringy flesh around the gills, to suck as a treat.

  ‘Bobby and Cissy working brings in a bit on top of me own wages,’ Charlie continued, still feeling for the less fortunate. ‘We’d be in queer streets without them, way costs’ve gone up since the war.’

  No one could call a lighterman’s job exactly steady. There were days when waiting around for something would bring bouts of concern, and other days when it all came in a rush, keeping a man so busy he wouldn’t see home for several days, loading, driving a craft (as barges were known), unloading, always the tide dictating the hours.

  Much of the time these days he was on tugs. A four-man crew, skipper, mate, engineer, fireman and a boy to look after them, doing all the deck work – the coiling and handing up of tow ropes, pulling down of the funnel to pass under the bridges, scrubbing out cabins, making everlasting cups of tea.

  They were long hours, he was up at four-thirty and seldom home before seven. Sometimes there were twenty-four-hour shifts on the more powerful tugs and the much larger craft they towed, covering greater distances, working the bridges up to Hammersmith and downriver to Canvey Island, even as far as the River Medway, to the Isle of Grain. But the lads, like the rest of them, whether on tug or craft, developed a love of the river, a feel for their work that few on shore had. Breathing in the clean morning air while others had to rely on the streets for air before dragging themselves off to offices, shops, factories, there was something that made a man feel of importance when working up or down along the river.

  There was compensation for those long shifts, a bit on the side to barter for baccy at Free Trade Wharf, the odd something rolling into a corner – perks of the job, mopping up the unclaimed – to exchange for a bit of something else. Kept life ticking over sweet, though it was a foolish man who let himself be carried away by greed.

  Discovery meant dismissal, your licence taken away; it meant becoming unemployable. Wasn’t worth it, and it wasn’t honesty that kept him from over-pilfering, as much as the risk of being caught. And then there was Doris, wont to get herself in a flap about things coming into the house that weren’t come by honestly.

  She had let go his arm to fish for the key in her purse among the empty sandwich wrappings in her shopping bag, but his own key was at the ready as they reached their door, one of a row of identical doors.

  ‘Got mine,’ he rumbled, inserting it into the keyhole.

  ‘Bin out fer the afternoon, Mrs Farmer?’ a voice crackled.

  Old Mrs Turpin, a few doors along, stood gripping a tatty coconut-fibre doormat.

  ‘Thought we’d take advantage of the weather,’ Doris obliged.

  ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Greenwich Park.’

  ‘Wish my old man’d take me out. All ’e ever does is snore ’is ’ead off.’ She began pounding the mat against the wall, raising puffs of dust with each collision. ‘Be nice ter go out now’n again.’

  With an offered nod of agreement, they stepped inside and closed the door on the lovely evening. It had grown dark enough to light the gas in the kitchen. Removing the single round glass bowl, Charlie carefully turned the key until the gas began to hiss. The mantle plopped as he applied a match. Its delicate chalky mesh gave forth a sickly hue but grew steadily incandescent with the glass shade replaced.

  Sinking down on one of the four kitchen chairs, Doris emitted a huge sigh. ‘My feet are killing me.’

  Charlie smiled, dropping the matchbox on the table and going to hang his coat on one of the cluttered hooks in the passage. ‘Don’t wonder at it. Bin on ’em all day,’ he called.

  ‘Just need to take the weight off me legs for a bit,’ she agreed, but as he returned, she was already up, going for the kettle to take it to the sink. Filling it noisily and transferring it to the stove, the gas lit with his box of matches, she announced: ‘A nice cup of tea,’ as if such activity could mean anything but that.

  Cissy had come from the front room. Her clear grey-blue eyes and pretty features bore a somewhat peeved look.

  ‘You’re home, then?’

  Compared to her parents’ flat Cockney vowels, hers were rounded, obviously and painfully studied. Cissy took elocution and deportment lessons from a one-time opera singer who boasted of having gone much further in her vocation than her pupils actually believed she had. Madam Noreah Addiscombe, who wore black velvet always – a dusty black victim-of-age velvet – beneath which her bosom bulged mightily from her past operatic exertions and looked like a pregnancy in the wrong place, taught singing too, at sixpence an hour. Cissy couldn’t afford to sing as well, so only took the elocution and deportment.

  ‘Fat lot of good that’ll do you, working round ’ere,’ Charlie had said when he heard. But there wasn’t much he could do about it being as she paid for her lessons out of her own wages.


  Cissy was a machinist at Cohens just off Burdett Road. Piecework on dresses and skirts brought in good money if you were quick at it. And Cissy was quick at it. After giving Mum her keep, the rest was hers, and Dad’s views were – to coin one of Madam Noreah’s beautiful phrases – mere chaff blowing on the wind.

  What Cissy wanted most in this world was to escape, to flee this poverty-striken East End for ever. She dreamed of it constantly. But it was only a dream. Girls like her, for all the elocution lessons at a tanner a time, did not get to flee to any better life.

  Slim and upright, she stood in the doorway of the kitchen. For all Dad’s efforts at decorating it with layer upon layer of wallpaper to hide the outline of bare brickwork, the paper soon became stained from cooking, necessitating another layer. But even that did not stop the summer invasion of bugs from not too clean homes on either side, the bane of Mum’s life. Beyond, was the outside toilet and washhouse, the brickwork there well in evidence through the whitewash. How she loathed its miserable, mean look.

  ‘Did you have an enjoyable afternoon?’ she asked wearily.

  Dad was looking at her in the manner of one taking the rise. But it was done with humour, loving her dearly for all her foolish ideas.

  ‘Yes, we h-ad a very enjoyable h-afternoon,’ he mimicked.

  ‘Thanks for looking after the kids, luv,’ Mum said, gently guilty. ‘We wouldn’t’ve had time to go nowhere if you ’adn’t. Didn’t give you much trouble, did they?’ she added hopefully.

  Cissy gave a non-committal shrug. ‘Out playing most of the time. But had Daisy Evans called I’d have been unable to go out with her.’

  Her mother looked crestfallen. ‘You didn’t say you ’ad anything perticler to do today.’

  ‘I might have had. If she had come to ask me to go out with her.’

  ‘Did she come?’ Charlie asked, lighting his pipe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it don’t matter, do it? You ’ad nothing perticler to do.’

  ‘Have the kids had their supper?’ Doris asked with a quick glance at her husband. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Upstairs, gone to bed.’ No sound came from upstairs. She crossed her fingers that Mum would not go up just yet to see them. If she did she’d find her youngest boy’s eyes probably still red. Cissy trusted Sidney to heed her warning that if he told on her, she would get him next time, well and truly.

  May had been good enough, playing hopscotch on the corner with girls her age, had come in willingly when called. But the boys.…The pair of them had played up something horrid, scowling and rude to her when she’d called them in, rebellious at having to scrub the black off their fingers where they’d been popping tar bubbles in the kerb caused by the heat of enclosed streets under a mid-August sun.

  By five o’clock she’d had enough and belted into both of them. They’d scurried upstairs, Sidney calling her names from the safety of the closed bedroom door, neither daring to come down lest she belted them again. Mum wouldn’t be happy if she knew, but one can stand only so much when it’s not really one’s role to play nursemaid.

  At twenty, all she wanted in life was to be like those privileged little flappers who frequented the West End. She and Daisy Evans often went up West. Daisy too went to Madam Noreah, for singing, but not every week, as she wasn’t so dedicated as Cissy.

  Both at the same firm, most of their wages were spent up West each Saturday, dancing until the last bus forced them to leave those rich bright young things to dance the rest of the night away. The next six days would be spent eking out what was left, but it was worth it, pretending to be one of those to whom money was no object. Hair shingled on the cheap, spit-curled over the cheeks, fake jewellery matching the real thing, dresses homemade – worth it all.

  Come what may, putting by for her elocution lessons was a must, even if it meant walking to work to avoid paying fares. One day, Cissy thought, one day I shall be part of those bright young people, if it kills me.

  Another shilling or so went religiously into her Post Office Book. Saving since starting work six years ago, it held nearly fifty pounds.

  Making her own dresses on Mum’s old sewing machine helped. Luckily 1924 had brought a fashion for the simple straight chemise. A couple of yards folded end to end, neck and armholes cut out, shoulders and sides stitched, satin band around the hips – nothing could be simpler. With dangly earrings and two strings of fake pearls, it was easy to look a million dollars on a few pence. Although, the pale beige rayon stockings had to be bought, of course. And shoes – never the best on her money. Only looked so, leaving her coming home half-crippled by their ill-fitting pointed toes, narrow-waisted heels and unforgiving bar straps. But it was all worth it. She looked as good as any of them. And one day…

  Chapter Two

  Madam Noreah held the one-eyed ginger tomcat close to her unevenly bulging bosom as she stared through the window of her room on the ground floor of one of those somewhat neglected Victorian houses just off the Mile End Road. Once home to middle-class families of business men and a handful of domestic staff, now most of the long terraced rows of houses each accommodated several tenants.

  Since the Great War, the moderately wealthy had moved out to urban perimeters to enjoy modern detached homes surrounded by those leafy walks and long gardens pictured on the hoardings and brochures of estate agents. Living the healthy life away from the smoke and dirt of the City, they commuted to it by sooty train instead.

  The forsaken mansions had been taken over by all sorts and all professions, of which Madam Noreah, who gave singing, elocution and deportment lessons at sixpence an hour, was one.

  She shifted her gaze from the dusty street beyond the grimy window to the ancient ormolu clock – a present from an admirer more years ago than she cared to recall – squatting in pride of place on the mantelshelf over a fireplace of once shining marble now more a shade of dirty grey.

  Five to eleven. Miss Farmer would be on the dot as always. Madam Noreah bent her large face to look down at the subdued head of the one-eyed cat she called Nelson, for want of anything better.

  ‘Miss Farmer is never late, you know,’ she told the animal who purred its response in a welter of wet snuffling. ‘I wish she could be, just for once. We must hurry and feed every one of you in the five minutes we have to ourselves, or you’ll all be around her feet the whole lesson, purring at me for attention. Ah well…Come along, my little ones. Let us see what we can find to give you.’

  Putting the cat down beside two others, a black and white and a ragged tortoiseshell, both of whom had been rubbing against the long skirt of her black, seen-better-days velvet, she moved off to the kitchen to distribute a series of saucers upon the grubby brown and white tiled floor; half a dozen to be filled with milk, the other half with bits of yesterday’s fish, precooked offal obtained from the cats-meat man every Monday and now going a little bit off, and whatever other bits and pieces she had left from her own meals.

  There was hardly any need to give her usual twittery call: ‘Here-come-come-come-come!’ as the sound of fork scraping against china had already summoned some dozen or so feline bodies of all sizes and in varying conditions of health, arrowing in through the open back door and from the parlour where some had been curled up on the sagging armchair, the sofa, the scratched sideboard and dining table whose polish had long since disappeared.

  She watched them as they fed, the hungrier, fitter ones snatching up chunks larger than they should, while the less fit sniffed the fare and turned away, skinny but off their food.

  Madam Noreah sighed and felt the tears prick her eyes for these poorly ones. She tried to tend them, but she knew little about cats beyond feeding them and giving them shelter; the poor strays who bred incessantly, the poor thrown-out kittens fending for themselves, the too-young mothers slowly starving as milk was drained from their thin teats, the one-eyed, one-eared denizens of rooftile and backyard.

  ‘Eat as well as you can, my little ones,’ she told the
twelve, or was it fourteen? She never counted the same number twice. They came and went as they pleased.

  A hollow pound on the front door told her it was exactly eleven and Miss Farmer was here for her elocution lesson. Leaving the cats to themselves, Madam Noreah went to answer it.

  Cissy’s nose twitched at the offensive odour of cat urine that met her as the door opened. She hated this place. But where else could one be taught to speak nicely at sixpence an hour?

  Madam Noreah had once tried persuading her into taking up singing. ‘You say you have no voice, Miss Farmer, but I believe you have, and I could develop it for you.’ But Cissy knew it was the extra sixpence she was after, and anyway, the mere thought of taking in deep breaths of urine-tainted air to reach that high ‘C’ was a great deterrent to singing lessons.

  ‘I just want to speak nicely,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford both.’

  That was enough to dissuade Madam Noreah from pursuing the question again, thank God.

  Madam Noreah, seeing Miss Daisy Evans had arrived too, gave her singing pupil, quite her most favourite singing pupil, a toothy grin.

  ‘Ah, you have come this week, dear. So nice. Entré, my dears.’

  She opened the door wide for the inseparables, that was when Miss Evans deigned to come which wasn’t as regularly as she’d have wished, but when she did come it was always with Miss Farmer even though she must sit and wait for an hour until her own lesson.

  Cissy in her turn would sit and wait while Daisy went up and down scales and arpeggios and on to one of the easier arias Madam Noreah had set for her, accompanied on the piano by Madam Noreah who also gave piano lessons, before the two girls finally left together.

  With the outside air coming in and diluting the cat smell a little, they made their way down the dim passage to the back parlour, now empty of cats still feeding in the kitchen. Cissy was grateful for that.

  Cissy was first, taking reluctant deep breaths through her nose and, as her lesson progressed, growing slowly inured to the cat odour, taking her cue from Madam Noreah’s powerfully resonant vowels.