Lizzie of Langley Street

by Carol Rivers

  ‘Yeah, it’s gonna be a pea-souper.’ Lizzie saw her father shiver under his blanket. It was time to go home. She wouldn’t see Danny again for a whole week. And when she did, she’d have to have a good excuse up her sleeve for not going out with him.

  ‘Take me home,’ Tom said.

  Lizzie waved to Dickie, then started the long push home.

  On the Sunday before Armistice Day 1920 the news was broadcast to the nation that King George V would unveil the new Cenotaph in Whitehall. As Lizzie and her family gathered round the table in the kitchen, eating boiled potatoes and mutton stew, the talk was of the city in mourning.

  Lizzie had helped Kate peel the potatoes and prepare the table. There were more vegetables than meat in the stew but Lizzie knew it would fill a gap in each of the seven hungry stomachs. Her father was silent and withdrawn, but Kate was smiling. Lizzie had watched her tuck the rent money safely in the Ovaltine tin. ‘The old Cenotaph was an eyesore anyway,’ Kate remarked as she surveyed her family. ‘No one liked it.’

  ‘What’s an eyesore?’ This from ten-year-old Flo.

  ‘A blooming great monstrosity, that’s what.’ Kate frowned at her youngest daughter. ‘In other words, a fake. It was erected in Whitehall, temporary like, for the peace celebrations in 1919. But a bloke called Sir Edward Lutyens ’as designed the new one. And there ain’t a word on it about religion, mind.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Flo.

  ‘Because the blokes commemorated on it were of all creeds and none.’

  ‘What’s—’ began Flo again, only to be swiftly silenced by Tom, who scowled at her across the table.

  Vinnie and Babs looked bored. Bert was almost asleep, his hands clasped over his stomach.

  ‘Can I ’ave Babs’ carrots?’ asked Flo, willing the food off her sister’s plate.

  ‘You’ve already had three helpings,’ Kate scolded.

  Flo pushed her fringe from her eyes. ‘I could eat an ’orse, I could.’

  ‘She can have them,’ Babs shrugged. ‘I’m sick of veg.’

  ‘Well, I certainly ain’t gonnna have those carrots wasted,’ sighed Kate, passing the leftovers to Flo. ‘There’s souls out there who’d give their right arm for food like this.’

  Flo picked up her spoon. ‘Slowly, gel,’ Kate reproved her. ‘Anyone’d think you were starving. Just you watch yer digestion.’

  ‘What’s di . . . dig—?’

  ‘Innards,’ clarified Kate as Vinnie and Bert yawned loudly, twiddling their braces. They were eager to leave the table and have forty winks. Lizzie was relieved that neither of the boys had returned to the Quarry since Friday. Despite his injuries, Vinnie had joined the family for Sunday dinner. His face was still yellow and blue but the swelling had gone down.

  ‘As I was saying about the Cenotaph . . .’ Kate picked up the thread of her conversation but was stopped by Babs.

  ‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about.’ Babs spoke truculently, with a swift glance from under her eyelashes at Lizzie. ‘The war’s over and done with. Besides, who’d want to go up West on a day when all the shops are shut, anyway?’

  Lizzie knew the remark was aimed at her. Leaving school that summer had given Babs a precocious air and she thought she knew it all. She had been taken under the wing of the women who came from the affluent parts of the city, and she helped give out hot soup and tea at Hailing House, the old family home now used for the destitute. Lizzie knew Babs had envied her the visit to the city even though Babs wouldn’t be seen dead pushing a Bath chair.

  Kate intervened. ‘I don’t want to hear no talk like that, young lady. The war’s over, but like yer father tells you, at a cost to nearly every family on this island. Thank Gawd yer brothers were too young to enlist or they might not be here today, just like poor Lil’s two sons, who didn’t even survive the first year.’

  Lil Sharpe and her husband Doug lived next door at number eighty-four. Kate had helped Lil over the terrible period following the two boys’ deaths in 1915. Kate and Lil were close friends as well as neighbours, and it was Ethel, their daughter, whose clothes and boots were handed down to Lizzie. Ethel was now married and had moved to Blackheath. She had two small children of her own.

  ‘Miss Hailing says that all the other kings in Europe is gone,’ Babs continued airily, ‘and only our one’s left. She says that God was on our side. That’s why we won.’

  Tom began to shake his head, his fingers tightening into fists on the arms of the Bath chair. ‘God was on no man’s side, gel. The whole world lost.’

  ‘That ain’t what Miss Hailing says. She says—’

  ‘Listen here, young lady . . .’ Tom leaned forward, his face flushed with anger. ‘You tell this to your Miss Hailing from me. We’ve got strikes, we’ve got unemployment, we’ve got civil war with the Irish and the king don’t give a toss. All he gives us is a load of blarney and expects us to swallow it. But we don’t want talk, we want jobs, food on the table, our kids’ bellies full. We want what they promised us when we laid down our lives for their future. But what we want we ain’t never going to get. They told us lies in the trenches and they’re still telling us them. What in God’s name have we got to live for?’

  Babs had long since stopped listening and was staring disinterestedly into space. Tom looked hard at his family, his pale eyes going over them one by one. No one answered. Vinnie got up, belched loudly and left the room.

  Tom turned to Lizzie, his thin lips quivering. ‘Fetch me cap, Lizzie, and me coat and push me out into the yard.’

  ‘Oh, Tom, you shouldn’t upset yerself,’ Kate wailed, her hand going up to her mouth. ‘You haven’t eaten yer pudding. It’s yer favourite, Spotted Dick.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Tom growled.

  Lizzie rose from the table and did as her father told her. If she didn’t there would be another full scale row. ‘You carry on with dinner,’ she said to her mother as she helped her father on with his clothes. ‘I’ll do the washing-up.’

  Kate’s head was averted. Lizzie knew she was wiping away a tear. Tom’s aggression was getting worse and Babs and Vinnie did nothing to ease it.

  Lizzie wheeled the Bath chair from the kitchen and into the yard. Here, in the freezing November afternoon, she turned her father towards the broken fence that divided the two backyards. Beyond the fence Doug Sharpe attempted to thrust a spade into the earth.

  ‘There’s Mr Sharpe, Pa. Why don’t you have a chat?’ Doug and Tom were old friends. Lil and Doug had lived next to the Allens for twenty years. If anyone was able to understand her father, Doug was. But her father shook his head and said quietly, ‘Leave me alone, Lizzie.’

  ‘But Pa—’

  ‘Go in, girl. Eat yer dinner.’

  Lizzie stood for a moment. Sadness overwhelmed her at the sight of his slumped shoulders. She had seen desperation in his eyes and heard a new bitterness in his voice. Vinnie and Babs could be relied upon to upset the apple-cart, but what satisfaction they derived from it, Lizzie was at a loss to know.

  Chapter Three

  It was Monday and wash day in Langley Street.

  ‘I tell you, Lil, one morning I ain’t going to see the light of day,’ Kate Allen complained to her neighbour as they stood gossiping over the garden fence. ‘I’ll be laying there in me bed, me heart stopped dead, the kids screaming their heads off, and what’ll happen to the lot of ’em then, I ask you?’

  ‘Well, one thing’s for sure, if you’re dead you won’t know a bugger about it,’ Lil Sharpe responded dryly.

  Laughing, the women continued to peg out their washing. Minutes later, two neat rows of clothes were blowing gently on each line. Steam rose in the frosty air, the smell of carbolic and Sunlight mingling.

  ‘Your Tom ready for Wednesday?’ Lil called out as she draped a pair of long johns over the line.

  ‘He’s only going as far as Poplar now. He had a good day on Saturday, so he ain’t got that much left to sell.’

  ‘Probably a good thing,’
Lil remarked. ‘They’re bringing the coffin from Dover, arriving at Victoria, so I hear. The city’ll be chock-a-block.’ Lil took a spare wooden peg from between her teeth and clamped it on the line. ‘Your Lizzie still pushing Tom, then?’

  ‘Better at pushing the chair than her brothers.’ Kate lowered her voice, returning to the fence. Lil joined her there. ‘Bert’s so big and ugly he frightens off the women. Vinnie makes himself scarce at the mention of the chair.’

  ‘You think he’d be proud to push his father on Armistice Day,’ Lil commented, folding her thin arms across her chest. ‘There ain’t many blokes round ’ere lost two legs to the Kaiser. One maybe. Or an arm. But not two legs. You can’t do much these days without yer old pins to walk on.’

  Kate sighed. ‘Yeah . . . and don’t I know it.’

  Lil raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘Least you ain’t up the spout again. ‘S’pose that’s a comfort for you, gel.’

  Reluctantly, Kate agreed. ‘Nor likely to be, either, with what that shell did.’

  ‘Don’t make a man feel like a man, I ’spect.’

  The subject of sex always dismayed Kate, for Tom was disabled in all respects and her only release was to pretend that she had gone off it too. Not that it was the sex that mattered so much, rather the tenderness and affection that her husband had once lavished on her. She longed to be taken into his arms and hugged; she didn’t care that he was crippled. She loved him for what he was, her man. In fact, his disability had made her love him all the more. But she knew he felt he was repulsive to her. He recoiled when she slid her arms around him at night, and often she wept into the pillow, sleep evading her. But tears did no good. Her husband’s heart had hardened.

  Kate glanced at her neighbour and changed the subject. ‘We had another ruckus Friday night. Gawd knows what I’m going to do about our Vinnie. Pissed to the eyeballs, he was, his face as black as a bruised plum. I tell you, me heart is having real problems catching up with me breath these days.’

  ‘At least you got your Lizzie. She’s a good girl, your Lizzie is.’

  Kate nodded. ‘Yeah. At least I got her, poor little cow.’

  ‘And your Flo’s coming on nicely. She’s bright as a button for ten.’

  This brought a smile to Kate’s face. ‘Ain’t she just. Always askin’ questions, that girl. Gawd help her teachers if there are more like her at school.’

  ‘She’s a real card, too. You can have a good laugh with your Flo,’ Lil agreed with a chuckle. ‘And Babs, well, she knows her own mind, that one. And with all that red hair, she turns heads all right. She’s gonna be a stunner when she gets older.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ Kate nodded. ‘Up with all them posh ladies at the House.’ Kate was secretly proud of the fact that the ladies of Hailing House had asked Babs if she’d like to help in the soup kitchens. It didn’t matter that it was charity work. Babs would get on if she behaved herself.

  ‘As for your Bert,’ Lil continued, but in softer tones this time, ‘he hasn’t got a bad bone in his body, and me and Doug love him for it.’

  Kate was aware that Bert reminded Lil of her two sons. They were only young when they had been killed in action in France. They’d been fine, strapping lads. Greg was sixteen and Neil seventeen. Though Greg had been a little older than Bert, they had been good mates. It had been five years since their deaths. Kate knew her friend had never really recovered.

  ‘And I’ve got a bit of rent for old Symons on Friday,’ Kate said cheerfully, avoiding the subject of the boys.

  ‘That’s a relief, ain’t it?’ Lil pulled her turban round her ears to keep out the cold. ‘Maybe Christmas will see us all right, after all.’

  And maybe she’d be crowned queen of England, Kate thought as the racing beat in her heart started once more. She took a breath and nodded at her neighbour’s hopeful words. She didn’t want to depress Lil, who had her own troubles. And to complain she’d had this funny feeling inside her for some months now would only cause her friend to worry. It was probably just a bit of indigestion. She’d take a double dose of salts and that was sure to ease it.

  ‘What we need is a bloody good party,’ Lil said suddenly. ‘Like what we had at the end of the war.’

  Kate sighed. Life was full of wars. When one ended another started. Tom had come home from the German war to the war of survival, not in the trenches, but in family life with all its pains and very few pleasures.

  ‘Yeah, I s’pose so,’ she agreed distractedly.

  ‘Come on, gel, keep yer pecker up!’ Lil laughed. ‘It ain’t the end of the world yet.’

  ‘Course not.’ Kate galvanized herself into action, shaking out a wet sheet. ‘You’re right. We should all get together at Christmas and have a knees-up.’

  Lil nodded enthusiastically. ‘’Ere, I’ll get Doug on ’is spoons, Lizzie can sing and we’ll get our Eth on the Joanna. Some of the keys is missing, but never mind, no one will notice.’

  ‘That’ll be nice.’ A sharp pain went across Kate’s chest and she dropped the sheet back into the tub. Keeping her face averted from Lil, she breathed slowly, the way she’d been trying to do lately. It sometimes helped to make the pain go away. Lil was trying to cheer her up, bless her. She was a cheery spark, for all that had happened. It made Kate feel that she was lucky to have all her family alive. She’d miscarried the twins, but they had just been scraps, no life in their minute bodies and only a brief agony. Lil carried her dead sons in her heart – bravely and without complaint.

  ‘You sure you’re all right, gel? You look a bit pale.’

  Kate nodded. ‘Right as rain, Lil. But I’d better get meself back indoors. Gotta think of somethin’ to give ’em for dinner.’

  ‘You do that.’ Lil Sharpe winked. ‘And don’t forget about Christmas.’

  Kate picked up the sheet gingerly. She was relieved to find the movement caused her no discomfort. At last the pain was receding. Bloody indigestion. She began to mull over what she was going to put on the table. Should she borrow from the rent or make do? There was nothing except spuds in the pantry. Well, she could boil the bones from yesterday that she’d saved from the mutton. Yes, she’d do that just as soon as she sat down for a bit.

  That evening Lizzie and Flo were in their bedroom. They were pretending to be nuns, with coats over their heads. Lizzie had a strong, husky voice and could reach any note she attempted, high or low. Flo stayed in tune as long as she concentrated.

  Babs had gone next door with Kate and Lizzie was trying to amuse Flo. Normally she would have died rather than let anyone see she was acting out a part in her old coat, pretending she was a famous actress. But her mind kept going back to Danny and the one and only chance she’d probably ever have of going to the theatre.

  ‘I ain’t seen Mary Pickford being a nun,’ said Flo doubtfully. ‘A singin’ nun, anyway.’

  ‘We’re just imaginin’, Flo. Nuns have lovely voices, like what we heard on His Master’s Voice.’ Lizzie pulled her green coat firmly round her head, doing the button up under her chin. She’d always taken the part of Mary Pickford when she was younger. But now it was Flo who had been given the honour. Charlie Chaplin was usually left to Flo, who was the comic of the family.

  Flo pushed back her straight brown hair and hugged her knees. ‘Is that real nuns singing the Nuns’ Chorus, Lizzie?’

  ‘Course it is. Or else it wouldn’t be called a Nuns’ Chorus, would it?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s written on the label of one of them shiny records that Pa got from the Seamen’s Rest, over Greenwich. If it’s on the label then it must be true.’

  ‘I wish we could listen to it now,’ Flo said wistfully. ‘Then we could join in with them.’

  ‘Pa ain’t gonna let us bring his gramophone up here, is he?’ It was from a battered black box that the strains of such music as Cavalleria Rusticana could sometimes be heard in their parents’ bedroom.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ Flo complained. ‘We would
n’t ’urt it.’

  ‘Well, you ask him then,’ said Lizzie challengingly, knowing that would stop Flo’s questions. They had often lain awake in bed at nights listening to the gramophone downstairs. Lizzie had an ear for music and it was not long before she had memorized each tune.

  ‘What do nuns do all day?’ Flo asked, ignoring Lizzie’s last remark.

  ‘They pray for people’s sins. To save the world.’

  ‘We ain’t been saved though,’ Flo spluttered. ‘Pa says that if God loved the world he would have stopped the wars and all them soldiers what’s been killed would be alive today. And it’s God that them nuns pray to, ain’t it?’

  ‘Flo, d’you wanna be Mary Pickford or not?’ Lizzie was getting exasperated. She wanted to think about Danny, not answer all these questions.

  Flo yawned. ‘I’m tired,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Then undress and get into bed,’ Lizzie told her. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

  ‘What sort of story?’

  ‘Flo!’ Lizzie yelled. She’d had enough. Flo pulled a face, but she did as she was told. Lizzie removed the coat from her head and tidied away the tattered old clothes they had used to dress up in.

  By the time Lizzie had finished the story of a poor girl marrying a prince and having a ball gown to wear every day of her life, Flo was fast asleep. Lizzie went quietly out on to the landing, closing the door behind her. She expected to hear Bert and Vinnie in their bedroom, but was surprised to hear voices downstairs.

  She leaned over the banister as Bert came up the stairs. ‘We’re off out,’ he said, squeezing his cap down over his forehead.

  ‘Where you goin’? You ain’t going up the pub, are you?’

  Bert looked awkward. ‘Only for a couple of beers.’

  ‘Bert, don’t go. Wait for Ma to come in.’

  ‘Vinnie’s kickin’ his heels doin’ nothing, gel.’

  Lizzie knew what that meant. Vinnie had returned home in a foul mood that evening and was planning to drown his sorrows.

  ‘What will I tell Ma when she comes back?’