The two women and Elizabeth stayed still, as if in a tableau, until they heard the front door slam. Then Bella, bending in her chair, gave a little moan.
‘Be quiet, Bella,’ ordered Harriet. ‘You’ve been fool enough. Don’t make an exhibition of yourself in front of the child. What on earth are you doing here anyway, Elizabeth?’
‘He meant no harm,’ said Bella in a low voice. ‘Now he’s been dismissed, ejected from his home.’
‘What home? This is not his home. He was here on sufferance,’ declared Harriet. ‘What else could he possibly expect? His behaviour was an abuse of trust. There are to be no secret meetings or correspondence with that man. As Robert says, as far as you or any of us is concerned, he no longer exists. I hope you clearly understand that. Oh my God,’ she concluded impatiently, as her sister-in-law fainted, falling from her chair on to the carpet. ‘Elizabeth – fetch the smelling salts. Oh, whatever next?’
As Robert had ordained, there was no further mention of Alec Murgatroyd, and Bella gave up going to church in the mornings. As the year wore on, she became paler and more uncertain and confused.
But every January, until she was fifteen, on Elizabeth’s birthday she received a card from Kent, always signed, ‘With best wishes, from your friend, Alec’. Meanwhile, life became even harder and drearier at Linden Grove than it had been before.
Chapter Six
1899
Mrs Macfarlane often smiled from her window as she witnessed the comings and goings of Elizabeth, who was growing up to be a tall, slim, good-looking girl with large blue eyes and a definite nose. Christina Macfarlane liked the unruly, slightly frizzy red hair considered such a disaster in Elizabeth’s own family. Where she came from, in Scotland, there had been many such heads of hair, attached to tall, vigorous girls who ran downhill for water to the burn with buckets swinging. She had, in fact, been such a one herself. She knew, though, that all was not well at 53 Linden Grove.
Mrs Macfarlane had, from behind her curtains, of course seen the eviction of Alec Murgatroyd over a year ago, and later noted Bella’s downcast face and the fact that she had abandoned the innocent vanity of little white collars to relieve the dullness of her black dress. An experienced watcher from windows needs little information to put a story together. ‘Poor little Mrs Armitage has taken a beating,’ she remarked bluntly to her friend Mrs Kennedy-Johnson. ‘That’s not surprising; she’s a woman with no strength of character at all. But it’s a pity all the same. The child still retains some spirit, but it’s a hard life for her. Twelve, and growing fast, and the food isn’t generous in that house. Nothing is spent on her. In short, she’s a poor relation. She seems to be helping her mother with much of the housekeeping. You’d think the Warrens would be ashamed.’
‘Does she still visit you?’ enquired Mrs Kennedy-Johnson.
‘Yes, though the family doesn’t like it. But she still comes, for a little game of cards, or a chat. And a small meal, sometimes. She’s doing well at school. She says that Mrs Hamilton, the headmistress at Ferndene Hall, plans to take her on as a teacher.’
‘She’ll need to earn a living, with nothing else behind her,’ said Mrs Kennedy-Johnson.
It was true that if Elizabeth had not ‘misbehaved’ so badly one stormy August day in 1899, she might have continued for the next few years in the unfriendly house at Linden Grove and have begun a career as a pupil-teacher at Ferndene Hall.
But she did misbehave.
By August the women and girls at Linden Grove had all been cooped up in the house together for three weeks since the start of the school holidays. A house by the sea at Broadstairs had been booked for the last fortnight in the month. The maid would be left in London on half-wages. In the meantime, boredom prevailed. Elizabeth sat reading in her attic, Frannie and Cora quarrelled. The day before having been particularly irritating, Mrs Warren prevailed on Mr Warren to hire a carriage and take them for an outing. He had agreed, but only to the morning. He had an appointment at one of his factories in the East End during the afternoon.
So they set off next day: Frannie, Cora, Harriet and Elizabeth, the girls in white dresses, stockings and shoes (except for Elizabeth, who had no special summer shoes), and all in relatively good spirits. The outing was due, however, to terminate extremely badly at the factory in Cork Street, Whitechapel.
On the same August morning, thirteen-year-old Lily Strugnell woke up early in French Street, lying in her petticoat in her little truckle bed beside the kitchen door. On the other side her sister Rose lay sleeping. In the middle of the room the kitchen table still bore traces of last night’s meal.
Lily heard the door of the shared privy in the yard banging, the back door opening, and the heavy returning feet of Mr Wilkinson, the upstairs tenant, thumping along the passageway past the kitchen door. He’d go upstairs now, she knew, then start clumping about. Then the Wilkinson baby would start crying. Sure enough, she heard the child utter a high keening noise. In two minutes Mr Wilkinson would start shouting at his wife about the baby and the lack of hot water for his shave. Later, he’d go off to work at the bell foundry.
Rose also began to stir, said ‘No, no’ in a sad voice, and went back to sleep again. Upstairs, predictably, Mr Wilkinson was shouting louder and the baby becoming more anguished.
Dawn chorus starting here, Lily said to herself, and I’m off, thank you very much. She slipped out of bed, a thin, undergrown girl, with very pale blonde hair, brows and lashes, and stood in bare feet on the cracked lino floor, looking out of the kitchen window. Lovely day, she thought. For people who don’t work in Cork Street.
‘What are you doing?’ mumbled Rose. She knew from the familiar sounds that they both had another half-hour of sleep ahead, if they were lucky. Lily bent over her and whispered, ‘I’m getting out early, before Dad and Mum get up – after last night.’
There had been an unholy row at eleven, when Lily had come in late, flushed with triumph and a little drop of port Jack Cunningham, landlord of the Rose and Crown, had given her.
The day before, after yet another grim day at Warren’s, Lily, almost without conscious thought, had gone to see Jack. She’d auditioned for his music rooms, on the stage in the annexe beside the pub, to a hall of empty tables – except for Jack, who was sitting down with a sceptical expression on his face.
She’d sung a parlour song about exile and mother-love and had finished on a long, long note – it seemed impossible that her skinny chest could hide that amount of lung power. Big Jack Cunningham asked, ‘Who trained your voice?’
Lily stared at him defiantly. ‘Trained? It ain’t a bleeding dog, is it?’
Jack stared at her, pretending disbelief. ‘No training then?’ he said. ‘All learned at your mother’s knee? Tell you what – give us a comic song now, something a bit lively.’ And Lily sang him the ballad supposedly sung by a drunken old woman, ‘One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit’, and included in the performance that cheeky movement she’d practised so often at home in the kitchen – skirt lifted up to her knees, narrow pale legs showing above her old boots, bottom out, a little waggle of the hips, then, straightening up, that unique little step, later much copied and called the Strugnell Strut. The Strugnell Strut went on stage publicly that afternoon for the first time and got her the job that evening at Cunningham’s.
That night she’d sneaked out after supper, saying she was going to the Sullivans’. She’d gone on stage dressed in her ordinary clothes after the comedian, the fat lady singing ballads, and Featherstone’s Five Four-Legged Friends, performing dogs, mostly small terriers. ‘Four-letter friends, more likely,’ the fat woman had said to her, waiting at the side of the platform. ‘One of them done its business in the room at the back, where I had to get dressed. I cleared it up before you came. They were there last week, too, and you should have seen them take on the bulldog some man in the audience had with him. What a fight – they were all over him like mustard. There was six of them, then. Bulldog killed one. To
ssed it like a rag. This ain’t much of a place for a singer. All right for you, just starting out.’
Lily had done well. She knew she had. She could feel the audience – working men drinking pints of beer, their wives or girlfriends with lemonade or a glass of port – all egging her on, wishing this evidently local girl well, enjoying the way she, just a nipper, had control of them and her own performance. She gave them only two songs, one sober, ‘Only a Violet I Plucked From My Mother’s Grave’, and one cheeky, ‘Our Lodger’s Such a Nice Young Man’. That was her first public performance, but, she swore to herself, it wouldn’t be the last. The row at home came as no surprise.
Charlie shouted that he wouldn’t have any daughter of his showing herself off to all and sundry in a pub when everyone knew what happened to girls like that. Lennie and Dan had got up and stood sleepy but intimidated in the doorway. Rose had pulled the blankets over her head. Charlie stood in the middle of the floor, a powerful figure in a collarless shirt, his old trousers held up with braces, threatening fire and brimstone for Lily in future, and a good hiding from him in the present. Lily, fired with triumph and excitement, stood up to him. ‘You think I want to work in old Warren’s sweatshop for ten bob a week, ten hours a day in a room with no windows, until I go down with lung fever or something? You say you care what happens to me – well, I know what’s happening now and I don’t like it.’
‘You’re not meant to like it,’ exclaimed her father. ‘You’re meant to do it and bring your wages home, until you find a man to support you, God help him. And speaking of wages, what’s happened to this famous shilling you earned?’
‘Oh, so that’s it,’ Lily had shouted. ‘You’re prepared to take the wages of sin towards the rent, then.’
That was when her father clipped her round the ear and sent her to bed howling. ‘Where is the shilling?’ Rose had whispered after Charlie and Queenie had taken the boys back to bed. The sound of their quarrelling voices could still be heard in the bedroom.
Lily whispered back, ‘In my drawers, and I’m not parting with it.’
‘He’ll kill you,’ Rose said fearfully.
‘Let him try,’ Lily said through gritted teeth.
She was the oldest and had always stood up to Dad, though she’d taken a lot of punishment for it – blows, of course, and, worst of all, being shut out in the yard all night, crouching there against the back door in the darkness, listening to hens stirring in the coop, dogs barking, people talking in the houses round about, until Rose got up (if she remembered) and let her in. She’d had to sneak out again at dawn, so as to pretend she’d been out all night. But Lily was resilient. Rows, smacks, even exile in the yard overnight were what she was used to, and were water off a duck’s back. Apart from Queenie’s tongue, the only thing which really checked her and made her think life hardly worth living was Robert Warren’s factory.
The factory was in a long wooden building built across the bottom of the gardens of two old, formerly dignified houses. Lily had been there a year, working ten hours a day, Monday to Friday, and five hours on Saturday, for a wage often shillings a week. The entrance to the factory lay down an alley. In the long work shed, with big, filthy windows on either side, forty women, aged from twelve to sixty, sat all day as close as was possible, making soldiers’ uniforms, running stiff serge tunics through the machines with sore and painful hands.
The building was draughty. In winter, coke stoves at either end of the room did not emit enough heat, though they produced fumes which made the workers dizzy during the day and sent them reeling out, coughing, in the evenings. In summer the room was baking, for only the transoms at the top of the windows could be opened. There was not enough air to ventilate a room for forty women, and there was only one privy at the back. Too many trips to it could get a woman sacked.
The office, where the boss and his clerk worked, was in the front of one of the Cork Street houses. It was one big room with two desks, shelves full of dusty files, and, frequently, boxes of garments on the floor. Behind the big room was a smaller one, where the lady typist, Miss Bennett, a thin woman always in mourning for some relative who had died – ‘passed away’, as she put it, although the old mother she supported stayed firmly alive – sat at a desk with her typewriter and notebook. The boss owned another building in the area, a glove factory opposite the coal yard by the railway. This brick building, leased from the railway company, stood alone on some wasteground behind the big fence with tall iron gates set in it.
On those premises, women made cotton gloves for men to wear at balls, or for ladies to wear in summer, and a thicker variety of glove designed to protect hands while doing housework or gardening. One of the women who worked there told Lily’s mother that the walk down the alley to the factory gates at night in winter was frightening if you had stayed a bit late and were on your own. There was no light until you had left the gates, and you had to run past the coal yard to the bottom of the street, never knowing who you might meet; you could be murdered in a flash. The boss could make you stay late but didn’t care what happened to you afterwards. He just said it was railway property and the railway’s problem, wouldn’t see you as far as the gate, even if you asked him.
‘He don’t care,’ Lily’s mother had told the woman. ‘Plenty more where you come from.’
‘Well, don’t you never let Lily get transferred here,’ the woman had said, ‘even if it is a bit better paid.’
‘Believe me,’ Queenie had said, ‘Lily’s that much of a tartar, if anyone attacked her he’d run off terrified as soon as he found out what he’d got his hands on.’
That first winter at Warren’s, as Lily made her way tiredly home at night, back aching, hands raw from the heavy serge, slightly dizzy from the coke fumes, she thought her singing days were over. In fact she thought her whole life might be over. There seemed to be nothing to look forward to but work and more work, only the odd bit of ribbon or a pair of stockings now and then, a visit to the music hall from time to time with your friends; eventually, she supposed, courtship and marriage and babies, just like her mother. She could see that women aged faster in the East End – up West you could see women well over thirty who had kept their figures and complexions. But where she lived, by the time they were thirty, unless they were exceptionally lucky, women were tired, fat, slopped around corsetless, often wore slippers in the street and nearly always had a new baby at the breast. Ten years turned a fresh-faced girl into an old granny. And who could she marry anyway? Ted Jones, the greengrocer’s son, who liked the look of her, she knew? Or Jesse Smart, who was always trying to recruit her for the Baptists, though she suspected it was not God nor her Christian soul he had in mind? She didn’t want either of them.
The winter at Warren’s had been long for Lily. She became thoroughly depressed and did not bother to hide it. Her father said, ‘Now, you know life’s not all beer and skittles.’ Lily moaned to her mother, ‘What have I got to look forward to?’ and her mother, nursing Dan and Lennie through chicken pox, had turned a weary face to her and asked in return, ‘What have any of us got?’
‘It should be better than this,’ she complained to Rose, who responded, ‘Well, seemingly it ain’t. If you don’t like Warren’s, why don’t you try to get a job in a good shop? Talk a bit posh and make out you’re from a better neighbourhood.’
But Lily didn’t want that. She had gone beyond knowing what she did want. Until she’d gone to see Jack Cunningham.
Meanwhile, she thought, she’d better stay out of Charlie’s way. Apart from anything else, he might start asking about the shilling she’d been paid… Yet here she was at the crack of dawn with nowhere to go but Warren’s. It threatened to be a warm day, too. The place would reek of hot serge and hot bodies. She cheered up. At least she still had her shilling.
She slipped through the back door, her dress and shoes under her arm, and gave herself a good splashing at the pump. She slipped her dress on over her camisole and drawers – she wasn’t supposed to
stand in the yard like that, but she didn’t care – put on her boots and took the passageway beside the house to French Street. Then she started running, and within minutes was tucked up in a coffee shop in Whitechapel High Street, treating herself to a good cup of coffee – oh, the smell, the taste of that rare treat – and some juicy lamb’s kidneys on toast.
Lily stared round at the crowd in the coffee shop, a mixed bunch at that time in the morning: pimps in smart waistcoats, and a few tired ladies of the night in draggled skirts and feather boas; some market traders from the stalls outside, and a couple of gentlemen in evening clothes who had not seen their own beds the night before. They in turn stared back at the skinny girl in her faded print dress and working boots. Lily observed to a heavy man at the next table, who was watching her, ‘You must be a policeman, you look so hard. Why don’t you arrest me if you think I’m guilty?’ And as he smiled, unable to help himself, she’d turned back to her kidneys, thinking, this is the life. This is it. Money in your pocket, do what you like and to hell with the lot of them. She was happy again.
After three hours at the workbench in the stifling long room at Warren’s, she was less cheerful. The smell of the serge and the crowded bodies was awful. There were two long benches in the room, with twenty sewing machines along each. Girls ran to and fro, fetching more thread, more pieces for machining, sweeping up, collecting pins, so that the work would not stop. On a dais at the top of the room by the door sat Mrs Frayne, the forewoman, watching like a cat to make sure no one slacked, no one called excessively for mugs of water, no one visited the privy more than once every few hours.
Elizabeth and Lily Page 8
