Paradise Court

by Jenny Oldfield

  Dolly sat and sipped her tea, deep in thought. She’d already sent Charlie packing. ‘Get upstairs, it ain’t nice for you to hear,’ she told him. Charlie had been glad to escape. Now Dolly stared cold reality in the face. Arthur was right; the family had lost the only money coming in, and there was nothing left to pawn. She stared round at the empty shelves and the one crooked picture on the wall; a cross-stitch sampler done by Amy at school. ‘Bless this house,’ it said. What’s more he was probably right about the police. She looked up at Amy. ‘Calm down, girl. Your pa’s right. We done as much as we can do.’

  ‘But I thought you said we was going to the station?’

  ‘I did. But think about it. We’ve left it too long for them to believe us. Who’d take our word against Cooper’s?’

  ‘We’re not going then?’ Amy was stunned into silence. She sat on the doorstep, suddenly limp.

  ‘No. But we’ll let the Coopers think we are.’ Dolly arched her eyebrows. ‘Leastways they’ll have to sweat it out for a bit.’

  Arthur nodded, glad she’d seen sense.

  ‘And I got another plan.’ Dolly stood up, ready to tackle the sinkful of dirty pots and pans. ‘We’ll move Charlie out of his room at the top of the house again and well take a lodger. That’ll keep the money coming in!’

  Back at the workshop Jack Cooper re-established order and got the women settled back to work once more. He promised them a shilling each if they made up for lost time, but they’d have to take on the Ogden girl’s work until he filled her position. He bullied and bribed them back into place, his sagging, mottled face betraying the strain of the recent scene. The women resented every inch of the pompous little man, every whiff of his hair oil and every stab of his stubby finger on the table in front of them. But they needed the shilling. They bowed their heads and the waters closed without trace over the scandal of Amy Ogden.

  At home in Richmond, Edith Cooper bathed the cut on her son’s face. After twenty-five years of marriage to Jack, she’d trained herself never to ask questions. She’d slid into place alongside him on all his upward moves from tenement to rooms above the first shop and eventually out to the leafy suburb. Her clothes and her accent improved along with her surroundings. She was by now a tall, slight, sandy-haired woman of good taste and manners, with a fondness for cameo brooches and amber necklaces, and an outstanding lack of curiosity about the business which paid for them.

  She finished dabbing at Teddy’s wound as Jack’s car drove up the drive, and she quietly crept out of the room with her basinful of disinfected water.

  Jack lectured his son. What he did with his women was his own affair, but never again would he put up with a situation where Teddy’s fooling got in the way of profits at work. There were girls on every street-corner; why did Teddy have to pick them up in the workplace? From now on he strictly forbade that. He’d noted what the Ogden woman had said; there was every chance she’d lay charges against him and it would serve him right. ‘Does your mother know?’ he asked. He rumbled in a silver cigar box, his handshaking.

  Teddy shook his head. ‘I haven’t told her. Listen, Pa, how will this affect things? Will they really lay this second charge, do you think?’ He was in trouble up to his neck, what with the mad suffragette and now that little fool, Amy Ogden. His self-confidence was visibly dented and he presented a pathetic figure; pale, cut and bruised, with a wheedling tone. ‘You’ll back me up, won’t you, Pa?’

  Jack treated him to a contemptuous glare. He thought of all the years bartering on the docks and barrows, the fights he’d had for the best market pitches in the early days, his first shop with his name in gold letters above the door. He pictured what he had now; the acres of floor space, the precious plate-glass expanse on Duke Street, newly restored. He’d built Coopers’ Drapery Stores from nothing, and this young fool sitting before him was the son he must hand it on to. ‘You don’t deserve it, Teddy,’ he said with grim resignation. The best you can do is hope the Ogden woman keeps quiet.’ He lit his cigar and felt the smoke ease down the back of his throat. ‘Or if you’re very clever and think about it long enough, maybe you can work out a way of making her!’

  Chapter Eleven

  Daisy O’Hagan called up to see Hettie in the middle of one Saturday morning in August, not long after Dolly Ogden’s notorious row with her employer.

  ‘Good for her,’ Daisy said to Robert, who was sweeping out in the pub before the day’s trade began. It had been the talk of the street for days. ‘It’s high time someone took that Teddy Cooper down a peg or two.’

  Robert leaned against his broom handle, keeping it propped at an angle so that Daisy couldn’t get upstairs. He wore his usual teasing smile. ‘You could’ve fooled me. Last time I seen you, you was, with Teddy Cooper and you couldn’t get so much as this broomstick between the pair of you. Very friendly, you was.’

  Daisy flared up. ‘Where was that, I’d like to know?’

  ‘After the show last Tuesday or Wednesday, I think it was. He dropped you off down the court in a taxi; either him or his double.’ Robert shook his head. ‘You got a nerve, Daisy my girl.’

  Daisy tossed her own head backwards and brazened it out. ‘It ain’t none of your business, Robert Parsons.’

  ‘But you’re breaking my heart, Miss O’Hagan, pushing me over for the likes of him!’

  ‘Teddy Cooper’s a gent, not a scuttler like you!’ Daisy attempted to barge past Robert.

  ‘Tell that to Amy Ogden,’ he said quietly. ‘Or Chalky White for that matter. I’m sure he’d be interested in your high opinion of Mr Cooper.’ Robert had heard rumours that Daisy was still involved with the shady docker, despite her denials.

  Daisy felt Robert had gone too far this time. Her temper snapped, and she raised a hand to give his cheek a smart slap, but Robert moved quickly and caught her wrist. He grinned condescendingly. ‘That Irish temper of yours ain’t going to get you nowhere with me, Daisy.’

  ‘It ain’t meant to, you bleeding idiot! Now let go of me.’ She struggled to prise his fingers from her wrist, ‘I gotta go upstairs!’

  Robert, at such close quarters with Daisy, could see why she was the most popular of all the girls at the Palace. A spirited mixture of jokiness and independence overlaid a real passion. Her eyes said everything. Wide and expressive, they flashed with anger, but they conveyed vulnerability beneath. And she was so pretty and wild. He stood, unwilling to let her go.

  ‘Look, just let me be,’ Daisy pleaded. She glanced swiftly up the stairs and back into the empty bar, then stamped hard on Robert’s foot with the thin heel of her boot. He yelped and let go. Daisy hurried upstairs, hot and flustered. ‘Serve you right!’ she called down.

  ‘Our Rob been having a go at you, has he?’ Hettie greeted her friend with a shrewd look. She worried about her a good deal these days. ‘You want me to have a word with him for you?’

  Daisy sank gratefully into a fireside chair. ‘No need, thanks. I can look after myself.’

  ‘So what’s up then?’ Hettie had spent the morning washing her hair and looking after baby Grace while Jess went out shopping. Her hair hung free almost to the waist. She stood by the mirror over the mantelpiece, brush in hand.

  Daisy sighed. ‘If it ain’t one bleeding thing it’s another.’ The grind of poverty at home was having its effect on her for a start; the lack of privacy and her father’s constant grumbling. Her mother would turn to her for both money and a sympathetic ear.

  Being Irish, the O’Hagans were cut off from most of the other families down the court They were regarded as outsiders and drifters, likely to flit whenever they fell too far short with their rent Their children tumbled up and down the stairways and hovered in alleys, got ill, picked at the gutters for scraps, crawled under the market stalls and generally went to the bad. So Mary had no one except Daisy to share her troubles with, except for occasional lifts from good-hearted neighbours like Frances Parsons. ‘Ma’s worried sick about Tommy,’ Daisy told Hettie. ‘We ain’t seen h
ide nor hair of him since Wednesday. The little sod’s gone and vanished on us again!’

  ‘He’ll turn up, won’t he?’ Hettie knew that Tommy often took off for a day or two, perhaps teaming up with one of the local rag-and-bone men to go picking iron off the rubbish tips. Or else he’d be cab-ducking up at Waterloo. Tommy turned his hand to anything that would earn him a copper or two.

  ‘He mostly leaves us word though. Last time he was cutting up hay at the carter’s place down Angel Yard. He got a bed in the hayloft and never come back home for a week. But he sent Ma word where he was and we never lost no sleep.’ Daisy came close to the mirror to push stray hairs into the framework of pins that held her elaborate style in place. ‘Any rate, I told her I’d ask around. You ain’t seen him, have you, Ett?’

  ‘Wait here, I’ll ask Sadie.’ Hettie went off; while Daisy stooped to look at Jess’s baby, sleeping peacefully in its crib in the corner. The tiny, unmarked face made her sigh again.

  ‘Sadie says she ain’t seen him since midweek, but she remembers him going on about them cage birds he keeps in the cellar. Said he was feeding them up so he could go up the West End and get good money for them. She ain’t seen him since.’ She looked at Daisy and squeezed her arm. ‘Don’t take on. Tom’s the same as you; he can look after himself.’

  ‘We have to in our family,’ Daisy agreed. ‘But I think you’re right. Just pass the word will you, Ett? If anyone catches sight of him, let me know. Then Ma can stop worrying herself.’ She made as if to go. ‘See you later up at the stop?’

  Hettie smiled and nodded. ‘Six o’clock on the dot,’ The baby showed signs of waking, so she went and gingerly lifted her from the crib.

  ‘Suits you, I’m sure!’ Daisy said with one of her old, lively grins.

  ‘Cheeky sod!’ Hettie cradled Grace in the crook of her arm as Daisy went on her way to look for Tommy.

  To Hettie’s relief, Jess soon returned to look after the baby.

  ‘Here, give her to me,’ she offered, putting her basket down on the table. She smiled at Grace and grasped hold of her tiny fist. The baby gurgled and puckered her wet lips. ‘How’s she been?’ Jess asked.

  ‘Fine. Sleeping mostly.’ Hettie came up to look, her hair swinging free. ‘Ain’t it time you started to breathe more easy over her, Jess? She’s eight weeks now, and Dr Fry says she’s coming on in leaps and bounds.’

  ‘I ain’t worried no more,’ Jess lied. ‘Leastways, not like at first.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Hettie gave her a hug. She began to tie back her hair in a loose plait. ‘You didn’t half give us a fright,’ she confessed. ‘Both of you. Pa never knew what to do with himself, all that time you was sick.’

  ‘I know that.’ Jess held Grace dose to her cheek. She felt the little fists uncurl, the sharp little nails catch at her lips. She pressed them together and kissed the baby’s fingers.

  Her confidence had grown day by day since the difficult birth. If the pregnancy had been unwanted and fraught with anxieties, and the birth itself a time of searing pain for which no one, not even her own mother, could have prepared her, the weeks since then had been ones of extraordinary fulfilment. Once she came round and held the fragile scrap in her arms, tiny but tenacious, all Jess’s fears and pent-up shame dissolved into nothing. Her strong, life force passed into the little mite and she willed it out of its sickly beginnings into contented babyhood. She would never hear a word of doubt about its survival.

  With Frances’s help in keeping things scrubbed and spotless, Grace soon gained physical strength and was now considered out of danger, a healthy baby. She was still slightly underweight, but gaining fast. And Jess had taken on every aspect of her care with complete dedication, rising in the night, cleaning, washing, feeding with infinite patience and care. The family had soon stopped moving from room to room in a stilted, hushed way, as if present at a death, with Duke’s huge figure sitting bowed by the fireside. He did blame himself for me premature birth; or rather, it was the row he’d had with Frances over the suffragettes that had brought it on.

  He sat and remembered loyal, long-suffering Pattie, her pale face surprisingly sharp in his mind’s eye again after all these years. But the first sight of the baby in Frances’s arms had brought him back to the present. He went in to see Jess, propped up on pillows, ghostly white, too weak to do more than smile as he patted her hand. Illness, so rare in his life, unbalanced him further. Tears came to his eyes.

  ‘Have you taken a look at your granddaughter, Pa?’ Jess whispered.

  Duke nodded without speaking. ‘You hurry up and get well, now,’ he said at last.

  From that moment he doted on Jess and his grandchild. He would want to know when the baby woke, when she slept and fed. He would shut windows against draughts, open them for fresh air, talk of days in the countryside once Jess and Grace were fit to travel. If anyone had even mentioned the circumstances of the baby’s begetting, the family felt he would have killed in Jess’s defence.

  He came upstairs after Jess now for a glimpse of his grandchild and a short break from duty behind the bar, settling at the table with a contented smile. ‘Has she been out for her walk yet?’ he enquired. There was a smell of linen and soap in the room; Jess kept the baby scrupulously clean.

  ‘Not yet, Pa,’ she answered evenly.

  ‘Don’t leave it too late. Get out there in the sunshine and fresh air. Take Sadie with you for company.’

  ‘Sadie’s at Maudie’s.’ Jess wrapped Grace in a fine white shawl and put her back in her crib. ‘Frances and Ern are both at work, Ett’s busy, and I don’t think walking babies is Rob’s cup of tea exactly. Why don’t you come and walk her with me instead?’ This was a daring request, asking for Duke to put the public seal of approval on his illegitimate granddaughter.

  He jumped at it without a second thought, and soon they threaded their way up Duke Street, Jess pushing the high-handled pram, Duke strutting alongside. He took all compliments as his very own, accepting good wishes from neighbours and friends.

  ‘About time, too!’ Annie Wiggin exclaimed. She leaned into the pram, then stood up wreathed in smiles. ‘Ain’t she a picture! I ain’t never hardly seen such a pretty little thing!’

  ‘Oh, Annie,’ Jess demurred.

  ‘Why thank you, Annie!’ Duke beamed back, chest out, head up.

  ‘There’s a couple of yards of spare lace at the back of my stall here. I want you to have it for any little dress or smock you make up for her.’ Annie handed a small packet of tissue paper and lace to a surprised Jess. She held up her hand to wave off protest, ‘I been keeping it handy, hoping I’d catch you. It ain’t nothing much, but I hope it comes in.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, I’m sure.’ Duke took the packet from Jess and put it in his pocket. He smiled again and strolled on, steering them through the crowded market.

  Jess raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Who’d have thought old.’ Annie Wiggin would go all soft over little Grace!’

  ‘Course she would,’ Duke remonstrated. ‘Anyone would. And less of the old. Annie’s a spring chicken.’

  ‘Leave off, Pa. She’s fifty if she’s a day.’ Jess paused, and seeing Ernie pedal by on the far side of the street, raised her hand and gave him a big wave. Ernie wobbled and waved back.

  ‘She’s not. And besides, I’m nearly sixty,’ he reminded her. ‘Old Duke Parsons with a brand new granddaughter.’ They walked on in the sunshine, proud as peacocks.

  He was in a good mood back behind the bar when a new customer came in. Since most of the men had gone to watch the Crystal Palace versus Bury match, business was slack and the newcomer stood out all the more. Smartly dressed in a dark suit and bowler hat, he approached the bar and gave his order. Duke took in his clean-shaven, sallow skin, his confident air. ‘Are you just passing through?’ he enquired, pushing the glass towards him. ‘Or visiting down the court?’

  ‘To tell the truth, I’m looking for a room,’ the young man said pleasantly. ‘I thought the local
pub was as good a place as any to start,’ He took a long draught of the cool beer, glad to be out of the hot sun.

  ‘That’s true,’ Duke said. ‘We get to hear most things.’

  ‘I don’t want nothing flash to start with, just a respectable room till I get set up proper. You heard of anything?’

  Maurice Leigh was moving on from the Balham Empire. He’d been offered the manager’s job at a new picture palace on St Thomas Street at a starting salary of two pounds ten shillings per week. Convinced as he was mat moving pictures was the entertainment form of the future, he’d seized the chance to get a new establishment underway. He was full of plans and bursting with enthusiasm. Lodgings were a minor detail which he hoped to sort out without too much bother.

  Duke studied the stranger. He wouldn’t recommend lodgings unless he approved of the enquirer. By his voice he was East End bom and bred, but not from this neck of the woods exactly; more Bethnal Green. By his looks, his background was Jewish; second, maybe third generation of emigrants from Eastern Europe. Duke was practised in the art of pinning down newcomers. ‘You found work round here?’ he asked with some scepticism. Jobs were still like gold dust, though that might change again as men enlisted and went off to the war. The rumblings had turned into certainty, with the declaration on the 4th of August, even now posters were going up on street-corners calling the young men to arms.

  Maurice nodded and confirmed Duke’s theory. ‘I’m the new manager at the Gem Picture Palace. This area’s nice and handy for my work, see, if I can find a place.’ He drank up, took a watch from his waistcoat pocket and looked about.

  ‘Well, maybe I can help.’ Duke came to the conclusion that the man was a good prospect. ‘It just so happens there’s a room going down Paradise Court.’ He leaned over and gave details of Dolly Ogden’s place. ‘Not grand, of course, but she keeps her place clean. I know for a feet she’s looking for someone. I’d try there if I was you.’