The Cry from Street to Street

by Hilary Bailey

  Little arrangements of this kind are common in every society and in every country where the white man has set his foot, thank God, and in this way, only a few short years later, I had my lovely wooden house, which I christened Esmeralda’s, with its verandah, on the outskirts of Calgary where it would not offend the respectable. Downstairs, a bar and space for dancing. Upstairs, for the girls, bedrooms done up in the very best of style. I also owned a piece of well-watered land further off which I rented for grazing to cattlemen bringing steers to the railhead. Hard work and useful tips from the customers made me a wealthy woman – a far cry from the East End where I was born and where I was nervously returning, not because I wanted to, but because I knew I must.

  I was not born in Whitechapel at all but in a small, yellow-brick house in a respectable street in Hackney. All the houses were joined together. There was a patch of garden at the back where my father, a railway signalman, planted potatoes and cabbages, and an even smaller patch at the front, where faded grass and a rosebush grew. A featureless street, dry and dusty in childhood, or cold, or hot as you dragged back with mother, and the shopping, baby sister whimpering in the pram. Then we would re-enter the house, to a well-banked fire in winter or lemonade in summer, read, play in the garden, be calm and safe. I was the oldest, Marie Anne; next down, a year younger, was Marie Claire; then, after that, eighteen months younger still, the baby Marie Jeanne (my mother was French and had been a seamstress with a famous dressmaker in the West End before she married). When we went to school, of course, in the classroom we became plain Mary Anne, Mary Claire and Mary Jane.

  We grew up pretty, intelligent, lively girls, two of us resembling our mother, dark, with dark eyes and slender bodies, Marie Jeanne blonde and ruddy, resembling my father, a big, fair Irishman. Leading us all to church on Sundays dressed in our best, he would call us the Big Frog and his three Little Frogs.

  It was indeed a dull street we lived in, one of many long, straight streets, all new yellow houses, a Baptist church on one corner here, a little grocer’s there, quiet pubs, a drab little park – nothing special or remarkable about it at all. The man next door worked as a tram driver. The man on the other side left for the West End each day in a dark suit. He worked in the gentlemen’s section of a department store, selling shirts. He was Mr Lloyd. Mrs Lloyd was a jolly woman, with five children. The oldest, Alice, had golden ringlets, and was my friend. If we had stayed there, I suppose I would have become bored in the end, but it soon ended, so I never got the chance. I remember the winter evenings with father reading his paper in a chair by the kitchen range while mother ironed, or mended, or made a little dress for one of us, her three Marys.

  We were Catholics, my father Sean, or John, Kelly having come over as a boy from Ireland during the dreadful famine. My mother had prosperous grandparents, it seemed, Calais merchants, but her mother had run off and married a French seaman, and the family had rejected her. The seaman had given up the sea when four children were born, and gone to work in a small brass foundry in Kentish Town. My parents had met when my mother was taking her father his dinner and a jug of beer there and Sean Kelly had come in to ask them if they could knock out the dents on a much prized brass plate, crushed by a door falling off its hinges in some farcical domestic episode. They often spoke of this fallen door, without which, they argued, they would never have met.

  Then when I was eight, Mary Claire seven and Mary Jane only five, my father began to have pains in his abdomen, dying, in the end, of a growth in his stomach.

  The operation they gave him to get it out when it was large enough to feel, and be identified as the source of his trouble, killed him. His pension was small, only ten shillings a week. We were forced to move from our house into lodgings. My mother took in sewing to try to keep us, but things nevertheless went down and down. We moved into worse rooms, then worse still. Mother had herself and three growing children to keep, and work as she would, with the sewing machine going day and night, making men’s shirts for a shilling, hemming mounds of sheets for ninepence each, the work was never sufficiently well paid or regular enough to provide. We continued the downward spiral, ending up in one garret room in Whitechapel, with three beds in it and everything else we needed. If my mother had had some luck, or some harder determination, if she’d been prepared to find me employment in a workshop where children illegally rolled cigarettes or made string or buttons, if she’d even grieved less for my father, we might have survived better. As it was, man’s oldest enemies, poverty, hunger and cold, were bound, pretty much, to win in the end.

  My mother found something to keep her on her feet during this unequal battle and what she found was a pint of porter or a threepennyworth of gin of an evening. The pint inevitably turned into two, the threepennyworth into sixpennyworth and so on and so forth, until the drink ceased to help, and started to hinder. Not that she ever sank to the level of those hatless, dirty women, staggering and shouting, singing in the street or just silently reeling on from corner to corner, not knowing where they were going. Still, you may picture our little family at that time, just like a sentimental picture in a magazine. In our clean garret – for at least it always was clean – there would be mother, sewing, two pretty little girls, cleanly but poorly dressed, quietly helping with their needles, while the littlest plays with an old doll. The last of a dozen soldiers’ tunics must be made by next day, at tenpence each, the work given out by a man who has to deliver four score by Tuesday, at one shilling each, and so thousands of tunics back to the fat man in Manchester, who spun the cloth and will deliver them to the War Ministry at five shillings each.

  The pretty pictures never depict true want – the cold in winter, heat in summer, the weight of the buckets that had to be hauled upstairs to clean the floor, the fight against bugs and lice, the pain in the fingers forcing a needle through serge. They don’t even show the beds, stretched across the room, and with the table, leaving hardly room to turn round. Nor do they (unless in another picture) show the weary children in bed, waking to hear mother’s unsteady footsteps coming up the stairs, later on her body stretched across her bed in her clothes in the morning. What mother did, drunk or sober, was get us, even if hungry, to school. She always spoke to us gently and never struck us. She fed us when she could. In the end she had worked and worried herself into the grave. At twelve I was apprenticed to a milliner and at fourteen I had abandoned a life of making hats for fashionable women in favour of making money for myself, in the only way I knew. Ably assisted, I hardly need to say, by my good friend Jim Bristow, at the time only seventeen himself, but old in the ways of the world.

  A year later my mother died – she said, of my disgrace, but I think of work and worry. At any rate, when she died she died in a clean bed, with a doctor calling and food in the house for her and us girls, all purchased with the good coin of my disgrace, the wages of sin.

  I remember a Salvation Army band coming down our way one afternoon, and once they’d collected a crowd, listening to the music, a woman in a blue uniform and bonnet stood up on a box and addressed a drizzled-on crowd of respectable women with shopping, urchins who should have been at school, street corner layabouts and costermongers. She said, I remember, ‘Though some of you are besmirched, you can be clean. The Lord Jesus will cleanse you white as snow.’ A trader cried from his stall, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive-alive-oh, penny a cup, halfpenny to pretty girls and sinners.’ And I reflected that smutted and besmirched was only the half of it, or a quarter. If that woman but knew it, much of the crowd were filthy in and out.

  I felt low after that, for a few days, and considered changing my ways for the better because, after all, I was brought up religious, but I was not persuaded enough. In the end, we needed money, and the price of a woman’s snow-white soul worked out at about a shilling a day while I could get half-crowns, five shillings and half-guineas by pulling down my drawers. Later I heard that General Booth, the man who set up the Salvation Army, concluded, and said, that the choice for
us girls was to starve or sin, which showed he knew a lot more than his missionary woman on her box in the street. He was right. The same is true for men also, half the time. Looking back, I resented his dispatching a woman who had never known want in her life to Whitechapel Road to stand up in front of all and sundry and address us on the topic of sin.

  My Russian, Ivan Somethingovich, the man who taught me to shoot, told me life was a matter of who had money, and who not, and God had nothing to do with it. He was by way of wanting to shoot and blow up the wealthy, had escaped the Tsar who persecuted him for these views, and joined the railway gang, where a strong back is enough and you can say what you please. He might have offered to marry me, he said, but would not, since marriage was against his religion. I responded that it was also against mine, as it seemed to me all too often for a woman it was a kind of respectable workhouse.

  As we drew closer to Southampton I grew more nervous. I stayed in my cabin a fair amount, to be alone, and without my suitors, Baverstock and Brown. One morning, made restless by the confinement, I went on deck to sit and look out towards England, hoping to be soothed by sight of the sea, but always wondering how matters would go for me when I arrived. I wore my white dress, with lace insertions in the neck and wrists, white shoes and big shady hat, and felt every inch a lady.

  As I sat, I tried to read, but my eyes kept wandering to the horizon, and the sight did not soothe, for I was bursting to arrive, restless, after a week of inaction, and yet I feared what I should find on my arrival. Then a lady joined me, and asked if she might sit beside me, which I welcomed to some extent as I knew her presence would deter my prowling suitors – men, like lions and tigers, prefer to hunt prey when it’s out of the herd.

  The lady, Amanda McKay, was middle-aged and got up too warmly in an ugly coat and skirt, made, she told me, out of her family tartan, or plaid. She was returning from a post as governess in the household of a Member of Parliament in Ottawa to nurse her widowed sister in Aberdeen.

  I encouraged Miss McKay to talk, having no wish to answer any questions from her side, for my story aboard ship was that I was the widow of a Scottish engineer, a Mr Frazer, and was returning to live with his parents in Scotland after his untimely death of fever. Largely ignorant of Scotland, except for what my patron, Mr Hamilton of the Mounted Police, had told me, I did not want to discuss too closely any details of the situation of my imaginary parents-in-law, so I encouraged her to speak of her own history. I heard much of her three brothers, one a minister, one a ship’s engineer and one an officer killed at Omdurman, fighting against the Mad Mahdi. She spoke also of her sisters, their confinements, children et cetera et cetera, and of her childhood, glum enough, it seemed to me, but without want as my own had been. I remembered the blue dresses mother had sewed for the three of us before father died, while he smoked his pipe and drank a glass of beer and read to us from Dickens, for he was a book-loving man as the Irish often are, and I imagine it is from him I get my habit of persistent reading.

  As we ladies both watched the smoke from another ship on the horizon, Ethan Baverstock came up bringing a deck-chair so that he could sit with us. He told us of his business, meat packing in Chicago, flourishing more and more now the cattle could be shipped by train rather than arriving thin and worn after long cattle drives across country. I responded with my tales of the encampments on the prairie as the Canadian railway was built (my imaginary husband, Mr Frazer, standing in for the gentleman I had actually accompanied).

  I did not, of course, tell them my real history or reveal that my present prosperity had begun with bringing whores in wagons to the navvy camps in the Rockies. They were fearsome journeys, especially at the beginning of winter, when the snows began, and hard going when we arrived, but there was money, a great deal of it for all, and as we departed, the women flat out in the carts, we jingled as we went. The lonely men would stand on the track a mile from their camp, cheering as we arrived, running down to try to jump on the wagons for the rest of the journey, but we were guarded by a big half-breed called Johnny, with hair to his shoulders, and a small strong Irishman, Pat, both with rifles, so no disorder arose. In other places the whores came into the camps by train along the existing track, but out of respect for my erstwhile lover, even though he was sadly deteriorated by his drink and smuggled opium, the other engineers in charge would not offer me this facility. Though half the time they were doing his work as well as their own, they still supported his cause, feeling that by abandoning him to set up in business as a whore I somehow degraded him. So our journey was far longer, more uncomfortable and dangerous than it needed to be. But it’s natural for men to stand by each other, I suppose.

  Anyway, it was from those journeys that I made enough money to build my new house, outside of town, and buy out my partner, Mr Hamilton, to his profit, whereupon he purchased from their landlord the humble croft in the Highlands in which his parents lived, though I don’t suppose he told them where the money came from. Just before the journey became too long and difficult for us, before the two sides of the railway joined up at Eagle Pass in 1885, a sickness hit the camp and we took it, too. The Irishman, Pat, and five of the women died within days of each other on the journey back. They were the Indians, Betsey and Flora, the half-breed, Hannah Long, who sang like a bird, Josephine O’Mahey and the woman from Bath, Nellie Rose, who had come out as wife to a track layer and fallen on hard times when he was killed in an explosion. The news went back to the camp and some of the men came down to help with the burial and make markers for their graves among the trees in the foothills of the mountains. When we arrived sadly back in town only I, Dolly Halloran, Frenchy Stillwater and the silent half-witted girl we called Vanya were left in the two wagons. It was a sad blow, and I wondered what to do next, with my big house half built, including a bathroom a duke would envy and a piano coming in all the way from Winnipeg and with women, especially white women, like gold dust in those parts. And white women are an attraction in a house like mine, that can’t be denied.

  Naturally, as I told Mr Baverstock some tales of the building of the railway, I did not say any of this. Nor did I tell him that part of my reason for returning to Whitechapel was to recruit ten or fifteen pretty young women for my house in Calgary. In fact, if I got enough, I was ready to start up a new saloon in Regina or Medicine Hat in due course. I even dreamed of a theatre, too, for men in those parts crave entertainment, which I love myself.

  Meanwhile Marcus Brown, the tall Englishman, joined us, revealing for the first time that he was returning to England after the death of an uncle. I think, from sheer nervous anxiety and restlessness, I must have begun to make eyes at him – in a polite way, mind you, more like a widow aboard a ship than a tart in a saloon wearing a red petticoat and no drawers. Nonetheless, I did it. The danger of our trade which I know but sometimes cannot avoid is a craving for attention, excitement and excess. In that life there is always something doing – a row between women, hair pullings and petticoat tearings, drunk men acting flamboyantly or violently. In my house I make them give up their guns at the door, but men used to a hard life can still make plenty of trouble without firearms. There’s always movement and event in the life of a whore, drinking and gambling, wins and losses, rumours of theft, murder and hold-up and, at the back of all, always, fear of violence offered by the men. We are always over-stimulated, our nervous systems always strained, our senses agitated and in the end, unless careful, we come to demand excitement as some crave drink or laudanum. It takes one’s mind away from the dismalness, the discomforts of the trade; and the contempt. In any case, we generally have short lives. We depend on youth and good looks for our trade and lead the life which destroys both. By and large, we live hard and die young and for us an early death may be a blessing. To consider that life in cold blood while you are leading it is unbearable. So, as I spoke to Brown, that old, vicious mixture of boredom and agitation overtook me. All this, taken with my anticipations of the future, made me so restless that, as
we steamed steadily over the calm sea to Southampton, I forced myself from my seat and, saying I felt the beginnings of a headache, took to my cabin. Mr Brown, stimulated by my unsuitably challenging demeanour, was, I knew, disappointed by this departure.

  I lay down in my bunk, thinking of my sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane. ‘Look after your sisters,’ my mother had told me before she sank into a final coma. They had been almost her last words, and the most important. I had been fifteen, Mary Claire fourteen, a fairly sober girl, though pretty and with many sweethearts, working selling hats in a shop in Mayfair, and Mary Jane had been twelve, and even then given to disappearing and coming in late without explanation. And I had not looked after my sisters. I had excitements and problems of my own. I saw that the rent was paid. I spent a night now and again in the two small rooms we had then. I lectured my sisters, lost my temper and went out again. I was not a good girl looking after my sisters and they were not good girls either. They resented me, stole my silk stockings, called me a whore and refused my orders to scrub the floor and the like. So things were bad and got worse between us, and in the end, of course, I ran away to America. I thought nothing of this for years, but when I became rich and settled I began to ponder about them and about the broken promise to my mother. Now I was going to find them, if I could. I feared the worst, too, that perhaps through my abandonment of them, one or the other, or both, had died or got into bad trouble.

  I had sent a message to Mrs Mundy, a fairly trustworthy woman who ran a beerhouse in Commercial Street, asking her to get news of them and tell them, if she could, that I was coming. I had requested her earnestly to tell no one else, except her son, who for the neighbourhood was a strangely contained young man, not kindly or sympathetic, but intelligent. I hoped she was keeping to my instructions for I did not want to find Jim Bristow or any of the old lot at Mrs Mundy’s as soon as I arrived, their hands out for Canadian gold.