I spent the next hours unpacking and making up an advertisement for the Liverpool newspaper and The Times. The message read, ‘If Mary Claire Kelly, otherwise known as Marie Claire Kelly, late of Whitechapel, London, will communicate with Messrs XYZ of ABC, she will hear something to her advantage.’ I would add the name of my solicitor in London when I had appointed one. The final words, about something to someone’s advantage, will, I know, get any message to the person for whom it’s intended, over mountains and plains at the other end of the world, though it take half a year.
Earlier than eight a subdued Dora was carrying up pails of hot water for my bath and before nine I was dressed and out, my sleepless night only affecting me by making me quicker and more energetic, though I imagined I would pay for it later.
First, I went to the bank with my box of valuables, well received by the manager, who then made some effort to establish, since I was a widow, what other man – father, brother, uncle, reliable friend – was responsible for me and my fortune. Perhaps because of my bad night I did not give him my usual soft answer, but told him I believed I had heard that, thanks to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, I was now responsible for my own money and property, being over the age of twenty-one, and that I had no need of other help.
‘I hope so, my dear lady,’ he responded, a warning in his tone. ‘I do sincerely hope so.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied and, as they say, swept out with my nose in the air.
To the solicitor, Mr Ratcliffe of Ratcliffe and Ratcliffe in Mitre Court, I was more civil. I went there simply because I had heard Ratcliffe’s name used by one of my old customers in Calgary, poor Joey Fitzgerald, who had died of consumption. It was Mr Ratcliffe who forwarded from London the money he was always awaiting in Calgary. His family, he sometimes said when drunk, paid him to stay away. Sometimes, again when he was drunk, he wrote to them, pathetic scribbles of apology, asking forgiveness for some unspecified crime. They never wrote back. So that there would be no contact with him at all, they employed Mr Ratcliffe to send him remittances.
The frontiers have their complement of these young men from prosperous families, sent out to make a life for themselves because there is no future for them in England, or sometimes, like Joey, because they have done wrong. Only when they have been dispatched thousands of miles can the family again hold up their heads, their disgrace being well away in desert, in jungle or on the prairie. These poor fellows succeed or fail – or just die like poor Joey, killed as much by homesickness as anything else, I daresay. What terrible crime he had committed I never found out – gambling money he didn’t have, getting a girl into trouble, something like that. Whatever it was, I don’t suppose it was much by Whitechapel standards. Well, so be it. He had died one winter in his shack, snow coming under his door, fire out and a bottle of hooch to hand. And I had come back alive.
Ratcliffe was a calm, thin man of forty or so, behind a mahogany desk in a solid but dusty office. He had a young family upstairs, I guessed, judging by the sounds. I explained I had heard of him from a certain Joseph Fitzgerald, whom, I claimed, my husband and I had tried to assist in Canada. Ratcliffe agreed to take care of the deeds of my house and farmland and to act as my man of business in London if necessary.
I told him the Scottish widow story briefly, but although he had a long, grave, thin face very suitable for a respectable solicitor, he had quick eyes, and a trick of raising his eyebrows in enquiry which made me suspect a sceptical, and tolerant, turn of mind. He was barely worth trying to deceive, but I felt it was only civil to seem to try. I explained that adverse circumstances, family difficulties, the long distance between us, had caused me to lose touch completely with my sisters, and that I was now attempting to find them. Would he, I asked, accept letters and messages for me, as I was not sure what my movements would be? He suggested newspaper advertisements, an approach to the police, and, if that failed, he thought a private detective might be of assistance. He could recommend a reliable man. I told him that if my own enquiries failed I would certainly consult him.
‘If you feel equal to the toil and difficulty …’ he said uneasily.
‘A duty’, I assured him, ‘I am happy to undertake.’
But he still looked doubtful.
I thought, as I left, My God, pretending to be a member of the weaker sex, while still managing your own affairs, doesn’t half take it out of a woman. Then, full of excitement, I jumped on a bus for the first time in eight years, paid my twopence, sat down beside an old man in a silk hat and was carried off through the wide busy streets of London, not knowing whether to laugh or burst out crying.
Only a few miles from the slums of the East End, all was prosperity – shining carriages waited outside large shops with gleaming glass windows; ladies in large hats and gentlemen in toppers, strolled along; servants in trim uniforms did errands; clerks in bowlers hurried with messages; boys on bicycles with big baskets in front ferried meat and fish to big houses. Who, in these broad and open tree-lined streets, under a blue sky and in late summer sunshine, outside these well-kept houses where the letter-boxes, knockers and bells had been brought to a high polish – who could believe there was anything wrong with the world? The country was at peace, a third of the map was red, we were at the hub of a mighty and benevolent empire. Down Whitehall the Horse Guards stood firm, great ministries ordered the affairs of state and as soon as the members had returned from their holidays, the Mother of Parliaments would be in session. And the theatres would put on new plays.
I began to consider staying in England, setting myself up at ease, where there were no bears or Indians, snowstorms or droughts, where there was plenty of hot water and servants, and a lady was not required to do anything. Indeed, she was under strict orders to do nothing. If that were my choice, then I would marry to make myself respectable, though I was not sure whether, after my independent life, I would be able to submit to a husband in all affairs, nurse him when sick and keep his house as a matter of love, and duty.
I took myself off to the Army and Navy Stores and had a cup of tea in the restaurant. There, I glanced about at the other patrons. There were two respectable middle-aged ladies, both in mourning, with a girl, daughter of one, perhaps, in blue; two dressy ladies with tight waists and high feathers in their big hats; a gaggle of suburban housewives; an old lady in black, with a pale woman in grey, her paid companion, I guessed. The only man there was a ruddy-faced clerical gentleman, free on a weekday of course, and his wife, a bitter-faced matron, a stranger to any joy if ever I saw one.
As the waitresses moved to and fro with their trays, I felt becalmed in a sea of women sheltered from all harm. They were calm-faced, mostly, but it was the calm of an opium addict with his pipe, and, under the calm, as with the addict, who knew what dreams, fevered, mournful or terrifying, swam about? The society ladies in their big hats looked a little more alert; one laughed at something said by the other. One other patron, in a corner to which the waitress was going with a tiered cake-stand laden with confections of every kind, had a cheery look. She stared out the vicar’s wife, whose glance suggested repressively that cream cakes in mid-morning were unsuitable fare, and then turning her glance, caught my eye and gave me half a wink from under a grey silk bonnet, which matched her coat, both items French, if I knew anything. She had rosied up her cheeks, too, though it would have taken a keen eye to detect it. An actress, or a singer perhaps, with a rich protector, or just a girl who’d fallen on her feet? At any rate, being of the same general species, we knew each other. I dropped an eyelid at her, returning the wink, and she settled to her eclairs. Concluding that it was too late for me to join the lady class, I finished my tea. At that moment those worthy ladies, my fellow customers, appeared to me to be only one step up from so many Mohammedan wives, made to wear veils and live behind a screen. I knew I could never manage it, however hard I tried. I might succeed for a while, then I would break out again.
So I set off over the carpeted floors of the
vast emporium to get my shipping order for the Villa Esmeralda settled. A bolt of red silk, a bolt of red taffeta, two of red flannel, two of white, for the realities of a cold climate have to be accepted; a new piano and a pianola and many rolls of music at ten guineas, so we could have tunes when we felt like it, even when the pianist was drunk. I bought two brass bedsteads, a wagon of bed linen, a bale of new chemises, drawers, stockings, lampshades, lamps, canned food of every description. There were times, in the snows, when we’d had to eat moose, and I do not recommend it. Worse if anything, in times when the trains were not getting through, we came close to scurvy for want of fruit and vegetables. I bought netting against insects, netting for the windows. I bought fans for the ceilings, medicines, bandages, splints. (In Calgary we had a doctor, funnily enough, a woman. The Canadians make few difficulties for lady doctors, only too pleased, I suppose, to have one at all in the wilderness.) I bought facial lotions, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, a gallon of lavender water and rouge, and powder from a discreet lady assistant in a corner. I bought insect killers of every kind, candies for the girls, a fancy dog-collar for Dolly Halloran’s mongrel dog, the only creature she loved in the world, and bangles, beeswax, new pans for cooking, a patent bottle opener, louse combs. In short, I bought everything necessary for a large household, if of an unusual kind, situated in a wild place where the railway had only just established itself.
I had seen some time ago that I would have to establish a superior sort of business. Because of the railway a higher kind of civilization and better standards of life were emerging. My clientele was changing and I sensed would change further. There would be more lonely clerks and storekeepers, and unsatisfied respectable farmers married to wives in their sixth pregnancy, fewer trappers, loggers and cowboys, no railway navvies at all. The last had been all too ready to take a squaw on a blanket at the back of a barn, if that was all there was on offer, and at the start of my career that often was all. In any case, many of them were fit only for those conditions, being dirty and lousy and uncouth after so many years away from any kind of civilization. But times were changing fast. I dreamed of discovering a girl here who could play the piano well and sing. Even if she had a wooden leg and a glass eye, I’d import her, along with the beds, the rouge and the pianola.
For my loyal half-breed I ordered a full dress suit: trousers, stiff shirt, silk hat, tail coat, even down to the white kid gloves and silk-lined cloak. I knew he would like the suit, for he’d often pored over the picture of a gentleman going into an opera house in a story in a magazine we had. On the other hand, when he put it on he might find it enormously restricting, after his buckskins. And I knew he would wear all this finery with moccasins, for he couldn’t wear shoes. If he would not wear the suit in the end because it constrained his movements too much, I would make him do so on special occasions, for I couldn’t resist thinking of the impression he’d make, a giant, with his long black hair coming down from under a silk hat, perfectly dressed for a West End evening (but for his moccasins). The assistant who took the measurements from me scarcely believed the size of the man and thought, I believe, I had made some mistake.
I bought a new, splendid mouth organ for the Negro who hung around the place, sometimes singing his plantation songs for the customers and doing that lively nigger dance they call Jump, Jim Crow. To be quite candid, this was the purchase I most enjoyed making, when all else was done, for at night he would sometimes sit alone on the verandah in the dark, playing and singing sad, barbaric songs I found most affecting. In spite of their strange rhythms and tunelessness they seemed to call up and yet soothe pains and troubles I was not conscious of in my daily life. They were quite different from the songs with which he used to entertain his masters, when he was a slave in Mississippi as a young man. Freed, he became a roamer, and washed up on my shore, old and broken. What had happened to him in life I don’t know. He was nearly beyond all speech. He mumbled. His sentences were confused and sometimes meant nothing to me. He could still sing, play phrases on the piano sometimes. It was as if the music was more deeply embedded in his mind than speech. Perhaps this is so with all of us – drunks and small children, beyond or before rational speech, still sing, or try to.
Sometimes, his discordant songs, which must have had their origins long ago in the jungles of Africa, became unbearably painful to me. I would shout, ‘Shut your row, nigger’ and pretend I hated it, but I think he, whom we called Blackie, knew better.
So from there, my commissions done, I skipped luncheon and left the busy but orderly streets full of wealth and luxury and took a bus to Whitechapel High Street, passing the stalls, selling vegetables, fried foods, old clothes, and turned off up Commercial Street. There were warehouses on either side, two churches, the Baptist facing the Anglican from opposite sides of the street. From the Jews’ school came a high-pitched chant as they recited their tables or whatever inside. Then I went down Goulston Street, crowded and full of smells, rubbish, children and dogs, as it had been when I left, only now it was worse, if anything, and asked at the Bull’s Head for Mr Murgatroyd’s. There was a big house, claimed the barman, on the next corner, and that was Murgatroyd’s. He gave me a curious look, which changed into an ugly one. He told me, ‘No point in asking him for lodgings.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘He don’t take Jews. He can’t abide them.’ His expression told me that for his part he endorsed Murgatroyd’s sentiments.
‘I’m not a Jew,’ I said.
‘That’s your business. I’m just warning you, Murgatroyd’s got no time for Cohens and Levis.’
It seemed a good idea to leave, so I did. It was probably my dark hair, oval face and pallid, or ivory if you like, complexion which had made him think me some Jewish woman. The native East Enders are of course often golden-haired, with blue eyes, and call to mind the old Roman declaration about the British captives in Rome: ‘These are not Angles, but angels.’ This helps them detect strangers in their midst and persecute them. Their attitude is best summed up by the cartoon in Punch. Two hobbledehoys are standing shoeless in the street. ‘’Ere, Bert,’ says one to the other, ‘there’s a foreigner. ’Eave ’alf a brick at ’im.’
Nevertheless, when I got into New Goulston Street I saw that since I was last there it had become partly a Jewish colony. Dark children played in the street, their mothers, outside on chairs, sewing for dear life, making cigarettes or preparing food, called out to them in German. A lot of the shops had foreign names, Nathan, Stegenburg, Zuse. The houses let out the smell of foreign dishes. But it was still the same old place, people coming out of the fried fish shop with newspapers containing their dinners, a boy struggling along with a bale of striped ticking for his mother and sisters to sew up into pillowcases and mattress covers, a girl of ten, carrying a baby in the crook of her arm, holding a shopping bag with her hand and leading a toddler with the spare one, a mouldy-looking dog nosing in a gutter where sat a dirty child with blonde curls and an equally dirty one with black curls, the black-haired one jabbering away while the blonde one, sucking her thumb, stared, wide eyed, probably wondering why she could not understand a word of the other child’s speech.
A young, fair man with a horse and cart stood talking to another at the end of the street. I could tell from the tension in the first man’s manner that, although he liked the other man, a dark Jew in a black jacket, he was trying not to, was trying to keep a distance between them. Come nightfall he and a band of mates would be roaming the street looking for a Jew to beat up, on principle, and he wouldn’t want to look down in the darkness and notice he was kicking in the ribs of a man he’d been speaking to in a friendly fashion earlier on in the day.
As I approached I could see the house outside which the men stood was bigger, not like the narrow two- or three-storey houses on either side of the street. It was a wreck now, with green slime trailing down where the gutters had broken, and cracked windows wedged up with bits of wood. The peeling front door was propped open with a big
stone from another part of the building. A prosperous home once, it was now falling to pieces. Inside it would be a kind of crazy-house, where large rooms had been split up to make several small ones, people were living eight to a room, and any garden there once had been would be filled with shacks, sheds, and outhouses.
By now I was quite excited, thinking I might find Mary Jane inside, or at least get recent news of her.
‘Is this Murgatroyd’s?’ I asked the man with the horse and cart. I was not dressed for this area. I was very clean. My complexion was fresh as no London complexion, even a well-tended one, ever can be, because of the smoke and grime. He looked at me stonily, thinking I had come to interfere about something or other.
I just stepped into the hall where, on the cracked tiles, a lean dog was scratching itself vigorously. The hall itself was broad, with a battered, once imposing staircase up the middle, banisters missing, used for firewood no doubt; on either side of the stairs at the back of the hall, two sacking curtains hung down. In the space behind them someone, or several, were living. I saw the sacking bulge out as a body came against it. I was probably under observation. There were doors to right and left. I planned to begin by knocking on the nearest, but having seen three children, the eldest a girl of about seven, sitting half-way up the stairs, I paused and said, ‘Good-day.’ They stared back at me doubtfully. The girls had boots. The boys, about five and two, wore plaid bedroom slippers. Their little legs were thin and pale, like stalks. They were clean, wan, underfed children, and probably their mother was trying to keep them good, not allowing them to play in the street alongside the shameless, barefoot lice-ridden urchins who roamed around in packs, getting into bad ways. I pitied those children. My mother too, before overwork and drink broke her down, had tried to keep us respectable, made us stay in the house within call, while she sewed, and sewed and sewed. As I came through the door I’d spotted the big sister trying to amuse her brother with a cat’s cradle made out of yarn, heard her singing, with the little one, ‘Humpty, Dumpty sat on a wall’, seen her eye attracted by something happening in the street outside, where I’d heard a child’s voice call, ‘Come on, Tom. Hurry up!’ Now they sat silently, looking down at me.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 6
