The Cry from Street to Street

by Hilary Bailey

  Rosie shook her head, making a face. ‘The Old Nicholl. Blimey.’

  ‘I’ll go and look for her.’

  ‘Not at this time of night,’ Rosie exclaimed. The Old Nicholl was the worst part of the East End slums, full of gangs. Policemen there patrolled in pairs.

  ‘No – not tonight,’ I said and yawned.

  Rosie stood and stretched. ‘You’re tired and I must love you and leave you, as the soldier said. I’ve promised my room a good turnout tomorrow. Will you come and visit me?’

  I said I would. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Rose,’ I said, as we went to the door.

  ‘Likewise,’ she told me. ‘Cheerio, Cora, my darling. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  We parted in the street, she strolling off in her tatty finery as if she hadn’t a care in the world. ‘Cheerio, my dear,’ she called. I heard her singing as she walked alone up the middle of the dark street. ‘Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay, my drawers flew away, They came back yesterday, let’s hope they’re here to stay.’

  ‘Shut up,’ called a voice from an upper window.

  ‘All right, my dear,’ Rosie called back confidently.

  I, more sober, walked back to my lodgings, reflecting that, though less cheery, I had fewer burdens than Rosie. For one thing, she’d been cast out by her family on account of her way of life. They’d even read the Jewish funeral service over her, which meant she was dead to them henceforth, and I know this upset her. Still, I reflected, she would make a most promising recruit for my Canadian enterprise. She was clean, sober on the whole, sensible and energetic and I now knew she wanted to leave the East End.

  I was extremely exhausted when I reached Fleet Street. I’d only arrived recently, had slept badly and had been running round London all day and now it was the early hours of the morning. My only hope was for a long, undisturbed sleep, well into Friday morning. I washed, brushed out my hair, got into my nightdress and lay down. I was asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow – but not for long.

  A voice, in my dream, kept singing jovially, ‘Good for any game at night, boys, Champagne Charlie is my name. Good for any game at night, boys …’ I gazed at a sickly ape in little red trousers and a red fez perched on a barrel organ in a crowded street. Oh, the horror of that little creature. Its eyes watered. ‘I’m going to marry Yum-yum, yum-yum,’ it sang. ‘Going to marry Yum-yum.’ The barrel organ ground out a tune from the music halls, ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery’. Then a creature caught me against a wall in a square of black, blind-eyed buildings. A hand, a paw, came over my mouth; a face, or a muzzle, was pressed to mine in a reek of liquorice. I woke, suffocating. It was no dream, I quickly realized. There was a hard and heavy hand over my mouth. My eyes darted from side to side round the dark room. Only a little light came through a crack in the curtains. The rest was pitch black. And above me was a dark figure, with one knee on the bed, I guessed, and one hard hand pressed over my mouth, while the other was on my shoulder, holding me down. I began to toss my head violently, attempting to dislodge the hand enough to get my teeth into it. A familiar voice then said, ‘Don’t thrash about so, girl. It’s only me. If I take my hand away, will you be quiet?’ He released the pressure on my mouth enough to enable me to nod.

  The hands were removed from my face and shoulder. I struggled up. My attacker now sat near me on the bed, near enough to fall on me and silence me, or prevent me from moving, if he wished. I stared, in the dim light, at the man who had apparently got through the locked and bolted doors downstairs (I had seen to all this myself when I came in). Unless that silly Dora let out her lover later and left the back door unlocked, he would have had to climb the drainpipe at the front in a city street, seldom empty, then swing off it to get on to the bedroom windowsill four feet away, push up the bedroom window silently, and climb in without waking me. Jim Bristow could have done such a thing, had done such things in the past – and had done it now.

  I suppose it was a relief the intruder was Jim. Unless things had changed much for the worse, he wouldn’t murder me for my hairbrushes.

  ‘Well, Jim,’ I said in a low voice, for I did not want a disturbance, ‘this is an unusual way to call. Couldn’t you have knocked at the door, like anybody else?’ As I spoke, and he listened, I snatched my Colt from under a pillow to my right (I was sleeping on the left side of the bed) and at the same time rolled over and out, which left me standing beside the bed aiming my gun at him. This he had not expected. Men of Jim’s kind expect coshes or knives, not guns, which are for the gentry. And none of these weapons in the hands of a woman.

  He recovered quickly and said, ‘Don’t shoot. I don’t mean any harm.’

  I kept my finger on the trigger, so he could see it, though. I had no real idea of shooting. I did not think he meant to attack me. The Jims of this world do not harm women, unless they have said they love them. As for me, I had no wish to kill him. It would only have been for revenge and he had done to me no more than what thousands and thousands of men have done to women. If all women with no more grudge than I took to shooting their menfolk, they would have to recruit all the others as gravediggers.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I demanded.

  ‘Let me light the gas,’ he said, ‘so we can see each other.’

  ‘I don’t want to see you, Jim,’ I told him. ‘Leave now and we’ll say no more about it. Otherwise, I’ll raise the alarm and say you came to rob me. How did you find me, anyway?’

  ‘Followed you from Mundy’s,’ he replied promptly.

  That was the reason for Cora’s shifty looks. The old bitch had told him how to find me.

  ‘I only wanted to talk to you,’ he said, ‘for old times’ sake.’

  And all the more, I thought, now he’d looked round the room, spotted the silver appointments of my dressing-table, the long string of amethysts I’d taken off the day before, and looped over the side of the mirror before I set off for the East End. Not that Cora Mundy, during her revelations, wouldn’t have told him ‘an old friend of yours, Mary Kelly’s, back’, but without adding ‘done very nicely for herself, by all appearances’.

  ‘Old times’ sake, eh, Jim?’ I said. My tone must have been grim for my finger suddenly began to itch on the trigger. He’d taken the money I’d earned dropping my drawers in the dark for all and sundry, sent me off to Old Fanny Baines for a dirty abortion and abandoned me when it nearly killed me, and from this, or from the disease I’d caught, I’d fetched up half a woman, lucky not to be dead. For a moment I thought it might be worth shooting him, purely for the principle of the thing, and putting up with all the trouble of appearing soberly costumed at the Old Bailey, shaken and sobbing, claiming I’d woke up to find a burglar rifling my jewellery box. Anyway, he caught the hanging judge note in my voice and said, ‘Come on, Mary dear, let me light the gas.’

  ‘Light it then,’ I said.

  He took the matches from the mantelpiece and stretched up to light the gas mantles. When he turned, he flinched a bit, seeing me clearly with my hair down, in my nightdress, holding a gun pointed at him, with an expression on my face, I’m sure, like the statue of Justice.

  In my turn, I saw a figure in a greasy-looking black waistcoat, bright bandanna round his throat, shirt not fresh for a week, black trousers and patent leather shoes, somewhat cracked and dirty. A moulting peacock, Jim was not tall, though he was strong as one of those weeds which put down obstinate roots in city soil. His dark hair was a stubble, which probably meant he’d been in gaol and had his head shaved. His face was pale and plainly his last bath had been months before. As Cora Mundy had put it, things hadn’t gone well for him recently.

  He shifted uneasily in a way I remembered, but demanded boldly, ‘What’s going on? I’m not a bloody Indian tribe you need to hold off with a gun.’ (So Cora had added even more information, I noted, such as where I’d been.) He continued, ‘It’s me, Jim, and I’ve come to help you. Put the pistol down and let’s talk.’

  I didn’t, so he went
on, rapidly, ‘See here – Cora Mundy tells me you’re wandering Whitechapel at night, looking for Mary Jane. For a start, that’s dangerous. You need a man about you for work like that, as well you know. And, moreover, I can help you track her down. Gun or no gun, Mary, you need some help and protection. God knows what life you must have been living,’ he added piously, ‘to have to sleep with something like that under your pillow. But the point is, if you really want to find Mary Jane, you need a man who knows what’s what to go about with you and protect you.’

  Yes, I thought, a half-breed Indian six feet tall, paid to do so. With him, I felt safe. With Jim Bristow, never. The fact was that even crouched in the steerage of a ship beating up and down in the Atlantic, on my way to a place I knew nothing about 3000 miles away, I’d felt easier in my mind than I had in London with Jim. His eye quickly lit on the silver-framed photograph of Esmeralda’s which stood on the dressing-table. It showed the house with tall pines behind. The Indian was standing barefoot on the verandah with his shotgun. Jim glanced back at me quickly, smiling his charmer’s smile, ‘Anyway, like it or not, there was always something between us,’ he told me.

  He had not come up a drainpipe at two in the morning to persuade me to go to church. He hoped to seduce me, thus the liquorice he had chewed to disguise the smell of tobacco and whatever he had drunk, perhaps even the empty-belly reek of his breath.

  I said, ‘Whatever there might have been between us was a long time ago. I don’t need you, Jim. You’d better get out.’

  ‘Charming woman you’ve turned into,’ said he, going out of the room and across the sitting-room as if to the door. Half-way across, he turned. ‘I know where Mary Jane is.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Don’t, then,’ he advised with his hand on the doorknob. I dropped my hand, with the gun in it, to my side.

  With the door open he turned again, to face me. ‘If you want to find out where Mary is, meet me at the Ten Bells at ten o’clock tomorrow night.’

  He was grappling, like a wrestler for a good hold, one that would make me feel the pain of it. He had planned to catch me at a disadvantage, alone, at night, in bed, and take advantage of the apprehension any woman must feel in that situation. If it led to some love passages between us, so much, he would consider, the better. His aim would be to make me fear, or love him – or both – for that was the way of it between Jim Bristow and the women he knew. My producing a gun had overturned his plans, yet I knew in the end I would get nothing from him unless I played the part he expected – I, powerless, begging and imploring, he powerful, giving or refusing at his discretion. So I agreed to meet him. ‘Leave your lover at home,’ he told me, nodding at my revolver, then left.

  I went down some minutes later, to lock the door and draw the bolts after him. I came up again and slammed and bolted my bedroom window. If I had not left it open, Jim would not have been able to ease it up and creep in.

  Then I lay down on my bed, and found myself drifting off into a kind of stupor. The room still smelt of Jim, his unfresh clothes and body, and behind that unmistakable odour the very essence of Whitechapel poverty. With it came over me the old Whitechapel fatigue. This is caused by men and women eating and sleeping when they can, not when they ought, by being kept awake by lice, bedbugs, crying babies, shouting drunks, or hunger, or rolling home drunk at three, or by rising at three to queue for work – in docks and markets, unloading a wagon of threshing sheep or bucking cows, brought in late at night – or by walking the streets till dawn, or rising all night to tend fretful children. This fatigue, and the depletion of body and mind it brings, is one of the faces of want. The well-off take their rest, the poor doze when they can, and are often startled awake; the well-off have stocked larders, the poor shop ten times a day, for tea in a screw of paper, a gill of milk, a herring, a slice of soap. The well-off clean their homes, the poor pick up a rag, try to wipe a floor clean, the baby cries, they tend it, tire, forget what they were doing. The well-off go to their regular employment, the poor hear of a job, run to get it, may fail and walk home again. If they get the job, it lasts only a day, perhaps only half a day. So each day, each hour of each day is unpredictable, confused, a battle. This weary, chancy way of life is one of the real hardships of poverty and one of the reasons why it is so hard to rise from it. Unsuspectingly, I was re-entering this world.

  I cursed Cora Mundy. She had deliberately given Jim a way of finding me and, by hinting at my prosperity, a reason for making the attempt. Did he know where Mary Jane could be found? Or was it just a trick to capture my attention and find out what I was worth to him?

  Finally, I fell into a nervous, restless sleep, full of dreams, and woke, unrefreshed, in my stuffy bedroom with the maid, Dora, standing beside me with a cup of tea, and glancing round the room. She had heard a man’s voice that night, I guessed, and caught the sound of bolts being drawn and pushed back. Now, because I had caught her with her lover, she would watch me carefully, and try to get evidence of guilt.

  Even before Dora had gone, or I had begun to drink the tea, the day began with a vengeance. There was a ring on the bell outside. Dora went down to answer. There were feet on the stairs and, as I got up and put on my wrapper, the parlour door opened. A little child’s voice, northern in sound, moaned, ‘I want home, mother,’ and I opened the bedroom door to find in front of me, fatter and dressed in heavy serge, with white piping, a dreadful bonnet on her head, my sister, Mary Claire. By the hand she had a little boy of about eighteen months, in a dress and blue serge coat, a hat pulled down over his brown, curly hair. There was a young man behind her in the doorway.

  I cried, ‘Clara!’ for that was our name for her in the family, and ran to her. Her body was stiff as I hugged her. She moved away from the embrace, pecking my cheek. ‘I’ve found you!’ I exclaimed. ‘Thank God you’re safe and sound!’

  But the smile she gave me was restrained. Her eyes took in my nightdress and ruffled peignoir, travelled uncertainly round the room.

  The man behind her, whom I recognized as Mr Ratcliffe’s clerk, stepped forward. ‘If you’ve no more need of me, Mrs Frazer,’ he said, ‘I’ll go off and leave you to your happy reunion.’

  After he had gone, Mary Claire, still standing in the middle of the room, said, in a rather cold voice, ‘I read your advertisement. I’m pleased to see you looking so well. And this is Thomas, my boy. There’s baby Andrew, also, but I’ve left him behind with mother.’

  ‘Mother?’ I asked. It began to feel a little like a dream. Here stood Mary Claire, a little stout, in her navy dress with the small, blue-ribboned straw hat skewered fast to an uncompromising scraped-back bun, holding by the hand a little boy, my nephew, and now speaking of mother, when our mother had of course been dead for nearly ten years.

  ‘Mrs Sugden, senior,’ she told me. ‘I am married to Mr Sugden.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, confused now. ‘Well, sit down, Clara, do, and tell me how you are.’

  ‘I can’t stay too long,’ she told me. ‘I must be back in Liverpool at seven.’

  ‘So soon?’ I asked. ‘You shouldn’t have come all this way with the child. I could have come to you. Why didn’t you write?’

  We’d been merry girls, as girls are in spite of hardships. I could remember Mary Claire, my Clara, dancing about in boots and petticoats, hair flying, singing silly songs. We’d been pretty girls, too, with a taste for finery, forever quarrelling over who was to wear the nicest stockings, blouse or hat. This Mary Claire, the new one, eight years on, was vastly different. I was beginning to feel awkward and discouraged. I said, ‘You must want some breakfast after your journey. And Thomas must have some milk.’

  I told Dora, inside the doorway and staring hard, ‘Will you get us some breakfast?’ But Clara interrupted, ‘We had breakfast at the station, thank you. I was not certain I’d find you. Fortunately, Mr Ratcliffe was at home when I called, and asked his clerk to conduct me to you.’

  ‘Tea, then,’ I said to Dora. �
��And a glass of milk and a biscuit, if you can find one.’ Not without a backward glance, she went off.

  I leaned forward in my own chair, as Mary Claire sat there with the boy in her lap, and said, ‘So, I have two nephews. And how are you, Clara? I’m so happy to find you. I’m searching for Janie, too. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘I don’t,’ she told me. ‘I’ve had nothing to do with her since I left London. You seem well and prosperous, Mary Anne. Where have you been? We worried when you disappeared.’ She had been glancing at my hand. ‘Are you married too?’

  I shook my head. I knew I ought not to tell her how I had led my life since I’d left London. Clara bore all the signs of respectability, her expression was so restrained as to constitute something like a warning. She did not want to hear my story. I ought, I knew, to resurrect poor Mrs Frazer, the youthful widow, with the respectable family awaiting her in Scotland, because that was what she wanted to hear.

  Instead, I told the truth. ‘I had to run away, Clara, believe me, being so abused and mistreated by Jim Bristow. Since then I have become prosperous, running my house in Calgary. Don’t judge me, Clara,’ I added, like the heroine in a sentimental play, as her expression hardened. ‘What choice did I have, arriving penniless and alone?’ She did not soften. ‘At all events,’ I said, ‘I came back when I could to make sure you and Mary Jane were safe and sound, and to help you if I could.’

  She had looked from me to the child and back, as I spoke, as if to see how much he was taking in. I’m sad to say that as I spoke, her face was not only unfriendly, but dour, as if she heard news no better than she expected.

  She responded, ‘I’ve no need of your assistance, thank you. Though Mary Jane might be glad of it.’

  ‘Have you any idea where I might find her?’ I felt I was pleading.

  ‘Let me be quite plain with you, Mary Anne,’ she told me emphatically, like a woman many years older, ‘and let me tell you once and for all. I have no wish or desire for any connection with your affairs, or Mary Jane’s. When I left for Liverpool with my fiancé, Mr Sugden, you were long gone and Mary Jane’ – and here she glanced at the child – ‘was going her own way, had been for many years, lacking the care of either parent, and perhaps not much improved by the example of her oldest sister. Mr Sugden was then a seaman, but being married got employment ashore, as a clerk with a large shipping firm. We’re not wealthy folk, but we’re comfortable in a modest way. My husband was born a Baptist and though he lapsed in his seagoing days he found the faith again. I am baptized now. I have found true faith, Mary Anne, and set aside the error in which we were reared.’