The Cry from Street to Street

by Hilary Bailey

  Now I’m hauled up, not very gently, and gazing at a woman’s face. A forty-year-old face, big nose, a few broken blood vessels in round cheeks, a pale mouth, and above it, a starched white cap. She spoons some rough food, porridge or the like, into my mouth. I eat it, to oblige, though I don’t want it. ‘Lie down,’ she instructs and pulls me flat again. I lie flat, very tired, but hearing voices, ‘Nurse! Nurse!’ There’s a moan. My breath rasps in and out. There’s the crash of metal from somewhere, footsteps running. ‘Bed four,’ a voice orders. Feet pass. There are green metal arches above me. I’m in hospital, I tell myself, and that’s all.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mary Kelly.’

  I slowly returned to my normal senses and found myself on a hard bed in coarse, clean sheets, in a long ward, with beds for about fifty women. From the nurses who swiftly fed me, fetched bedpans, washed me roughly, I discovered I was in the London Hospital, had been there for nearly six weeks, since I’d been collected from the pavement where I’d collapsed. I’d had double pneumonia. ‘We thought you’d die,’ said a friendly young nurse, handing me a tray with some sad boiled fish and mashed potato on it. I was desperately trying to piece myself together. I fell asleep again, without eating, as she spoke. She roused me, and made me eat.

  That day the almoner, a pale woman in a stiff black dress with a white collar, a big bunch of keys at her waist, arrived. She woke me and she took my name and address. I was still grappling for myself, trying to recall who I was, what I was doing there. As I told her my address in the city I suddenly remembered seeing Jim Bristow on that bed in Dorset Street.

  ‘You were very clean when you arrived,’ she said, it seemed critically. ‘Have you any family or friends you can go to?’ she asked. ‘You need nursing. Have you any money?’

  No one knew I was here. ‘My bag,’ I said in alarm.

  ‘You had no bag when you came here,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid someone may have taken it as you lay on the pavement.’

  There was no information it seemed worth giving to this woman, who to me was like someone I half dreamt and who, on her side, I suppose, saw in a hospital bed a skeletal young woman, some ruined milliner or shopgirl, unsought daughter, a piece of human flotsam cast up on her hygienic shores, to be cured and thrown back into the muddy waters she came from.

  ‘Mr Sloane and Dr French will be here to see you later.’

  They tidied me up. I slept. I was awoken by a senior nurse, when the ward was quiet. Behind her were two men in black suits, doctors, she told me. The older one had a black beard, cut to a point, a black moustache, a silk cravat. This was the surgeon, Mr Sloane, a dandy. Screens went round. He pulled up my gown and prodded my stomach. To my horror, before I knew it, his big fingers were going inside me. I resisted. ‘Now then,’ he said, looking at his colleague, ‘it won’t hurt if you relax.’

  In the next bed a woman was sobbing for her amputated leg. ‘Oh no. What’ll I do? My leg. Where’s my leg?’ she moaned. A big trolley of used dressings came past, wheeled by a pale nurse, only about sixteen. There was much noise and a choking smell of disinfectant.

  ‘Feel it,’ he continued, talking to the other doctor. The second man, in turn, poked and prodded. The fingers came out. ‘An ovariotomy will answer the case here,’ said the bearded man. ‘Or, if need be, the more radical operation.’

  ‘What?’ I asked weakly.

  He looked at me, without seeing me, rather as you might observe a cat coming into the room while talking to someone else. ‘You’ve been rather a naughty girl, my dear,’ he said. ‘But we can put you right, don’t worry about it.’

  I brought out some words. ‘It’s my lungs, they said.’

  ‘Ah, but why?’ he asked, as much for the benefit of the other doctor as for mine. ‘Why, we have to ask ourselves? What produced this general weakness? Prior examination suggests a venereal history, an interrupted pregnancy, possibly more than one. Never you mind, my dear,’ he assured me, ‘we’ll put you right.’

  All this time the nurse stood by. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘She’s a strong girl.’

  The nurse nodded. ‘Good afternoon,’ they said. She ducked a near-curtsy, and responded, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Sloane, Dr French.’ She was gone and the screens pulled back and moments later it was almost as if nothing had happened. I was so very tired that I wished to believe nothing had, and so I slept a little, but when I woke to the sound of a rattling tea trolley I asked the nurse who came with my cup, ‘What was the doctor here for?’

  ‘To see how you were, I dare say,’ she said.

  ‘They said they’d put me right – tomorrow,’ I persisted.

  ‘Ah well,’ she said, thinking. ‘Well,’ she said more briskly, ‘they will then, won’t they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put you right,’ she said. And she turned away. We were all paupers here to them. The better-off went into clinics or were nursed at home. We were just poor women with muddled lives, too many children, husbands drunk or out of work, or without husbands at all. The nurses themselves were respectable spinsters, many working only for the money. Some were dedicated, but often more to the idea of service itself than to the patients.

  It was the woman lying next to me who helped. A blanched face against a snow-white pillow turned to me, a tired, low voice said, ‘I heard you got Mr Sloane operating on you.’ She was a washerwoman, married to a longshoreman, and had been brought in when she collapsed with gangrene. They’d cut off two of her toes and she was waiting to see if they’d take off another.

  ‘Operation?’ I whispered, terrified. ‘What operation? It’s my lungs …’

  The ward was dark, with only two nurses there, one at either end, sitting at desks in the gloom with little lamps to see by. The woman whispered, ‘It can’t just be your lungs. This is the surgical ward. I heard them. I thought he’d come for me. I hope he never did nothing while I was under.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well – my parts, like. Female parts. I felt down there. I think I’m all right. My husband wouldn’t like anything like that.’

  ‘What will he do to me?’

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘he’ll cut your inside out. Womb and that. He’s famous for it, operates on society women, writes books about it.’

  ‘But – what for? I don’t need surgery. It’s my lungs … my lungs …’ I must have been babbling.

  ‘It’s for your own good, I suppose,’ she told me. ‘He does it for the fashionable women so they won’t have no more youngsters.’ She paused, said with an effort, ‘But in your shoes I wouldn’t want to go under the knife. Not here. Not for that.’ She paused again. ‘Not his, anyway,’ she added. After another pause she added, ‘He’s fond of the knife, Sloane.’

  ‘I don’t have to –’ I said like a child.

  ‘He says you’ve got to,’ she told me, like a mother.

  The nurse came up. ‘No talking. You must rest now.’

  ‘Nurse,’ I said, ‘Mr Sloane … in the morning …’

  ‘That’s right. You’re on his list.’

  ‘But I don’t want –‘

  ‘Kelly,’ she said, ‘Mr Sloane says you need this ovariotomy. That’s what it’s called. Your insides aren’t as they should be. That’s why you’re here in this ward. You’re in good hands with Mr Sloane, of that I assure you. He’s much in demand from titled ladies. And you won’t have to pay. You’re lucky, so don’t be a silly, ignorant girl, and stop complaining.’

  ‘But I don’t want an operation.’

  ‘You should have thought of that, when you did what you did,’ she told me, and went back to her desk.

  In the dim light from the nurses’ lamps I could see the fog putting its fingers under windows, creeping along the floor, tendrils, like seaweed, waving in, dissolving, thickening the air. Sounds from outside, in Whitechapel Road, were muffled. I must have lain for hours, weak and terrified, not knowing what to do. Did I really need to go on to the operating table? Was
I going to die if I didn’t? Would I die if I did? They would not let me refuse. I might cry out and fight, but the pad of ether would come down on my face, early tomorrow morning, and they’d have their way with me. If I survived the operation I would be ill again, trapped in this place, at everyone’s mercy, unable to leave for a long time. Could I escape? I was wearing a coarse hospital gown. They would never bring my clothes and I did not know where they were kept. I had been in bed for so long and I felt so weak I was not even sure if I could stand.

  Much later, it seemed, a nurse came and raked the stove, rattled more coke on to it. Someone moaned. Another woman cried out, ‘Johnny! Help!’ I was in hell, I thought, and it came to me, as it would have done to an animal, that I must escape. I had no thought now but of not being there in the morning to see the half-light of November coming through the windows, feel the suffocating pad over my face, have the knife cutting into me as I lay unconscious. It was my death I feared.

  The nurse who had tended the fire went back to her place. I watched, secretly, my head just raised from the pillow. But she did not stop at her desk; she went out. The other nurse seemed occupied.

  I got out of bed. My legs began shaking violently, but steadied as, quietly, in the shadows, I crept from the ward by the door the nurse had used and closed it behind me. In the semi-darkness created by lowered gas-lights I slipped down the stairs and found myself in a huge, tiled hall. Cowering in the shadow beside the stairs, I saw big doors to the outside. A chair by the door, for a porter, was unoccupied. As two nurses crossed the hall in caps and cloaks, I stayed hidden, vastly relieved the exit to the street was so close, anxious in case I was caught before I got out. I was in a nightdress, without shoes, trembling with cold, and I had no money. Then the doors to the outside banged open and in came two policemen, dragging in the dim light a woman with blood pouring from a wound in her head. ‘Porter! Porter!’ called one. ‘Christ – where is the man?’ The woman, swearing, was trying to get away from them.

  ‘Damn this, Fred,’ said the other policeman. ‘There – can you hold her? I’ll go for someone.’

  As he ran off the woman suddenly collapsed and lay on the floor in the gloom, like an abandoned doll. The other policeman dropped down and crouched beside her, still holding her arm.

  I was ready to run for the doors when two nurses came clattering in from somewhere, ran to the woman and bent over her. The policeman said, ‘I think she’s a goner.’ But one of the nurses, as she leaned over to attend to the woman, had slipped off her cloak, to leave her arms free. I ran silently on my bare feet from the shadow of the stairs, caught the cloak up from the floor and was in the street and down an alley on one side in a flash. There I crouched, gasping for breath, in the angle of a building. I heard cries and the sound of a policeman running. But the feet went past along Whitechapel Road while I leaned back against the cold damp wall, sucking in freezing fog.

  I sank down on the narrow pavement, in a doorway. I was alone in that still, yellow air, weak, barefoot, penniless and with my old lodgings some two miles off. I could hear shouts and footsteps from Whitechapel Road. ‘Get away from me, Bill,’ came a woman’s cry. Boys in a gang ran past. ‘Which way?’ ‘Up Eddie Clutterbuck’s – he’s got some –’ and they were gone. Nevertheless, I thought it must be late, from the sounds. Past midnight, perhaps. I breathed in and out, trying to steady myself. I had only to make one more effort and I could find help. All I had to do was slip across Whitechapel Road unobserved, take to the dark streets and alleys on the other side and within ten minutes, little longer, I’d be there in Dorset Street, close to Mary’s lodgings. And if she wasn’t there why, a minute off, there was Cora Mundy’s.

  The thought of this short trip, though, put me in a terrible state. The police were after me for absconding from the hospital in a stolen cloak – they’d have me back for that operation, under arrest, too, if they caught me. And at the back of my mind, of course, was the question of whether they’d yet found that slaughterhouseman, the killer of women. I was afraid. I, who had travelled vast plains and been thousands of feet up in unexplored mountains as the first snows came on the pines – I was afraid.

  I remembered the big Indian disappearing so silently, flowing like water into the forest. If you looked for him a moment later you could not have seen him among the tall trees. He would return just as invisibly, suddenly appearing at the wagon, holding a bird or animal dangling in his hand. And that was all I had to do, just slide into the streets, slip along like a shadow from wall to wall, doorway to doorway, like an Indian. That was all. Yet I was afraid. I had arrived here prosperous, healthy – and armed. Now I was sick, penniless and utterly defenceless, no better off than those the murderer had chosen as his victims. Never mind, I told myself. It will soon be over. And forcing myself to my feet I crept along cautiously and peered round the corner to see if anyone was coming.

  Because of the fog I could see only a few yards ahead and around me and that dimly, but there seemed to be no one about in Whitechapel Road so I went swiftly across. Once off the main road where the street lights were fewer I would be less visible. For the rest, who in that neighbourhood would think twice about a barefoot woman in a cloak slinking about at night like a stray cat? Even the lights of Whitechapel Road were dim in the fog, the yellow light, as if veils had been thrown over their lamps. Further up were naptha lights and a smell of fried potatoes. Some poor man trying to sell food to people at midnight, in thick fog. I ran left, swerving towards the street to evade the doors of a pub. There I had to shake off a couple of sailors, run from them in fact, on freezing and now bleeding feet, very tender, because I had been in bed so long.

  Just before I got to the turning I wanted to slip into I heard a coachman crying, ‘Whoah! Whoah!’ to his horses and a big black coach slowed down in the street beside me. The coachman was hunting prey for his master inside, no doubt, for the passenger could not have seen me through the fog. What a terrible pair they must have been, to be out looking for bedraggled tarts in such weather. But I ran into the alley and leaned against a wall, gasping for breath, listening for the sounds of the horses’ hooves to go. Then, before I felt ready to move on, I went anyway, limping now, but still travelling as fast as I could, hearing my own breath whistling horribly in and out.

  I twisted and turned through the narrow streets. Once I heard heavy footsteps behind me and my heart jumped in my chest. If the man meant me some harm I could not fight him – I was too weak – nor outrun him. He came behind me steadily all the way to Brick Lane. It was a little better lit and I was glad of that, now I was further from the hospital. The danger now was less of a policeman, more of some stray man, God knows who he might be or what he would want. I had no money, no weapon, no health and no one to care for me. What difference was there now between me and Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes?

  At last I got into Dorset Street, where Mary lived. It was empty as far as I could see. I hobbled along, hugging the walls, until suddenly a man caught me from behind and pushed me against a wall. His breath smelt of violets. ‘Let me go. I’m ill,’ I gasped.

  ‘So you say. So you say. You’d say anything but your prayers.’ But I remember his big hand coming on to my brow, which must have been beaded with sweat, and he took his hand away and went off himself, fearing to catch the infection he thought I carried.

  I found the archway and went through it to the room where my sister lived. The window was broken now and had a rag stuffed in it, which I removed. The only light was from the fire opposite. At first all I saw, by firelight, was someone, a man, crouched over the fire pushing some objects into the flames. All I observed of the bed, which was right under the window where I stood, was that there was something on it and that something was so horrible my mind rejected it, had to reject it. One more glance, then I turned my head away, seeking some object which would convince me I was alive, in a real world, that this was no nightmare. Thus I stared at the bricks bes
ide the window, old and yellow, then forced myself to look again at that bed, beneath my eyes, on which lay a body so hideously mangled that at first it was only recognizable by the arms and legs. Thank God the light was dim. One arm dangled over the side of the bed nearest me, over tumbled, soaked bedclothes. The face, turned upward, was so cut about it seemed barely a face at all. Inside that room, bending over the fire, was a man who had cut a woman’s face to raw meat and eviscerated her. He had carved off her breasts.

  I fell back, nearly fainting, against the wall beside the window. I must run back through the alleyway into Dorset Street and scream, ‘Murder!’ But even as I leaned there the door grated open and that monstrous man, in a black coat, came out quickly and half-ran past me. I dared not shout now. There was no one in sight. He might kill me before anyone heard my cries.

  As he turned the corner, deliberately slowing his walk, I crept after him. Now he was walking swiftly but calmly, a man in not too much of a hurry in his respectable dark overcoat. If anything he looked too respectable for that neighbourhood at that time of night. He could have been anybody. That is the horror of such monsters. I quailed as I thought of those bloody hands, jammed in the pockets of his coat, and of what else he might be clutching, what grim mementoes of his crime.

  He was moving in the direction of the Ten Bells, the pub on a corner only a little way up from Spitalfields Market. It might still be open and if it was, there I could get help. On the corner opposite the Ten Bells, too, lay Christ Church, that massive smoke-blackened edifice designed, surely, to placate some fearful God. Around it many homeless people slept in the churchyard, even on nights such as that one. Advancing slowly I prayed for lights in the pub, a crowd, people.

  That was when, on the corner outside the Ten Bells, I saw him turn right round in the dark. He sensed he was being followed, the villain, the animal. That instinct was how he had escaped so often before. I fell back against a wall and thought he’d not seen me. Then he rounded the corner. A few paces forward and I could see lights in the windows of the Ten Bells. I hastened on, pushed open the door of the pub and gasped in the direction of the few people there, ‘Quick – the Ripper – he’s here. Follow me.’