Keeping My Sister's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  ‘Frankie! No!’ shouted Peggy, but he ignored her and kept punching the other boy in the face until his nose bled. When a big bloke from the wastepaper factory separated them, Frankie had such a fat lip that he couldn’t go home but he was still smiling because he had won the fight.

  ‘You’d better get yourself round to Nanny Day’s,’ said Kathleen, lending him her handkerchief, which he promptly covered in blood from the cut on his lip. ‘If Dad sees you, you’ll be for it.’ Despite meting out beatings to them, their father wouldn’t tolerate them being involved in street fights. Eva went off with him, counting their winnings.

  As Kathleen, Peggy, George and Harry made their way back down the street, there was another dispute, this time between Mrs Avens and a burly-looking bloke who appeared to be carrying her precious sideboard off to a waiting horse and cart, while she clung on to it for dear life.

  ‘No!’ she cried. ‘Give me more time. I’ll get the money.’

  ‘You’ve had your chance, missus,’ he said, brushing her hands off the furniture, as if he were swatting a fly.

  Kathleen turned to her big sister. ‘That man is stealing Mrs Avens’s family heirloom! We can’t let him.’

  Peggy held her back. ‘No, Kath, don’t,’ she said. ‘I think she must have had it on the never-never.’

  Presiding over the whole scene, with a little smile playing on her lips, was Mrs Davies from number 16. So, all the endless stories about Mrs Avens’s mother working her fingers to the bone to get that sideboard had been a pack of lies. Mrs Avens had got it on tick from a shop down the Elephant and had fallen into arrears with her repayments, especially now that her son had been laid off again.

  Mrs Avens sat down, bereft, on her doorstep and began to cry, at which point several of the other women gave chase to the fella with the horse and cart, shaking their fists at him. It was too late. He was already clip-clopping his way down Belvedere Road and back to the shop, where the sideboard would be sold on, no doubt, to another customer – one who could keep up the repayments.

  After the fuss had died down, George escorted Peggy home, while the others tagged along.

  ‘Poor Mrs Avens,’ said Peggy.

  ‘The thing is, when you have moneylenders and people having to buy things on the never-never because their wages are so low, that is what you will get,’ said George, thrusting his hands into his pockets. ‘It’s all wrong. The poorest end up the worst off. Something has got to change.’

  They wandered along in silence for a bit. Peggy didn’t have the answers to that and Kathleen certainly didn’t. It was up to the powers-that-be to sort out those kind of things, not kids from Lambeth.

  ‘I’ve joined a new book club,’ he said. ‘It’s only two shillings and sixpence a month and I get a new choice for six months on that.’

  Kathleen yawned. Peggy’s eyes went wide.

  ‘What kinds of books are you getting, then?’

  ‘Just had one on the miners’ lockouts,’ he said. ‘I’ve got another by Wal Hannington due next month. Do you want to read it after me?’

  ‘Love to,’ said Peggy.

  ‘They’re having a meeting soon with speakers up in town at the assembly rooms,’ he went on. ‘Fancy coming along?’

  ‘Ooh, you lovebirds make me sick,’ Kathleen butted in. ‘Come on, Peg, it’s time for tea.’ And she grabbed her sister by the arm and yanked her through the doorway before she could answer.

  There were no familiar smells of cooking when they came through the door and Mum was nowhere to be seen. Only their father was there, hunched at the kitchen table with a face like thunder, chewing on a crust of bread.

  ‘Kathleen, go on down to the Feathers and get your mother,’ he said, barely looking up at them. ‘She’s been in there far too long, and Peggy, you go and get my shirts from Nanny Day; she hasn’t brought them round either.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Bloody women,’ he mumbled to himself.

  Kathleen and Peggy exchanged glances before leaving. Mum wasn’t like those factory girls who went out for a drink after work. In fact, she’d barely set foot in a pub that they knew of. She’d been working as a cleaner in the Union Jack Club when she met Dad before the Great War and she’d been mopping and scrubbing ever since.

  The noise of the pub hit Kathleen first. You could hear the carousing and the sound of someone playing the piano from the end of the street. They were having a right old knees-up. She went up on tiptoes and peered through the frosted glass. A crowd was gathered around the piano, beer was swilling overhead in raised pint glasses and, to her amazement, she saw Mum smiling and laughing, swaying along in the sing-song with the rest of them. Her old school friend Flo from down in the Borough was by her side. Mum’s face was flushed and her eyes sparkled. With a creeping sense of seeing something she wasn’t supposed to, Kathleen realized that a tall man with a ready smile had his arm around her waist as they sang and he was gazing down at her in a way that Kathleen had never seen her father do. It was only for a split second because the pianist hammered out a new tune and they broke apart. Some of the women started lifting the hem of their skirts as the kicked their way across the pub and back, drinks flying everywhere: ‘My old man said, follow the van, and don’t dilly-dally on the waaay!’

  Kathleen knew that tune well. It was one of her Nanny Day’s favourites. She hummed along to the next verse. ‘Off went the van with me home packed in it . . .’

  A voice came from over her shoulder.

  ‘Who are you spying on, then?’ It was Joe, Mary’s husband, from her street.

  ‘No one,’ she said, brushing the hair from her face. ‘I just need to tell my mum she’s wanted indoors.’

  ‘All right then,’ he said. Kathleen watched through the window as he pushed his way through the throng and leaned down to whisper in her mother’s ear. She glanced over towards the door, a look of panic sweeping across her face. In an instant, she was outside, smoothing her skirt in the evening air.

  ‘Everything all right?’ she said, straightening her blouse.

  ‘Dad was waiting, waiting for his tea,’ said Kathleen, shuffling her feet. She didn’t want to be the one who had to tell her mother that he was in a bad mood.

  ‘That’s all right, chicken,’ said Mum overly brightly. ‘Let’s go home!’ She was still humming ‘My Old Man’ as they walked along together.

  The house lay silent when they got in; Peggy and the others were already upstairs. Kathleen started to creak her way up to bed but as soon as the door to the scullery had shut, she crept back down to listen at the closed door.

  ‘Thought you weren’t coming home,’ Dad said quietly.

  ‘Of course I was, just had a bit of fun with Flo, that’s all.’

  ‘So much fun you forgot to make my tea and I’ve been out since six this morning,’ came the reply.

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘You know it was only for Flo’s birthday.’

  ‘And who else’s birthday will it be next week and the one after?’

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk!’

  ‘What did you say to me?’

  ‘You heard me,’ she said, clattering some plates into the sink.

  There was silence and then the sound of a slap and a little cry before her mother shouted, ‘Don’t hit me no more! I’m warning you!’ A plate crashed to the floor and shattered.

  ‘Threatening me, are you?’ Her father’s voice had such menace in it, it turned Kathleen’s stomach.

  ‘I’ll scratch your eyes out!’

  With her heart in her mouth, Kathleen silently held the door ajar and watched as her parents tussled with each other for a moment before Dad pulled his arm free and swung a blow at Mum’s cheek. As it made contact, Mum squealed before collapsing at his feet.

  He raised his fists again. Mum was begging him now, ‘Please, James, don’t.’

  Her father spun around. ‘Who’s there?’ But Kathleen had already scarpered up the stairs, two at a time, praying tha
t he wouldn’t follow her. She took refuge in the bedroom with Eva and Peggy, who were pretending to be asleep.

  Kathleen put her fingers in her ears and started to sing quietly to herself, ‘I dillied and dallied, dallied and dillied, lost me way and don’t know where to roam, you can’t trust a special like the old time copper when you can’t find your way home . . .’ as the awful cries of her mother’s suffering filled the house.

  13

  Eva, December 1934

  The pavement at Holborn Circus was chock-full of people doing their Christmas shopping. Children and their parents formed an orderly queue to see Father Christmas, while customers, weighed down with bags and parcels, bustled in and out of the grand shop entrance. Eva peered into the window of Gamages People’s Popular Emporium, which was crammed full of toys for the Christmas bazaar display, and her heart fluttered with the excitement of it all. Then she caught the determined look on Alice Diamond’s face. There was little chance of her getting any free time in the toy department. She was here to work.

  Percy, their driver, was already parked up in his motor outside and Alice had several other girls from the Forty Thieves working their way through the shop, with its warren of corridors and staircases. Gamages was a hoister’s delight: dark corners, nooks and crannies and dozy shop assistants who could be sent off to the backroom to look for something in a particular size or colour while the Forty Thieves pilfered for all they were worth.

  Maggie Hughes, the most experienced of Alice’s girls – and her unofficial deputy – preferred the West End stores such as Marshall and Snelgrove, and Selfridges, or Derry and Toms over in Kensington for rich pickings, but Alice was counting on the Christmas shopping rush to provide the perfect cover for her gang to clean up. The weather was to play its part too, as a freezing fog hung in the air, already yellowing in the failing light of a London afternoon, thanks to the fumes belched from the factories down by the river. The street lamps would soon be lit and it was not yet three o’clock.

  ‘Right,’ said Alice, pulling her mink stole tightly around her. ‘It’s going to be a pea-souper. Let’s get on with it.’

  They joined a slow-moving throng edging its way through the ground floor, which seemed to have every square inch of space filled with goods. There were gloves, hats and scarves, books, leather wallets and spectacle cases, alongside binoculars, manicure sets and even a shoe-shine kit. The queue for the till was already three deep and the distracted shop assistant was no match for Alice, who insisted she wanted a pair of gloves in the darkest shade of green, rather than what was on show.

  In an instant, as the assistant’s back was turned, Maggie was at the display, her vast carpet bag was opened like a hungry mouth, just out of sight beneath the counter, while Eva’s little fingers flicked things into it. At one point, Maggie boldly, and with a sweep of her arm, shoved some of the mountain of leather gloves into it. The shop assistant returned and looked quizzically at her half-empty display but Alice kept her talking and made a great fuss of finding the right change for the moss-green gloves, which she paid for at the till. Eva and Maggie, meanwhile, had made their way through the crush of warm bodies bundled up in their winter coats, to one of the many staircases to go up to ladieswear on the next floor.

  They started in the undergarments section, which was so quiet it was like a mausoleum, so Maggie said. No fellas would dare set foot in there and the shop assistants were usually snooty old matrons with tape measures slung around their necks and half-moon glasses.

  Eva was getting quite an education in underwear: silk stockings, finest slips and corselettes. These things were nothing like the underwear worn by her mother and sisters but Eva knew all about them because she had helped pinch them. They were what posh ladies wore; well, posh ladies and the Forty Thieves, who dressed like film stars around the Elephant, with nice hair and clothes and make-up. Eva was still dressing like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, because that is what she was and it was part of her cover as a member of the gang, but the moment she was old enough, Alice had promised she could have some really grown-up clothes of her own. Eva couldn’t wait.

  Maggie held up nightdress after nightdress, humming and hah-ing. She laid each one on the counter. There were so many of them, the shop assistant was getting a little impatient.

  ‘And will madam be buying?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maggie. ‘Madam will. I’ll have this, please. She picked up the teensiest silk handkerchief and dumped another armload of nighties at the till.

  ‘What about a handkerchief for Granny as well?’ said Eva. The assistant turned and pulled out a drawer full of handkerchiefs which she laid reverently on the glass counter top next to the heap of silk clothing. Right on cue, Alice Diamond sidled up and plonked her winter coat on top of the counter. ‘Blooming hot in here,’ she said, mopping her brow. Her mink stole was slung over one shoulder. ‘You are taking ages,’ she said to Maggie. ‘I’ll meet you in the furs department, shall I?’ With that, she picked up her coat, taking with it half of the silk nightwear from the top of the counter before walking off briskly. Those clothes were quickly stuffed into her capacious handbag, which she switched with that of another accomplice in the corridor between the underwear and the fur coats section. Eva knew the routine. That girl would make her way down to Percy, the driver, switch the bag and come back with an empty one. The whole procedure would be repeated several times; Alice and her girls had been known to make quite an afternoon of it before leaving any shop.

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ said Maggie, just as the assistant was about to ring the handkerchief sale through the till. ‘She only likes spotty hankies! Silly! We forgot, didn’t we?’

  The shop assistant scowled. Eva gave her a sweet smile. ‘Thanks so much for your help!’ And the pair of them walked off, towards the furs department.

  This was where Alice hoped to make a few bob. The freezing London winter meant every woman coveted a fur coat or a nice stole or a little fur hat. Eva spied a couple more of Alice’s girls trying on the hats and shoving a few in the inside pockets of their voluminous coats. The plan was for Alice and Eva to screen Maggie while she hid a couple of fur coats about her person: down her drawers to be precise. She was wearing her specially made shoplifter’s drawers, to the knee, with tight elastic, to prevent stolen goods from tumbling out onto the floor. Maggie specialized in clouting – rolling up the coats and stuffing them down her underwear.

  The department was bustling, full of Christmas shoppers, many of pulling coats off the hangers and trying them on, under the beady eye of several shop assistants. Floor space was at a premium, with rail after rail of coats crammed in next to each other, and that was something Alice and her gang liked to exploit because it made it harder for the assistants to see what they were up to. Some stores, such as Selfridges, had started to employ walkers. They were paid by the shop to go around pretending to be shoppers but they were really on the look-out for thieves. Discussions about how many walkers they had evaded that day usually formed a part of the conversation in Alice’s Scovell Road scullery, with Maggie chipping in, ‘They stick out like a sore thumb, silly cows.’

  Alice, Eva and Maggie crowded around some full-length sable coats and in an instant Alice had pulled a coat off and thrown it around her shoulders as she stood behind Maggie. Eva could just see the head of an assistant bobbing closer over the next rail.

  ‘Ooh,’ she cried, as Maggie lifted her dress, pulled a coat and a hanger off the rail and rolled it with lightning-quick fingers. ‘Ooh, help, I feel a bit faint.’

  Maggie had her back turned and was already stuffing the tightly rolled coat into her drawers as Eva half-fell onto the assistant to block her view.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ said the shocked shop girl, catching Eva in her arms.

  ‘I think I need some fresh air,’ said Eva, standing back up. ‘It’s just so hot in here.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’

  Alice, who by now had appropriated the full-length c
oat around her shoulders as her own, patted the shop girl on the arm. ‘She’s been so sick, she’s been up the ’ospital and everything. Doctor says it’s catching.’

  Eva coughed, loudly, and the shop girl withdrew. Maggie, meanwhile, was already waddling her way out of the furs department.

  ‘Watches next,’ hissed Alice under her breath. ‘Then it’s home for tea.’

  The Gamages watch department was quieter than the rest of the store, which made getting away with any theft more of a challenge. Eva felt inside her coat pocket. Yes, the watch Alice had given her was there. It was an expensive make, a Rolex, but it was a dud – it had stopped working ages ago – and the plan was to switch it for a similar one, without the assistant noticing.

  Maggie and Eva strolled up to the glass-topped counter and smiled at the assistant. He didn’t smile back. ‘Afternoon,’ said Maggie. ‘We’d like to have a look at some of your lovely watches, please.’

  The man peered at them through a pair of little round glasses, his eyes unblinking. ‘What is your budget?’

  ‘I’ll tell you that when I have seen what you have got on offer,’ said Maggie.

  ‘Very well.’ He sighed, as if his entire afternoon had been spent dealing with time-wasters. He produced a velvet-lined tray from under the counter and began to lay a selection of half a dozen watches on it.

  Maggie picked one up and passed it to Eva. ‘Be careful!’ he said. ‘These items cost more than a month’s wages.’

  ‘Perhaps for some, but not for us, isn’t that right?’ She gave Eva a conspiratorial little nudge. Eva blushed. That was a silly comment to make and Eva could smell the drink on Maggie’s breath. Maggie liked taking risks but Eva wasn’t experienced enough to want to do that yet. She just needed to get the watch out of her pocket and swapped with one on that tray.

  ‘I’d like to look at a Rolex, please,’ said Eva. ‘It’s for my mum.’