The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  My blue eyes looked into his brown ones and I felt like I knew him and I knew I could trust him, and I knew what I wanted to do, but instead I replied, ‘What do you think we should do?’

  And again we looked into each other’s eyes and held each other’s gaze and he said, ‘I think we should go back to my place.’

  And my stomach looped the loop and we did some more gazing as I savoured the anticipation of the moment before the point of no return … and then I said, ‘Yes, I think we should go back to your place too.’

  And he grinned at me again, his shy, boyish grin making a six-year-old out of the forty-something, and I’m sure I must have grinned back.

  And the rest, as they say, is history …

  Charlie landed on his feet in Lant Street too. Disowned by his own family, he was quickly adopted by the Crisps. Respectability was far less of a premium in this family, which earned a living ducking and diving on the edgier side of London society.

  My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Crisp, was the Victorian equivalent of a black cab driver: he owned a hansom cab. This light carriage, with two wheels and two horses, was perfectly designed to nip in and out of the London traffic, and they were the fastest way to get anywhere, often going so fast they bumped into pedestrians – usually killing them. Rifling through the criminal records, I was astounded by the number of pedestrian fatalities – several every month in the Borough of Southwark alone.

  Alexander set out from Lant Street every day, smartly dressed in bowler hat and greatcoat. He sat perched high on a seat above the carriage, and whizzed backwards and forwards over the great bridges connecting the south and the north side of the Thames: Blackfriars, London, Westminster and the new Tower Bridge. Sometimes he even ventured into the East End.

  He communicated with his passengers through a little trap door at the back of his seat. This trap door was very important, not just because it was through this that he received his directions and payment, but it also gave Alexander the opportunity to charm his passengers. Because Alexander wasn’t just any old hansom cab driver – he was cabbie to the stars, or the late Victorian equivalent. These included the Prince of Wales, whom he took to see his mistresses, especially Lillie Langtry; but it was the politician and four-times prime minister, William Gladstone, who was his most loyal customer.

  This put Alexander in an interesting position. Gladstone was one of the most overtly moral and religious politicians of the Victorian era. Alcohol, or rather the dangers of it, was one of his pet topics. As Gladstone got into Alexander’s carriage outside the Houses of Parliament, he would hold forth about its evils: ‘You know, Crisp, the devil works through the demon drink. When I brought in the licensing laws I lost the 1874 election. I was borne down in a torrent of gin and beer – literally, as it happens.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. The devil punishes those who are brave enough to take him on,’ Alexander replied.

  It was a good job Gladstone couldn’t see his cab driver’s rueful smile – only the week before the landlord of Alexander’s regular pub had changed its name to the Gladstone, to honour the fact that one of his regulars was this most distinguished politician’s driver. Alexander comforted himself with the thought that what Gladstone didn’t know, couldn’t hurt him.

  He also didn’t worry too much about probity with regards to Gladstone, as Alexander regularly took him to Whitechapel to ‘rescue’ fallen women.

  Alexander would go home and, as was his habit, put a gold sovereign on the mantelpiece for his wife. ‘There’s your housekeeping, Sarah, courtesy of the greatest politician of our time.’

  ‘Very pleased, I’m sure. I hope he appreciates just what you do for him,’ she would reply knowingly.

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear, we’re doing just fine,’ and Alexander would pat her comfortable behind rather cheekily until she clouted his head.

  But it was true – that shiny coin was the equivalent of a week’s wages for most working men. Each week, Alexander’s children would stare at it sitting on the mantelpiece and marvel at the company their father was keeping.

  Alexander started taking Charlie for a pint in the Gladstone. One night, seated in the corner by the fire, after one too many ales, Alexander put his arm around Charlie’s shoulders and gave him a bear hug of a squeeze.

  ‘You’re like a son to me, Charlie. I don’t know what you did back wherever you come from, but you know I don’t care. Sometimes you’re more like my son than my own son, if you gets me drift.’

  ‘Thank you, Alexander. It’s an honour. And you are like a father to me too.’

  ‘We all makes mistakes and we all needs a chance to start again. I won’t judge you – not for your past – only for what I find before me now. And what I find before me is a young man I’m proud of.’

  Charlie was quite overcome, not being used to praise from his elders. ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you. And I shall not disappoint you, I swear on Mr Gladstone’s life himself.’

  ‘Let’s leave the venerable gentleman out of it, eh? He’s what keeps the roof over our head.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  At which point Alexander found himself saying something a bit unexpected: ‘One thing I want you to promise me, Charlie – if anything ever happens to me, will you look after the girls?’

  ‘But nothing’s going happen to you.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I see things, you know, out and about. You never know what’s around the corner, do you?’

  ‘No, indeed. That’s why I think we should drink while we can!’

  At which point Alexander laughed, clapped young Charlie on the back and shouted, ‘Another round for the philosopher here!’

  But it was only a week later that Alexander found himself driving through the streets with a vague sense of unease. This was not unusual. The older he got, the more he saw, and every so often a shiver would run through him, like going over a hill too fast. Alexander worried about his reliance on the patronage of the fickle creatures that made up London’s smart set. He cracked his whip and drove faster to shake the shadow clutching on to his greatcoat tails.

  Alexander’s next customer was known in the Crisp household as ‘the Posh Puppy’. As he drew up to a grand front door in a Belgravia square, it swung open and the young lord skipped out. Alexander had been driving him around at the request of his father (with specific orders to keep him out of mischief and report back) since the young fop had gained facial hair.

  But the trainee playboy was hard to tame. ‘Evening good, Crisp! The Haymarket for now. There’s a certain bricky actress I need to know better.’

  ‘Bricky, m’lud?’

  ‘Yes, indeed – she’s the jammiest bit of jam.’

  ‘Well, m’lud, you are a right gal sneaker, you are, and that’s the truth.’

  The Posh Puppy blushed with pride. ‘Very well, Crisp, if you say so.’

  Alexander, all existential angst banished for now, smiled to himself, gently flicked his horses with his whip and headed in the direction of the West End.

  Disraeli once described hansom cabs as the gondolas of London. But while it’s possible to crash both a gondola and a hansom cab, the results tend to be more catastrophic in a hansom cab – they go faster, and the landing is harder. Alexander was not a reckless man. He was all too aware that all his capital was tied up in that carriage and the three horses he used to pull it (two working, one resting, in rotation). And there was no insurance. But sometimes you can’t allow for other people.

  As they started on the downward slope towards the Strand, a cab drew alongside them, the curtain at the door opened and one of the Posh Puppy’s so-called friends stuck his head out.

  ‘Evening, my Lord Gigglemug. Off to see that saucebox at the Haymarket?’

  ‘Might be, might not be!’

  ‘It’s just I’ve half a mind to pay a visit myself. Everyone’s been doing the bear with her.’

  At which point everything started to happen very fast. The Posh Puppy sho
uted at Alexander to drive faster and lose his ‘friend’. Alexander whipped his horses and picked up speed, but this was early evening in the West End and there wasn’t much room for manoeuvre. Worse, the friend’s cab picked up speed too, and tried to pull alongside them again.

  ‘Mind the grease!’ Alexander shouted at the other driver, but in an instant they found themselves head-on with a carriage coming the other way. One of Alexander’s horses stumbled on the cobbles and fell forward, and he lost his grip on the reins. The horse then picked itself up and the two dashed straight into the cab on the other side. The next thing Alexander knew, the cobblestones were hurtling towards his face.

  When he came to he was lying on the ground, a crowd of faces peering at him.

  ‘Are you all right, mate? Here, have a swig of this.’

  Someone passed him a bottle with some strong liquor in it. It burnt Alexander’s throat but it gave him a bit of his stuffing back.

  ‘Thank you, thank you.’ He heard himself saying, and then he realised he was crying.

  ‘It’s all right, mate. You ain’t gone down to old nicky yet.’ A kindly old woman was stroking his back.

  And then a thought hit him: ‘The horses?’

  And he could tell by the look on her face.

  He scrambled up unsteadily, a couple of arms shooting out to help him, and he limped over. What remained of his carriage lay on its side, mangled, with one of the horses underneath; still alive but bleeding, its legs all pointing in contrary ways. It was making whinnying noises and shaking. Luckily someone came over and shot it.

  Alexander staggered and retched and sunk down on the pavement again, where several people, including the old woman, put their arms around him. As he sobbed, people around him had to get their hankies out too; his despair was difficult to witness.

  In his grief, Alexander had completely forgotten about the Posh Puppy, who had emerged from the upside-down carriage unscathed, except for a few cuts and bruises. He had apparently pressed half a crown into the nearest policeman’s hand saying, ‘Make sure the driver gets this, eh? Got to dash. It’s curtain’s up in five,’ and skipped off, never to be heard of again, even after Alexander’s son, Alexander Junior, wrote to the Puppy’s father explaining that with no horse or carriage, Alexander now had no means to earn a living, and could he contemplate lending Alexander a small amount, which he would pay back with interest? There had been no reply, and no reply either from the other rich patrons that Alexander Junior wrote to.

  ‘You know what the problem is?’ Sarah said to her son. ‘Your father knows too much.’

  It was a dark day for the Crisp family when they finally had to accept that Alexander was never going to work again. The remaining horses had been sold and the money had run out.

  After a year of struggling, Alexander was admitted to the Constance Road workhouse, classified as destitute.

  My great-great-grandfather’s swift fall from grace and health has felt like a cautionary tale. It haunted me for a while, because Alexander’s fate was truly miserable.

  Workhouses offered a home to the destitute, but not a home into which you would ever wish to go. They were like prisons: huge, forbidding buildings, where your clothes and belongings were taken away and you had to put on a heavy, itchy, sackcloth uniform. The inmates slept in draughty dormitories; the food was monotonous and portions kept small, and they ate in long lines on benches in communal dining halls. There was no privacy or dignity. Discipline was harsh – food would be withdrawn for two days if you were caught swearing. There is a reason why Dickens wrote Oliver Twist. How many of us are alarmed at the thought of going into an old people’s home? It’s a ghost of Christmas future that I imagine does not sit comfortably with many people. But a hundred years ago, workhouses must have been an even more frightening final home for the elderly.

  There was also a real stigma attached to going into the workhouse: somehow you had failed in the most fundamental way – that is, to work hard enough to support yourself and your dependents. It was a mark of shame if one of your extended family members ended up in there too: as if, somehow, all of you had failed. None of us know why Alexander’s family allowed him to go to the workhouse – he had eight grown-up children, all working. Except seven of them were women, and in those days the low-skilled jobs they were doing would not have brought in a living wage. Clara always talked about her father with great pride and respect. He was the big man of the family. All I can think is that he insisted on going into the workhouse himself. With no means to earn any money anymore, he would have been a drain on their scarce resources. Perhaps he saw this as the only way to save the rest of them from this terrible fate.

  Within a year of entering the workhouse, Alexander was dead. The Crisps were told he had a massive seizure one night and by the morning he had gone. Meanwhile, unable to pay the rent on the Lant Street house, the remaining Crisps had done a moonlit flit a couple of miles down the road to cheaper rooms in Peckham. This meant Charlie could no longer show his face at the Gladstone’s brewery and so he had decided to temporarily make ends meet by helping Clara and her mother, working as a confectioner.

  It’s strange the places you can find yourself. Making cakes was not something Charlie had envisaged earning a living from – he would have preferred to have oil on his hands rather than flour, and yet he was haunted by his conversation with Alexander in the Gladstone.

  But even with Charlie’s help, they were still struggling. Charlie watched as Sarah got up later, sat down more and forgot to put the filling in her pies. Her pastry was suffering and Charlie knew she was having secret talks to move in with her eldest married daughter. Added to this, Louisa, Clara’s elder sister, was sweet on a boy and it seemed like only a matter of time before she would move out too.

  Although she didn’t mention it, Charlie could see that Clara was aware of her looming predicament. And, as a good engineer, when Charlie saw a problem, he felt duty-bound to fix it – he turned over different alternatives in his mind until he came up with the solution.

  The day after Alexander’s funeral, the Crisp family was back at work. Unlike the first time Charlie had set eyes on Clara, he was now wearing an apron too, while his own hands and cheeks were covered in flour – it was playing havoc with his black mourning clothes.

  He looked down and saw he was a mess. No matter. He looked over at Clara’s back as she stirred the filling for the pies on a pot hanging over the fire. She was sniffing again.

  Charlie felt a rush of blood to his head and a familiar feeling of heat in his ginger blood taking control of the wheels of his brain. He picked off a tiny corner of dough and, like a child, rolled it into a snake, then curled it round and joined the two ends. He went down on one knee, sending a mist of flour dust around the room, and tugged Clara’s skirt so she turned around. Then he took her left hand gently in his and pushed the dough ring onto her third finger, saying, ‘Clara, don’t cry. Marry me instead!’

  ‘Oh, Charlie!’ She laughed, wiping tears away with the back of her hand.

  ‘What sort of answer is that?’

  ‘Well, what are ya like?’

  ‘I’m like yer husband. Marry me, Clara! I mean it!’

  ‘No. Stop it, you big ramper.’

  ‘I’m not a ramper. I’m the opposite. Look, what are you going to do? What am I going to do?’

  ‘You’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well, maybe. But this way we’ll both be all right.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘’Course I am, you. Have you ever known me not to be serious?’

  Clara gave him a quizzical look. ‘Never ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to, Charlie Swain.’

  ‘All right. This is how serious I am.’ And he stood up and grabbed Clara and kissed her straight on the lips.

  At which point Louisa walked in. ‘What the bleedin’ heck?’

  ‘Louisa, I want to introduce you to my future wife.’

  Louisa stood stock-still with
a mouth wide enough to fit her daddy’s old hansom cab in. ‘’Ave you gone nicky?’

  Charlie turned to Clara.

  ‘Have I?’ he asked.

  Clara looked back defiantly at her big sister.

  ‘No, he hasn’t. We’re getting married,’ she said.

  And Charlie picked Clara up and spun her around and then they kissed again with Louisa’s mouth still hanging wide open.

  Later that night, in the bed they shared together, Louisa tackled Clara.

  ‘You’re a dark horse.’

  Clara ignored her and pulled the blankets over her head, but Louisa wasn’t giving up. ‘Never thought Charlie would be your knight in shining armour.’

  ‘Shut up. I ain’t got no choice.’

  ‘You could go into service.’

  ‘You jolly well go into service.’

  ‘I’m marrying Harry.’

  ‘Exactly. And I’m marrying Charlie.’

  There was not very much Louisa could say to that because she knew Clara was right. Like every woman in 1900, she was a second-class citizen with no political and very few legal rights. She was essentially the property of her parents or, failing them, her siblings, unless or until she married. And, like nearly all working-class women, Clara had no qualifications or professional skills, so the opportunities for her to earn enough money to keep herself were very limited; in fact, going into service was really the only way she could have been housed and fed independently. But there was no history of service in the Crisp family, and it would have felt like a backwards step.

  And then there was the huge stigma attached to being a spinster. Clara was twenty years old. It was expected that a woman of her age would marry and have children, and if she didn’t, there must be something wrong with her. Charlie had offered Clara a way out, and a future.

  Five months after Alexander’s death, on 20 October 1900, Charlie found himself hosting his own wedding breakfast (or, in this case, tea) in the small living room of their Peckham lodgings. It was just family, or rather the Crisp family. But they still made a jolly gathering, despite their black mourning clothes and the lack of food and alcoholic refreshment.