An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘Did she come?’ Charlie asked, lighting his pipe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it don’t matter, do it? You ’ad nothing perticler to do.’

  ‘Have the kids had their supper?’ Doris asked with a quick glance at her husband. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Upstairs, gone to bed.’ No sound came from upstairs. She crossed her fingers that Mum would not go up just yet to see them. If she did she’d find her youngest boy’s eyes probably still red. Cissy trusted Sidney to heed her warning that if he told on her, she would get him next time, well and truly.

  May had been good enough, playing hopscotch on the corner with girls her age, had come in willingly when called. But the boys.…The pair of them had played up something horrid, scowling and rude to her when she’d called them in, rebellious at having to scrub the black off their fingers where they’d been popping tar bubbles in the kerb caused by the heat of enclosed streets under a mid-August sun.

  By five o’clock she’d had enough and belted into both of them. They’d scurried upstairs, Sidney calling her names from the safety of the closed bedroom door, neither daring to come down lest she belted them again. Mum wouldn’t be happy if she knew, but one can stand only so much when it’s not really one’s role to play nursemaid.

  At twenty, all she wanted in life was to be like those privileged little flappers who frequented the West End. She and Daisy Evans often went up West. Daisy too went to Madam Noreah, for singing, but not every week, as she wasn’t so dedicated as Cissy.

  Both at the same firm, most of their wages were spent up West each Saturday, dancing until the last bus forced them to leave those rich bright young things to dance the rest of the night away. The next six days would be spent eking out what was left, but it was worth it, pretending to be one of those to whom money was no object. Hair shingled on the cheap, spit-curled over the cheeks, fake jewellery matching the real thing, dresses homemade – worth it all.

  Come what may, putting by for her elocution lessons was a must, even if it meant walking to work to avoid paying fares. One day, Cissy thought, one day I shall be part of those bright young people, if it kills me.

  Another shilling or so went religiously into her Post Office Book. Saving since starting work six years ago, it held nearly fifty pounds.

  Making her own dresses on Mum’s old sewing machine helped. Luckily 1924 had brought a fashion for the simple straight chemise. A couple of yards folded end to end, neck and armholes cut out, shoulders and sides stitched, satin band around the hips – nothing could be simpler. With dangly earrings and two strings of fake pearls, it was easy to look a million dollars on a few pence. Although, the pale beige rayon stockings had to be bought, of course. And shoes – never the best on her money. Only looked so, leaving her coming home half-crippled by their ill-fitting pointed toes, narrow-waisted heels and unforgiving bar straps. But it was all worth it. She looked as good as any of them. And one day…

  Chapter Two

  Madam Noreah held the one-eyed ginger tomcat close to her unevenly bulging bosom as she stared through the window of her room on the ground floor of one of those somewhat neglected Victorian houses just off the Mile End Road. Once home to middle-class families of business men and a handful of domestic staff, now most of the long terraced rows of houses each accommodated several tenants.

  Since the Great War, the moderately wealthy had moved out to urban perimeters to enjoy modern detached homes surrounded by those leafy walks and long gardens pictured on the hoardings and brochures of estate agents. Living the healthy life away from the smoke and dirt of the City, they commuted to it by sooty train instead.

  The forsaken mansions had been taken over by all sorts and all professions, of which Madam Noreah, who gave singing, elocution and deportment lessons at sixpence an hour, was one.

  She shifted her gaze from the dusty street beyond the grimy window to the ancient ormolu clock – a present from an admirer more years ago than she cared to recall – squatting in pride of place on the mantelshelf over a fireplace of once shining marble now more a shade of dirty grey.

  Five to eleven. Miss Farmer would be on the dot as always. Madam Noreah bent her large face to look down at the subdued head of the one-eyed cat she called Nelson, for want of anything better.

  ‘Miss Farmer is never late, you know,’ she told the animal who purred its response in a welter of wet snuffling. ‘I wish she could be, just for once. We must hurry and feed every one of you in the five minutes we have to ourselves, or you’ll all be around her feet the whole lesson, purring at me for attention. Ah well…Come along, my little ones. Let us see what we can find to give you.’

  Putting the cat down beside two others, a black and white and a ragged tortoiseshell, both of whom had been rubbing against the long skirt of her black, seen-better-days velvet, she moved off to the kitchen to distribute a series of saucers upon the grubby brown and white tiled floor; half a dozen to be filled with milk, the other half with bits of yesterday’s fish, precooked offal obtained from the cats-meat man every Monday and now going a little bit off, and whatever other bits and pieces she had left from her own meals.

  There was hardly any need to give her usual twittery call: ‘Here-come-come-come-come!’ as the sound of fork scraping against china had already summoned some dozen or so feline bodies of all sizes and in varying conditions of health, arrowing in through the open back door and from the parlour where some had been curled up on the sagging armchair, the sofa, the scratched sideboard and dining table whose polish had long since disappeared.

  She watched them as they fed, the hungrier, fitter ones snatching up chunks larger than they should, while the less fit sniffed the fare and turned away, skinny but off their food.

  Madam Noreah sighed and felt the tears prick her eyes for these poorly ones. She tried to tend them, but she knew little about cats beyond feeding them and giving them shelter; the poor strays who bred incessantly, the poor thrown-out kittens fending for themselves, the too-young mothers slowly starving as milk was drained from their thin teats, the one-eyed, one-eared denizens of rooftile and backyard.

  ‘Eat as well as you can, my little ones,’ she told the twelve, or was it fourteen? She never counted the same number twice. They came and went as they pleased.

  A hollow pound on the front door told her it was exactly eleven and Miss Farmer was here for her elocution lesson. Leaving the cats to themselves, Madam Noreah went to answer it.

  Cissy’s nose twitched at the offensive odour of cat urine that met her as the door opened. She hated this place. But where else could one be taught to speak nicely at sixpence an hour?

  Madam Noreah had once tried persuading her into taking up singing. ‘You say you have no voice, Miss Farmer, but I believe you have, and I could develop it for you.’ But Cissy knew it was the extra sixpence she was after, and anyway, the mere thought of taking in deep breaths of urine-tainted air to reach that high ‘C’ was a great deterrent to singing lessons.

  ‘I just want to speak nicely,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford both.’

  That was enough to dissuade Madam Noreah from pursuing the question again, thank God.

  Madam Noreah, seeing Miss Daisy Evans had arrived too, gave her singing pupil, quite her most favourite singing pupil, a toothy grin.

  ‘Ah, you have come this week, dear. So nice. Entré, my dears.’

  She opened the door wide for the inseparables, that was when Miss Evans deigned to come which wasn’t as regularly as she’d have wished, but when she did come it was always with Miss Farmer even though she must sit and wait for an hour until her own lesson.

  Cissy in her turn would sit and wait while Daisy went up and down scales and arpeggios and on to one of the easier arias Madam Noreah had set for her, accompanied on the piano by Madam Noreah who also gave piano lessons, before the two girls finally left together.

  With the outside air coming in and diluting the cat smell a little, they made their way down the dim passage to the back p
arlour, now empty of cats still feeding in the kitchen. Cissy was grateful for that.

  Cissy was first, taking reluctant deep breaths through her nose and, as her lesson progressed, growing slowly inured to the cat odour, taking her cue from Madam Noreah’s powerfully resonant vowels.

  ‘Oww…oww…Howw – noww – browwn – coww. Whom – loom – bloom. Repeat after me, “Ai have every hope of having a happy afternoo-oon.”’

  By the end of her hour Cissy’s lips ached, but Madam Noreah was well satisfied.

  ‘Very good. Excellent. Parfait, my dear, parfait.’

  But what good did it do? Who…no, on whom was she to practise her excellent vowels? On Eddie? He’d only look stunned, as always. Edward Bennett lived a few streets from her. Shy, but down-to-earth, he saw himself as her boyfriend, and often took her to the pictures where he would hold her hand as they watched the flickering silent screen, forgetting to laugh at Charlie Chaplin or Fatty Arbuckle for gazing at her the whole time. She’d feel his eyes on her all the while she was laughing, almost spoiling her enjoyment of the slapstick.

  Not that she didn’t like Eddie. Just twenty-one, he was quite tall when he didn’t stoop, good-looking, though he would more likely think he was being mocked should anyone say so. Cissy had to admit he had a natural grace and could have had all the girls flocking around him. But he was so sure he was the ugliest man alive. He’d told Cissy as much, confiding in her as one he could trust.

  ‘No one’s interested in a chap what’s got mousy ’air all over the place,’ he said once. In truth the colour was more gold than mousy, but he couldn’t see it, nor that it waved gently. ‘And piggy eyes,’ he’d said on another occasion, totally unaware that those soft-brown orbs of his were his very asset. If only he’d acknowledge himself as halfway good-looking, Cissy thought, as she followed Madam Noreah’s aitches, he would be a wow with girls instead of backing away from the first hint of admiration, shy to a point of idiocy.

  He was different with her, at ease with himself. They had grown up together, played in the street and gone to the same school, and somehow she had allowed it to go on until, too late, it was becoming accepted by everyone that they would team up together as the saying went, even though she now cherished her dream of one day escaping all this.

  He’d call round, welcomed in by Mum, who made him at home in the certainty that one day he’d marry her daughter. Dad approved of him – a lighterman like himself, made a Freeman two months back.

  ‘Nice ter know you’ll wed to one of us,’ he had said, proud Cissy was continuing the family tradition. He too assumed that they would finally pair up.

  Cissy thought otherwise, though she kept that to herself. She liked Eddie well enough, in a way she loved him. There was no doubt that he was in love with her. But she could not let herself love him back in the right way, because that way her dream would go pop, be lost for ever. She would be turned into a housewife, a drudge, a mother, all her ambitions would go out of the window.

  ‘One last time,’ Madam Noreah was saying. ‘Repeat after me…’

  The lesson coming to an end, Cissy went to perch on the edge of a bucket-seated velveteen armchair, aware of the stain in the centre – a faint ring of something nasty, probably an ancient accident by some cat or other – to wait for Daisy to go through her paces.

  At the piano Madam Noreah said, ‘I think in this instance we shall begin in the key of A, Miss Evans,’ and as Daisy took a stance, the appropriate chord chimed out from the ringing piano.

  Daisy filled her lungs, unmoved by the smell of cats – she was accustomed to smells, her house always smelled of cabbage water – and emitted the purest opening, ‘oo, oh, aw, ah, ay, ee,’, filling the shabby room with magic. Cissy felt a shiver of envy thrill through her as she sat listening to the clear crystal notes overcoming the dubious tone of the piano. Proceeding from the key of A to the key of B and thence to top C, Daisy could make the very air sing. It was an hour of rapture, finalised by the sweetest rendering of ‘Kiss Me Again’ from the operetta Mlle Modiste.

  ‘Another Saturday morning lesson over,’ said Daisy. The summer was now long past and Cissy took great gulps of smoke-laden London fog, even that was fresher than the odour of cats. ‘Another sixpence down the drain.’

  ‘Surely you think it worth it?’ Cissy said, the diction she’d been working on so hard, lingering. A few hours with her family would of course, blunt it, though she’d be annoyed with herself hearing it happen; but it was embarrassing to sustain when friends and family, whose speech never rose above the gutter, were forever having a dig at her. Easier to forgo all she had learned for the while. She could always put the polish back on when the need arose – which was usually up West.

  ‘I’m thinking of giving up singing lessons,’ Daisy announced out of the blue, as they boarded the tram home.

  Forgetting to hand her fare to the ticket conductor, leaving him hovering impatiently, Cissy stared amazed at her.

  ‘You can’t! You have such a beautiful voice. Whatever put an idea into your head of giving it up?’

  Beside her, the ticket conductor coughed. Cissy came to herself. ‘Oh, sorry, two threepennies please.’

  The tickets in hand, Daisy giving up her threepence, Cissy turned back to her. ‘You can’t mean it. Why?’

  ‘All that practice,’ Daisy explained, gazing out of the window onto the Commercial Road where they had got on. ‘It’s not doing my figure any good. All that deep breathing. I’m developing a chest and I can’t let that happen.’

  Cissy knew what she meant as Daisy glanced down at her bosom still flat beneath the loose V-necked georgette jumper bought second-hand down Petticoat Lane. The fashion these last few years dictated that the perfect figure was the perfectly straight figure, the tiniest of curves in those vital statistics of 30-30-30 considered fat. And now even Cissy thought she could see a bulge on that stick-thin shape despite the flattening brassiere. But to give up with such a lovely voice – to sacrifice it to fashion.

  ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’

  Daisy shrugged and looked back out of the window of the noisy, juddering tram. ‘I could carry on, I suppose, but I shall be careful doing the exercises she sets me. Fancy ending up like her!’

  ‘That won’t happen,’ Cissy said, horrified by the mere thought of it. ‘Not with all the dancing when we go up West.’

  Tonight, though, they wouldn’t be going up West. Daisy’s parents had relations coming and Daisy was expected to stay at home and be sociable. Not brave enough to venture alone into the West End, Cissy too would stay in, content herself doing a bit more to the jumper she was trying to knit and hope Eddie might call, offering to take her to the pictures. Better than nothing.

  As if by some sixth sense that was exactly what he did. Soon after tea, came a rap on the doorknocker. Mum went to answer it, the next thing was Eddie’s tall stooping figure at the front room door where the family had settled for the evening to listen to Dad’s gramophone records. The grin on Eddie’s narrow handsome face was full of hope.

  ‘Thought you might like to go to the flicks, Cissy,’ he ventured.

  ‘Sit down, Eddie, dear,’ invited Mrs Farmer. ‘Fancy a cuppa tea, luv? The pot’s still ’ot. We’ve only just this minute ’ad ours.’

  ‘Very nice of you, Mrs Farmer,’ said Eddie, and sat up to receive his cup, then turned back to Cissy. ‘Fancy goin’ then?’

  The way he spoke made her cringe. It was a problem she faced when with him – whether to keep up her cultured speech or moderate it so as not to sound out of place or show him up. It was a dilemma that followed her now whatever she did around here.

  She teetered on the point of refusing his offer, but anything was better than sitting at home, Dad putting on one gramophone record after another, most of them comedy ones which got everyone giggling; Mum and Dad taking up the armchairs, May and Sidney sprawling across the settee – Harry gone to bed at his age – leaving her hardly any room to sit at ease. Cissy ma
de a quick decision.

  ‘What film had you in mind?’

  He grimaced into his cup, his next words an obvious almost painful effort to improve himself, which showed he could when he wanted to.

  ‘Whatever you fancy.’

  There was not much she fancied this Saturday. There was a Buster Keaton film on at the local. She certainly needed a bit of a laugh to offset the disappointment of not going up West.

  Eddie nodded readily. The Keaton film, Our Hospitality, wouldn’t have been his first choice, she knew that, but so eager was he to take her out that he’d have suffered four hours of opera for it. And anyway, the big picture The Covered Wagon, was one he had said he’d missed last year in the West End. Now showing locally, this was his chance to see it and he was all for that, she could see by the way he leapt up, handing his empty cup back to her mother.

  He stood waiting while she went to put on a dab of face powder and apply a coat of deep pink lipstick before coming back into the room, coat and handbag at the ready, her stiff brown cloche hat hiding shingled fair hair and eyebrows plucked to a thin pencil line. Her mother eyed her with some disapproval as well as anxiety.

  ‘You shouldn’t pluck them eyebrows of yours like that. It ain’t nat’ral. Could ’arm your eyesight, tearing ’airs out like that. Then you go an’ paint it all in again, and then ’ide ’em. It’s daft.’

  ‘You can take some of that lipstick off too,’ Dad put in his two-pen’orth at the vividly coloured bow lips. ‘In my time, young…’

  But Cissy chose to ignore it as she swept out of the house with Eddie. If Dad knew she used deep red up West, wiping it off before reaching home, he’d have a fit.

  *

  Going to the pictures with Eddie was always a mixture of enjoyment and irritation. Relaxed with her, he was lively and could even be witty sometimes, but it was his moments of earnestness that spoiled it all.

  The programme was a popular one. They joined the queue outside and, armed with a bag of still warm fresh-roasted peanuts to while away the waiting, moved up in twos and threes, thankful the evening was dry for November. Finally entering the vast darkened cinema a few minutes into the continuous programme, they felt their way to their seats, near the back. ‘Don’t want ter muck up yer eyes,’ said Eddie, of the small square screen. ‘Can be ’armful sittin’ too close.’