An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘I’ve got work!’ Charlie Farmer’s broad face was aglow with triumph and relief as he burst into the steam-filled kitchen, Monday morning being Doris’s washday. ‘Got meself taken on permanently. I start termorrer.’

  Dropping the shirt whose collar she had been scrubbing, Charlie’s neck tending to sweat a lot, back into the tub, Doris hurried across to him and, her arms still covered in suds, threw them around him.

  ‘Oh, Charlie! Oh, that’s wonderful! Oh, I’m so glad!’ Exclamations tumbled from her and she leaned away from him. ‘How’d you get it? Oh, it’s wonderful news. What sort of work?’

  ‘Lighters. Be workin’ for Briggs.’

  ‘Big people!’ She knew her companies, did Doris. ‘And it’s permanent, you say?’

  ‘As permanent as it can be. They said for an indefinite period. Things must be lookin’ up at last. Said they wanted someone what’s got a few years behind ’im rather than a youngster. That must say something.’

  Doris had collected herself, dropped her arms from him. At her age and the length of her married years, wives didn’t go mooning around their husbands. But her small round face was alight with hope.

  Last week, May had found herself full-time machinist work – lingerie or lingery as she always put it, that was how it was spelled, wasn’t it? Nice delicate work. She was pleased for May. And her fiancé had been working for a while, street sweeper, but it was something. Maybe she and her fiancé could get married at last.

  That left only Bobby, but Doris had hopes for him too. Eddie had bought another tug after losing that last one like he did. Must’ve done well with the insurance money. He might have something for Bobby. They weren’t doing too bad, Cissy with her shop, modest though it was, the both of them in business – couldn’t be that bad off. Yes, Eddie might give Bobby some work. Doris could see a candle at the end of their particular tunnel, and overcome with joy that her breadwinner was a breadwinner once more, she threw herself at him again, and to the Devil with her age and the length of her married years.

  It was good to be on the river again, feel the strength of the water under his feet, the breeze in his face. To feel at one with if not in charge of the elements. Himself and an apprentice working a sixty-five-ton craft this fine April morning in the pale clean light of dawn, he had pulled her to the lock on a thirty-one-foot oar. Other craft gathering, a lively exchange of news and banter between lightermen as they waited for the lock gates to open. Good to have like men around him, to feel once more a part of the world he knew. Life was good again.

  Standing firm, legs apart to steady himself, the young apprentice he had with him making himself busy as his craft was pulled steadily in on the capstain rope alongside others. There was the familiar rumble of lock gates closing and the rush and gurgle of water draining, lowered until level with that outside. The dripping green-slimed lock walls seemed to rise above him, the gurgle of water dying, gates opening, pulled out by the capstain rope, the tide catching the craft, swinging it round, head to tide. They made the craft fast to the pier head and waited for the tug to arrive taking him to whatever destination he had on his orders.

  The one picking him up was the Milo, Eddie’s new tug. Charlie waved to him in the wheelhouse as he made fast and with his apprentice leapt aboard, his lighter and another secured in tow, signalled ‘How goes it, then?’ the chugging of the tug too noisy for words. He saw Eddie’s thumb go up, his optimistic grin from the wheelhouse signalling back that all was well.

  Later they’d probably have a proper chinwag in a coffee shop. He liked Eddie, admired him for taking Cissy back like he had, even if he thought him soft for having done so – he couldn’t have forgiven Cissy so easily, hadn’t, not for a long time. He had now, of course. With Eddie so forgiving, how could he go on holding a grudge? He just hoped it wouldn’t backfire on Eddie one day.

  He’d taken Bobby on his payroll again too. For that Charlie felt somewhat awkwardly indebted to him. Good sort, Eddie, but some people could be almost too good for comfort, he rated, tended to make you squirm a bit. But he was doing too much thinking. Getting looks from the bloke from the other lighter, and from his apprentice.

  Bobby was coming aft with mugs of tea for them. Soon there’d be four more craft hooked on at various points, and more blokes to bring tea for. He nodded thanks to Bobby as he took his mug, sipped the boiling brew and he left Eddie, Bobby and the other two crew to their work.

  The Milo was proving a good vessel. Eddie felt at home in her as he’d not done for a long time in the Cicely before she’d gone down. He felt a little odd, though, knowing the Milo had been acquired with someone else’s money. It still had a ring of charity to it rather than of business even though the money would be paid back. He was determined to do that as soon as he possibly could, even wished the interest was a little higher so as to lessen this sense of having accepted charity.

  He stood at the wheel, the Milo towing her six heavily laden barges as if they were matchsticks, each picked up at various points; Millwall Dock, Deptford Cattle Market, Folly House Roads, heading now for Tilbury Dock. The leading two barges towered blunt-bowed and cliff-like behind her, each rolling a splashing uneven moustache of a bow wave before it with a hollow sloshing and a strong muddy odour of stirred-up river water.

  He could see his father-in-law and the other lightermen taking it easy in the stern now, grouped in a pose with two of the Milo’s crew for an old box camera one of them had.

  With little to do for the time being but to forge ahead, merely keeping an eye out for other craft, Eddie glanced towards Bobby, a little apart from the rest, gazing back from where they’d come. Eddie grinned to himself. No doubt taking his own private pictures in his mind as usual, the river smooth, the fine weather clouds marching across the April sky. Eddie’s grin broadened, guessing the poetic wool-gathering his crewmember was indulging in.

  He’d taken Bobby on again after procuring the Milo; felt obligated, family and all that. After all, having laid him off before, it was only right he should consider him before anyone else. It had pleased Cissy.

  A good lighterman, Bobby had got his waterman’s licence years ago but hadn’t a chance to air his skills, unemployment being what it was. His main trouble, he was a dreamer. Like Cissy in that respect, except that where it had sent her looking for greener pastures he merely dreamed. Less harmful, Eddie concluded. She’d found them not as green as she had thought, but in looking had caused, and was still causing, bitter reverberations in some hearts, mostly in his.

  Abruptly, he drew his thoughts purposely back to Bobby, needing to focus them away from her. Bobby’s other drawback was forever moaning about Ethel; how she always took their daughter Jean’s side against his no matter how naughty the child was; how he wished he had left her and gone to that woman across the river; how he regretted not having got to know the son he’d had – on and on until Eddie felt like telling him to shut up. Yet he was a good hard worker when not daydreaming.

  He leaned out of the wheelhouse, alerting him from whatever was absorbing him. ‘Be making Tilbury Dock in ten minutes.’

  Bobby came to himself with a start. ‘Oh…yeah…right, Eddie.’

  Eddie smiled grimly. He had been daydreaming. If only Cissy had been so easily satisfied, things could have been a lot different to what they were now. But here he was again, taking things out on her when it was his own fault he let her go off as she had.

  ‘It really looks as though the shop’s picking up.’

  Cissy, counting the day’s takings, sitting at the dining room table, threw him a smile. The table cleared, pound notes flat, coins stacked, the tip of her tongue visible as she jotted down each count, like some miser, except that she wasn’t counting in a dim hidey-hole but in the liquid light of April evening sunshine slanting through the window.

  ‘If it goes on like this, what with the towage business, we might even be able to get out of this flat and find somewhere decent to live. We co
uld put our name down for one of those council houses going up around the suburbs. They say that Dagenham’s nice. Very country-like – well, it is country, isn’t it? I wouldn’t mind Dagenham.’

  Eddie looked up from his Evening Chronicle. ‘Counting chickens.’

  ‘No. But we can’t stay here over the shop for much longer. Edward’s thirteen months old now and getting a big boy. He can’t go on sleeping in our room. We’ll be wanting another baby, won’t we, eventually, and where will he sleep then?

  ‘Well?’ she prompted when he didn’t reply. ‘You would like to have more children, wouldn’t you? At least another one. I know I would.’

  He had to say something as she continued to stare across at him. He managed to grunt, ‘’Spect so.’

  It was moments like this that made his heart take a sickening backward leap into the old bitterness. Time had gone on, and in the way time has of blunting edges, he’d forget for days on end about the secret child she had. Yet it only needed her to talk as she was doing now, as though she had only the one child, to bring it all back.

  She was frowning at him. ‘What do you mean, you expect so? Surely you don’t want an only child?’

  He could feel himself on the very brink of blurting out: I’ve got an only child, you’ve got two. How about that? But he held his tongue and said. ‘I’d like another, yes. But give it time.’

  ‘Can’t give it too much time,’ she said happily, returning to her counting. ‘If we start trying soon, it’d make Edward two and a half, coming up to three – a nice age to have a little brother or sister.’

  The inevitable thought sprang to his mind. He’s got one already – one he don’t know about – one you don’t think I know about. But I do – and, oh God, I wish I didn’t!

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Cissy stared at the letter with the German postmark just arrived with the midday post.

  Closing for the lunch hour, she had come upstairs with the slim bundle of envelopes handed her by the postman just a moment earlier: long brown important-looking envelopes, they would be bills; flimsy wide envelopes, they would be circulars, adverts, the usual rubbish, and one firm-looking white one, the one with the German postmark.

  This Cissy had torn open first. The bills could wait, those touting for custom, far longer until she felt like going through them. But the one from Daisy was always the one she looked forward to.

  Mrs Bennett senior had taken Edward out to the park for the morning, the April weather being so warm and bright, but had come home about half an hour ago to get their usual quick lunch. ‘I do so enjoy doing all this,’ she never failed to remark on whatever she did around her son and daughter-in-law’s little flat. ‘I feel ten years younger, looking after me grandson.’ And indeed she looked ten years younger.

  She popped her head round from the division between kitchen and dining room at Cissy’s cry.

  ‘What is it, love? Not bad news, I hope?’

  ‘They’ve lost all their money,’ Cissy burst out, her eyes still scanning the letter, still only half read. ‘They’ve lost everything, Theodore’s business, everything.’

  ‘How could it’ve ’appened?’ Mrs Bennett cried, coming to look over her shoulder, butter knife still in her hand where she’d been making something to eat.

  Cissy didn’t answer, was reading on, disbelief growing with every word she read.

  It had taken Daisy two weeks to put her letter together. So many times she had begun, and so many times had torn it up. It was embarrassing, degrading having to write like this to Cissy, who had herself come down in the world and having, she suspected, seen her as opulent, of some standing, would now feel the superior one.

  Not that she’d ever wanted to lord it over Cissy. She hadn’t. But it had brought a good feeling being the one to succeed where Cissy, the girl who had done it all back in 1925, had finally taken a tumble. She hadn’t wished for her downfall of course, but there’d always been the but-for-the-grace-of-God bit hovering in the back of her mind.

  Now the tables had turned again, and it was she who found herself taking a tumble, worried out of her mind – no, not worried, terrified. And to think how happy she’d been in March, after all those years of hoping, to find herself pregnant at last. Teddy had been so happy, excited, shaking his head in disbelief.

  ‘I never thought I would be a father,’ he’d said, enraptured, and she’d felt so proud; so very proud and good and important, as though this miracle had been wrought by her alone. She’d been so grateful to the German doctor who’d shown her and Teddy what had been lacking. But now her world was falling around her. Having to hint – all she dared do – at Cissy’s financial help. After all, Eddie did still owe Teddy.

  Cissy felt her blood go icy as she read Daisy’s letter:

  ‘I’m so frightened. I’m sure we’re in danger. Teddy says there’s nothing to worry about and that it will blow over. He may be right of course, and it might be that my condition has made me worry more than I would normally. But I can’t help feeling so awfully scared. I want so much to come home, but we can’t afford to. We’ve hardly any money left. I wish I was in England. I don’t understand German politics, but there’s something ominous about it. Like the way that doctor spoke when I was trying for a baby. He did help us and what he said did work, but it was how he said it – like a command rather than advice. That’s how it seems all the time here. Ominous.

  The reason we’ve got so little money is that last month, the first of April it was – proper April Fools Day – Chancellor Hitler seized all Jewish bank accounts and Teddy’s money has been frozen. He has a Jewish bank even though he doesn’t make too much of his religion. Now he can’t get at his money and we only have what’s in the house and now Teddy is insisting his clients pay cash so we’ve enough to live on for the time being, but I don’t know for how much longer. But now a lot of his clients are dropping off. If we had the money to get us back to England, we’d be so grateful, but there is no one here to help. I don’t like this Fascist government. It frightens me.’

  Cissy’s eyes wandered from the letter recalling what had been going on here in London only recently. Sir Oswald Mosely, a Labour MP who’d resigned three years ago, had formed his own party. The New Party he called it, but really it was Fascism – Blackshirts as everyone called them, throwing their weight around as if they were hoping to run the country. Last month the papers had given accounts of demonstrations in the West End with battles between Jews and Fascists. His photo in the papers showed a dynamic man – drawing the wrong sort to him, he could bring Fascism even to England while people’s backs were turned.

  ‘Your poor friend do seem worried, don’t she?’

  Her mother-in-law speaking suddenly over her shoulder from where she had been reading made Cissy jump. Quickly she folded the letter. It was her letter, private, but she gave the well-meaning woman a smile.

  ‘I suppose we all get a bit over-sensitive when we’re carrying,’ she dismissed.

  ‘I suppose we do,’ adjoined the older Mrs Bennett. ‘Anyway, your lunch is ready, luv. I done tinned sardines on toast – it’s keeping warm under the grill. I’m going ter give Edward a bit ter see ’ow he likes it. It’ll be ’is first taste of tinned sardines. I bet ’e pulls a face. Kids do, yer know, at their first taste of anythink a bit stronger than porridge.’

  ‘Yes, I expect they do,’ Cissy murmured, her mind on Daisy and Theodore’s plight, but more on the situation her daughter could be in, a sudden protective instinct gripping her.

  Theodore had felt sure the country wouldn’t see its Jewish population threatened without realising how it could rebound on them. A lot of non-Jews had money tied up in banks that dealt with financiers like himself. Freezing Jewish banks would affect them too and they would not stand for it, he was sure of that.

  But his beliefs were thrown down when on the 18th May the Fascist Party won the elections in Danzig. The whole of Germany it seemed was behind its saviour, lured on by promises to lead Germany out of the world
depression; promises they believed implicitly.

  ‘They will snatch at anything in the dire situation Germany finds herself,’ Theodore had said bitterly when news of the political landslide came over the wireless. ‘They will learn the truth in time.’

  Daisy couldn’t share his optimism. She could see a day coming when she could be stranded in a country swiftly losing its attraction for her. By then with no money left to get home on, what would she do? No use asking her family for the fare. None of them had any money. And Cissy? She was feverishly still awaiting a reply from her. Would she take up the hints in her last letter. There had been hints. How could anyone ask outright and look cheap?

  ‘After all,’ she said to Theodore, following her train of thought, ‘Cissy owes us, for more than just money. And Noelle is her daughter. Surely she wouldn’t see her in danger.’

  He looked stern, his lips tight. ‘We do not beg. I hope you have not been writing to her asking for help. It is not shirt buttons we would be expecting.’

  On this occasion Daisy hadn’t laughed at his usage of her cockney sayings. ‘If we don’t ask, we won’t get,’ she flashed at him. ‘We need all the help we can get. And I’ll grab at any straw that comes along to get me home.’

  Yet for all her talk, pride stayed from writing such a blatantly begging letter. Until events in mid-June finally gave her no option.

  It was still partially light at ten o’clock. Teddy hadn’t yet come home and she was beginning to worry when urgent rapping on her front door made her start. Wondering why she hadn’t heard his motorbike, a second-hand one he now used instead of that lovely Daimler he’d once had, she found herself confronted by two stony-faced policemen as she opened the door.

  Her first stunned thought sent her blood cold as, in voices curt to a point of rudeness, they informed her that there had been an accident. Her gasp of relief was pure reaction that he hadn’t been killed as she was told that he’d been taken to Sankt Marien Hospital. But before she could begin to ask how bad he was or what had happened, they’d turned on their heels back towards a black car without even answering, much less offering to give her a lift to the hospital six miles away in Dusseldorf.