by Juliet West
For Mum, Dad, Alison and Rob,
with love.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon . . .
‘The Going’, THOMAS HARDY
Contents
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Part Two
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Part Three
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
Part Four
42
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Author’s Note
Part One
Leman Street Police Station
18th day of July 1918
Statement of Herbert Tilling
Motorman
I am a motorman employed by the Metropolitan Railway Company. At 5.49 a.m. on 18 July 1918 I was running my train into Aldgate East Station when a man got up from a seat on the platform and jumped in front of my train. When I saw the man jump, I applied the emergency brake.
I got down from the train and searched for the man and found him lying between the negative rail and the inside running rail immediately under the first carriage. I saw that the man was alive and moving. I told him to remain still until I got to him. I moved him to between the first and second carriages, then helped him over the negative rail into the six-foot way and eventually onto the platform.
I saw that his head was bleeding from the back.
He said: ‘Will you give me a drop of water?’ I caused some to be fetched. I then left him in charge of other officials.
1
London, September 1916
I can’t help looking down as I cross the bridge over Bow Creek. The high tide heaves, rising with the Thames, grey oily water sucking and slapping against the muddy banks. This water can swallow you in an eye-blink, whether you want to be swallowed or not. Women trip on trailing skirts; dockers overstep in the fog. Too long in the pub and even a lighterman could find himself falling.
People forget that water needs air to survive. Aitch-two-O. As I look in the river, I think of Beatrice and I wonder whether her drowned breath still breaks the surface, swirled up somehow with the coal dust and the rotten cats and the centuries of London filth.
After Beatrice died, I refused to cross the water. Six years old and stubborn, I would sink onto the cobbles wailing at the sight of a bridge. Instinct told me it went against nature, keeping things up with nuts and bolts. I couldn’t understand this peculiar magic, however much Dad tried to explain. It was surely only a matter of time before the bridge collapsed, I thought. Why not at that moment, the very moment I was stepping across?
For a time I conquered my fear.
A gust of wind batters in from the east and now the bridge seems to shift, a lurch downwards. I put my hand on the iron parapet and try to shake the dizziness away, the sense that I am falling. There’s a little trick I play. I imagine Dad teasing me in the way he always did – Daft old Hannah-Lou, daft old Hannah – and I chant the words silently, over and over, as I cross to the East India side. It comforts me as I hurry along, past the Blackwall Tunnel, over the dock bridges, until finally I’m in Cubitt Town.
A ship’s whistle sounds as I turn into East Ferry Road. The wind is sharp, demented; it tugs at my hair and flings grit into my eyes, so I have to squint and hold my hat down hard on my head. An old greengrocer is standing in front of his shop, arms crossed, with his apron flapping in the squall. I walk up to him, smiling.
‘Yes, miss,’ he says, smiling back and jangling the coins inside his apron pocket.
‘I was just calling about a job.’
‘What job?’ He’s frowning now and the coins fall silent.
‘Just any job.’
‘Sorry, dear,’ he says, turning to rearrange a display of small apples. A terrier pads out from the shop and the greengrocer shoos him back inside.
‘Thank you, anyway, sir.’ I carry on walking, head held high.
I try the newsagent two doors down, then the chandler’s and even the sweetshop on the corner. No luck.
At the crossroads, I turn right into Glengall Road. I’ve not been this far down the Isle of Dogs in ages, not since Dora dragged me to a bazaar at the Liberal and Radical Association because a boy she liked was running the dipping tub. That was a warm spring day, but this morning everything is darker. Two men in oil-specked waistcoats lean against a wall outside the George pub. Beyond them rise the blackened arches of the railway viaduct. ‘Morning,’ one of them says, while the other whistles a long, low note. Lecherous beggars, they are. Got to be careful with men like that, keep your eyes straight ahead.
There’s a cafe opposite the pub, double-fronted and the windows busy with advertisements and chalkboards so that it’s hard to see inside. Sticking out of the roof guttering is a crooked tin teapot. Flowers are growing from the spout, those pink jobs you see all over the show. Vandal root, we call it – posh name valerian. Supposed to be good for the nerves.
I cross the road towards the cafe and the closer I get to the teapot, the further I crane my neck up to see it. I should know better, really I should, because it sets off that feeling again, the sense of falling. I steady myself against a lamp post, try to breathe in deep, but all I get is a lungful of kipper stink from the fish shop nearby.
What I need now is a cup of hot tea, plenty of sugar. There’s a sign in the cafe window that says, NESTLE’S MILK. OPEN. When I push the door, a tiny bell rings.
It’s busy inside, the air all chewy with tobacco smoke and grease. Squat dockers with thick wrists and sloping shoulders stare at me over half-raised spoons. I make for the woman at the counter.
‘Morning,’ she says. She’s older than me, forty-ish and fat, wearing a plain apron over a high-necked blouse. Her hair is folded into a white net, and when she smiles, her wide-spaced teeth and little pink-rimmed eyes put me in mind of the Lipton’s pig.
‘Cup of tea, please.’ Soon as I’ve said it I wonder where I’ll sit. Might be easiest to stand at the counter, keep my back to the men.
Next to a jar of pickles on the counter is a plate piled with currant buns. A small square of cardboard rests against the plate – BUNS ½d, written in pencil. I take out my purse and put a coin on the counter.
‘I’ll have a currant bun ’n’ all,’ I say.
‘Good girl.’
The woman claws at the top bun with a pair of tongs and places it on a plate.
‘Marg?’
I nod and there’s a whoosh inside my mouth. Ravenous, I am.
The woman slices the bun, then spreads each half with margarine – flick, flick – all smooth and graceful, like the bone-handled knife is part of her body, an extra finger. She turns to a high shelf behind the counter and picks a china cup rather than the tin mugs lined up on the shelf below. From a huge pot she pours my tea; the steam curls from the spout in a lazy mist and suddenly my legs feel weak. I have the curious feeling of wanting to lie down right there on the floor and sleep for a long time.
‘Sugar?’
‘Please.’
She adds two heaped spoonfuls, pushing the second spoonful down so that the wet crystals crunch in the bottom of the cup.
‘Lovely as you like,’ she says under her breath, with such private satisfaction, surprise almost, as if this might be the first time she has ever served anyone tea and a bun. She looks up. ‘And you’ll be wanting a seat.’ She nods towards the table nearest the counter.
A man is sitting there. His shirt sleeves are rolled up, and he’s reading the Daily Mirror. This man, he’s not like your average docker. He’s well built all right, strong like you have to be, but there’s something unusual about him. A word comes to my mind – elegant – and I tell myself not to be so daft. It isn’t a word I’ve ever thought before, let alone said. He’s just a plain old labourer. You can tell from his ragged fingernails and the hairs on his forearms, laced with dirt.
The woman sees me staring. ‘Don’t you worry about him,’ she says, leaning forward so that I can smell her tea-sweet breath. ‘Soft as kittens they are, these boys. Would never insult a lady.’
The man looks up at me, straight-faced. His hair is too long and falls across his forehead. At the corner of his eye, a pulse jumps, like there’s the tiniest creature under his skin.
‘Just leaving anyway,’ he says, tucking the newspaper into his jacket pocket. He doesn’t wear the jacket, though, just holds it, all bunched up in his fist, not bothering about the creases. As he walks past, there’s the sharp smell of metal and something softer: peppermint, could it be? He touches the peak of his cap in our direction, but I don’t smile.
‘Good day, Mr Blake,’ says the woman, and the bell jangles him out.
The silence in the cafe lifts. An old boy coughs into a handkerchief, and two men near the window laugh. ‘God’s honest,’ one of them says. ‘Found ’er up the Commercial Road.’
Mr Blake’s chair is still warm. I think about moving across to another, because it doesn’t seem proper, soaking up the heat of him, but I stay put, sipping my tea. I eat the bun slowly, aiming for dainty, savouring the sweet stickiness of the currants, the cold layer of marg and the hot, heavenly tea cutting through it all.
‘Not often we see a young lady in the shop.’ The woman is leaning over the counter again and I have to turn sideways, try and face her to be polite. ‘Unless they’re looking for work, of course. And then they don’t bother buying nothing.’ She shakes her head as she wipes down the counter, her greying rag swishing damp circles into the wood.
‘Well, since you mention it . . .’ I say, placing the last piece of bun back on the plate. I can feel the blush rising, but I can’t pass up the chance. ‘Since you mention it, I am looking for a position.’
‘A position, is it? Well, I’ll tell you, Miss . . .’
‘Mrs Loxwood.’
Her eyes flicker to my left hand and for a second I’m tempted to produce the wedding ring from the chain round my neck. Instead I raise my hand to my throat, press the curve of the thin gold through the wool of my buttoned-up coat.
‘I’ll tell you, Mrs Loxwood, Mr Stephens – he’s the proprietor – Mr Stephens has been considering an extra assistant. My knees are playing up and the prospect of another damp winter –’ she twists her lips together and sucks in a stream of air ‘– it don’t bear thinking about. You local, dear?’
‘Poplar born. Just over the creek now, in Canning Town.’
Her nose wrinkles in a tiny sniff. She thinks she’s a cut above, here in Cubitt Town. Don’t blame her.
‘Husband work at the docks?’
‘East India. Did work there, I mean. He’s joined up.’
‘Oh, bless you, dear. You must be very proud.’
I don’t reply. She stares at me, her head to one side.
‘But no nippers, I take it, little slip of a thing like you. You’re no age.’
‘I’m twenty-four, and I’ve got two children, boy and a girl. My sister’ll look after them. When I get a job, I mean.’ I think of Jen laying down the law with Alice and Teddy. She’ll look after them all right, even if it turns her red hair grey.
She asks whether I’ve ever worked in a shop or a cafe before and I tell her no, but I was a kitchen maid at a house in Chelsea before I was married.
‘Well, that’s useful, at least,’ she says. ‘But can you write, Mrs Loxwood? Only you’d have to take down orders, and there’s the totting-up.’
‘Oh yes, I won prizes for my handwriting. Headmistress wanted me to stay on, but . . .’ I trail off. She doesn’t want to hear my sob story.
‘You’d be amazed how many girls come in here unlettered. Heaven knows what they got up to at school.’
They didn’t bother going, I want to answer, but surely she’s seen the children just as well as I have, mudlarking at low tide, scrabbling in the sludge for scrap iron or a good length of twine. Still, I sometimes wonder what’s worse, never having a chance, or thinking you had one, then finding it got taken away.
Lipton’s lady smiles. ‘I’ll put in a good word with Mr Stephens. You come back same time tomorrow and we’ll see about a position.’
‘I’m much obliged to you, Mrs . . .’
‘Stephens. Mrs Stephens, for my sins.’
Mrs Stephens disappears into the kitchen and I stand up, slipping the leftover morsel of bun into my coat pocket. When I get back to Canning Town, I’ll divide it between Alice and Teddy, tell them to shut their eyes and open their gobs and then they’ll have a surprise.
Walking home, the sun comes out, flashing on the shop windows and the drain covers so that the street looks almost cheerful. At the top of East Ferry Road, glass glints up from the rubble of Beasley’s milk yard. Mr Beasley wouldn’t leave the yard, my friend Dora said, not even when the Zeppelin was cruising right overhead. What killed him wasn’t the bomb itself; it was the flying glass from his milk bottles, great big shards of it. That’s Dor’s account, anyway, but she always has been prone to melodrama. She’d be right at home on the stage; everyone says so.
Vandal root is flowering around the edges of the rubble. Gets everywhere, this stuff. I never could resist a posy, so I bend down to pick a few sprigs, digging my thumbnail into the juicy stalks – squeeze, snap – and threading them into the buttonhole of my coat. When I walk back past the grumpy old greengrocer’s, I smile, jaunty as you like with all that sugar in my belly and the tiny pink flowers nodding from my buttonhole. ‘Up yours,’ I whisper, and the wind takes my words, lifts them high above the Thames.
A wool ship is locking into South Dock and the barrier comes down to shut off the swing bridge. Rotten luck to catch a bridger. I could be stuck here for twenty minutes now, and this is the very last place I’d choose to wait, this shadowy stretch of Manchester Road, not ten yards from the exact spot where they laid out Beatrice.
The swing bridge creaks as it turns a half-circle across the basin. A crowd gathers on the pavement around me: a gentleman in a bowler, an old Chinaman sucking on a pipe, three girls from Morton’s smelling of pickles. One of the girls smiles at me and rolls her eyes, as if to complain about the hold-up, but I don’t want to get involved in their chatter. I keep my eyes fixed straight ahead as the ship clears the lock and slowly the girders swing back into place. The crowd surges across the bridge, but I hang back. The footway is ever so narrow: too much of a crush and you could lose your balance. Daft old Hannah-Lou. I’d rather be daft than drowned.
Someone is crossing from the other side, a tall man who’s reading a folded-up newspaper as he walks. He grasps the paper tightly, and his shoulders are set, as if he’s trying to pour his whole body into those flimsy pages. When we pass on the bridge, he doesn’t look up. It strikes me then why this man seems so familiar. The cafe, of course. Mr Blake.
By the time I turn in to Sabbarton Street my flowers have wilted and the clouds are threatening rain. I think of Jen inside the house, poking coals in the stove, sweating and sighing, Alec skulking in the doorways, the children bickering and telling tales the minute I walk in the door.
The piece of bun is like a jewel in my pocket and it dawns on me that what Alice and Teddy have never known they’ll never miss. I take out the bun, doughy from the heat of my fingers, and push it into my mouth.
George’s letter is propped up against the button box on the hall shelf, a dusty footprint stamped across the front of the envelope. All those mornings I’ve been stuck indoors wondering what the postman might bring. Minute I go out, a letter comes, and it gets trodden on for good measure.
‘Any luck?’ yells Jen from the scullery.
I pick up the letter and walk through. She’s slicing bread, sleeves rolled up to show her arms, all dimply and mottled. Her hair’s the usual mess, gingery curls escaping from her bun. Jen doesn’t look at me standing there, just keeps slicing with a tight grip on the loaf and a frown on her face.
‘Not exactly.’
‘What do you mean, “not exactly”?’
‘I mean nothing definite. But there might be a job in a cafe. I have to go back tomorrow.’
‘You’ll be wanting me to mind the children again?’
‘If that’s all right.’
She sniffs, and right on cue a howl starts up from the yard. I squeeze past Jen and step through the open door. Alice is standing in the corner of the yard, back pressed against the sooty brick wall. Her right hand is stretched up high above her head, dangling Teddy’s Ducky. It’s a little sock puppet that George brought back from the training camp on his leave. He’d stitched it together himself: two odd buttons for eyes and a yellowish piece of sacking for the beak. Teddy takes it everywhere, and now he’s started to call it Daddy.
‘Want Daddy, Daddy,’ he’s shrieking, but Alice is still waving the puppet above her head, her black curls teased by the wind.
Teddy sees me and rushes over, grasping me around the knees. I run my hands through his knotty hair, press the damp heat of his head.
‘Alice Loxwood, give the baby his duck,’ I say.
Alice cackles louder, and although she leaves off the dangling, she keeps Ducky close to her chest.
‘I didn’t do nothing,’ she shouts. ‘It was him what kicked me.’
‘He’s two years old and you’re four. You should know better. Now give it back or you’ll get a smack.’
