by Mary Gibson
The girls around her laughed in sympathy. She was not the only one who handed over all her pay packet on pay day and counted herself lucky to get sixpence back to spend on herself. When Eliza James laughed too, Nellie noticed Ted joining in. But the thought of her father suddenly gripped Nellie with a stab of fear. He would never condone what this woman was suggesting.
She remembered the day, two years earlier, when she’d been taken on at Duff’s. She’d considered herself lucky to get a job there, as a powder packer. It was one of hundreds of food factories clustered in Bermondsey – ‘London’s Larder’. As well as the famous custard powder, Duff’s turned out blancmanges, baking powders, sherberts and jellies. She’d known it would be hard work, but nothing had prepared her for the excruciating back pain, after eleven hours standing at her bench, or the monotony of filling and folding custard packets, hour after hour. But the thing she’d learned to hate most was that pervasive custard powder, invading every pore of her skin, seeping into the seams of her clothes, clogging up her lovely chestnut hair with its sticky matt coating. But Nellie’s father wasn’t interested in her likes and dislikes. For him, it was purely a matter of economics.
‘It’s a good job and we need that five shilling,’ he told her. ‘Work hard and don’t you dare come back home, one day, and tell me you’ve been laid off.’
What they had planned tonight was disapproved of by many working men, her father included.
‘Lily, what time is it, do you think?’ she whispered. ‘I can’t be late back. Dad’ll skin me.’
When Lily pointed to the clock at the back of the room, Nellie leaped from her seat and dashed out, without even saying goodbye to Ted. It was gone ten o’clock and she was in all sorts of trouble.
2
Going Home
Ernest James had insisted on sending his car to take her to Bermondsey. Eliza James had wanted to take the omnibus from Mecklenburgh Square that afternoon, and she would have enjoyed the ride. Surely the best place to be on yet another fiercely hot day, in this unending furnace of a summer, was sitting on the top deck of a London omnibus. But Ernest wouldn’t hear of it, so instead, she had made do with rolling down the window. At least, that way, she could enjoy the delicious breeze as she was driven across London Bridge. The south London streets had been eerily quiet. Normally, they would have been full of traffic: horse and carts delivering to and from the docks, jostling for road space with hansoms and the ever-increasing number of motor taxis and cars. But with the dockers on strike and the wharves all closed, the dockside streets had a dead, dull, aimless air about them. The factories had not yet turned out and those pedestrians who had braved the searing summer heat were visibly wilting; men and boys sweated in thick wool jackets, totally unsuited to the weather. Dockers were hanging around in jovial gangs, holding up placards, engaging any passer-by who showed an interest in their demands in conversation. As the car cruised smoothly along Tooley Street, she had breathed in the Bermondsey air, made more pungent by the heat bouncing off the tar-block roads. It was an odd mixture of horse dung, petrol fumes, old bones from the glue works, leather from the tanneries and the all-pervading spice: cinnamon and ginger drifting up from the spice wharves on the river, mingling with sweet raspberry and vanilla from the jam and biscuit factories. It was the smell of home.
Now, at the end of a long day of planning and meetings, Ernest’s driver was waiting at a respectful distance while she said her goodbyes. This evening’s meeting had gone better than she’d hoped for and she didn’t doubt that the cells of women they’d persuaded, in each of the fifteen factories, would be enough to carry the rest with them. All it would take was a single spark and, in this tinder dry Summer of Unrest as it was being called, a spark was all that was needed. The factory women were burning with a suppressed rage that seemed to have no outlet. They knew it was wrong that they worked the same hours as a man, for half the wage; they knew it was wrong that they worked in unsanitary conditions, for hours on end, with no breaks. Tonight, she’d heard the story of one mother so frightened of losing her position that she had her baby brought to her by one of her own young children, nursed the baby at the factory gates, then went back in to work. There were no concessions made for mothers, or children, come to that. And what enraged Eliza James most was that the men resented their women’s presence in the factories anyway. A woman deprived a man of a job, or that was their short-sighted way of thinking.
But not all the men were of that opinion and with the dockers’ support, the women’s courage had got the final boost it needed. Ted Bosher was a useful man to have on the ground. He understood the women’s grievances. His own sister was working all hours as a powder packer, for a few shillings and grateful for it, by all accounts. Eliza was also conscious of the power of his undoubted charms, which he used to good effect, she had noticed, to draw in even the most apathetic of the women workers. That bold little thing, sitting next to his sister, certainly couldn’t take her eyes off him. His face had been aglow all evening, though whether that was a result of young Nellie’s attentions, or her own, she couldn’t be sure.
‘We’ll have them all out in August, I guarantee it,’ Ted Bosher said at the end of the meeting. ‘This lot will carry them. After that speech of yours, you’ve turned them into the firebrands that’ll light the fire!’
He had a pleasant voice, and an easy manner, but his eyes had an intensity that Eliza James had grown to recognize in her years as a union activist. Such burning anger as she had seen in them could be as much of a danger to their own cause as it could be to their adversaries. She preferred a more measured approach.
‘I hope they’ve seen the sense in my arguments too. Fifteen thousand women, walking out on one day, has got to make their bosses sit up and take notice. But I know it’s going to be hard for the women. They’ll get opposition at home, especially the younger ones.’
Ted brushed her misgivings aside. ‘It’ll be worth it, what’s a bit of family upset? The struggle’s worth it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, bristling slightly, ‘I wouldn’t be here, if I didn’t think it was worth it.’
At the door she shook hands with the other two dockers, and Ernest’s driver showed her to the waiting car. He opened the back door for her, got in to the front himself and set off towards London Bridge. They had been driving for several minutes, when she leaned forward to tap on the sliding window between her and the driver.
‘Simmons, could you turn round? I’d like to take a different route home.’
She gave him instructions, and a puzzled look passed across his young face. But he merely turned the car round, with a nod of his head, and drove towards Rotherhithe as she had asked. The gas lamps along Southwark Park Road were still blazing, but their cheerful glow soon receded. The lamps grew sparser as they skirted the entrance to Brunel’s tunnel and moved into the area of docks and wharves strung along the great loop of the river at Rotherhithe. The driver followed her occasional instructions and then stopped when she tapped on the window again. They had come to a street that fronted on to the Thames. A sign pointed to Globe Stairs, down on the foreshore. The little row of terraced houses was squashed between the wide blackness of the Thames on one side and the square, silent basin of Globe Dock behind. Here and there, the indigo skyline was pierced by the black bows and masts of ships, many of them marooned and still unencumbered of their cargos, while they waited for the dockers’ strike to end.
‘I won’t be long, Simmons.’
She peered at the door numbers as she walked down the dimly lit street, and hesitated before eventually stopping at the last house in the little terrace. She knocked, a weak knock; certainly it seemed less loud than the pounding of her own heart. The door was opened by a young man with dark wavy hair. He didn’t smile, just swung the door wide open and stepped to one side.
‘Hello, Sam,’ Eliza said.
Nellie’s lungs burned and she was gulping in painful breaths by the time she arrived at the front door of their terrac
ed house in Vauban Street. A gas lamp hissed and flickered halfway down the street and a few of the houses still had lights in the downstairs windows, but her own home was in darkness, with the shutters closed. She banged on the front door and when no one answered, stooped to call, in a half whisper, through the letterbox.
‘Alice, it’s Nellie, let me in!’
She heard footsteps on the stairs and, for a moment, was relieved that her sister had heard her. Then she heard her father’s voice booming.
‘Get back to bed, girl. I told her ten!’
Her sister’s muffled, pleading voice floated down to her and Nellie put her ear to the letterbox.
‘Please, Dad, she can’t stay out all night.’
She heard no reply, just her father’s footsteps, thumping down the stairs.
Nellie’s face was wet with sweat from her run in the sticky warm night, but now she shivered on the doorstep. She wasn’t sure which terrified her more, a night out here on the streets or a confrontation with her father. The front door was flung open and his large figure filled the passageway. He was dressed only in long johns and a hastily donned pair of trousers, baggy at the waist and held up by a pair of braces. He looked faintly ridiculous, but she wasn’t going to laugh, not now.
‘I’m sorry, Dad, I lost track of—’
‘What’s it to be?’ Her father held up the thick leather belt that he usually wore as well as his braces.
‘This, or a night on the streets?’
His voice was quiet and controlled, but his face was even redder than usual and thin spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth. She knew there was nothing George Clark hated more than to be crossed, especially by his children. Nellie avoided looking directly at him.
‘I’ll come in then.’ She knew what was coming.
He took her by the elbow and marched her into the little kitchen. She shot a glance up the stairs, to see her pale-faced sister hovering at the top. Alice shook her head, in a resigned way, that told Nellie she had tried on her sister’s behalf and failed. Nellie managed a weak smile, before being pulled into the kitchen. There her father grabbed her hand and administered his usual six smart slaps of the belt.
‘You dare defy me again and you’ll get more than that, next time!’
His large red nose glowed with exertion and what Nellie guessed was the effect of a drop too much of his favourite tipple. She wanted to grab the belt and strike him back. Images of red welts across his cheek flashed into her mind. But it was useless, then she really would be on the streets. One thing she wouldn’t give him was a tear. The bloody big bully could wait till kingdom come for that, she thought, in silent rebellion.
‘Get up to bed and don’t think you’re going out again of a night. And you dare lie to me again! I know it was a barefaced lie, about that Bosher boy being there tonight. You listen to me, girl, him and his Bolshy friends are trouble. Always stirring up people to be discontented with what they’ve got. Prancing about on soapboxes, telling me I’m hard done by. I can look after me own, and I don’t need some jumped-up docker’s son telling me different. I don’t want you having nothing more to do with them union lot. D’yer hear?’
Now he was shouting. Of course she heard, the whole bloody street could hear. She nodded, longing to get away, and then he let her go. She followed him upstairs and crept into the front bedroom, where, as expected, three heads shot up. The two boys, Freddie and Bobby, sat up in their bed, looking at her expectantly, and Alice jumped out of the bed she shared with Nellie, to put her arm round her.
‘Did the old git hurt you, Nell?’ she whispered.
‘Nah,’ Nellie lied, ‘he’s getting old and soft.’ But her palm stung as if a hot poker had been laid across it.
‘Gawd, you’re shaking, though.’
‘It’s temper, Al. I’m only shaking ’cause I can’t have a go back at the old sod.’
‘Come on, love, let me help you get changed,’ said Alice, starting to unbutton the back of her blouse.
But Nellie noticed that the two wide-eyed boys were still staring at her. Bobby, especially, looked close to tears. She knew his soft heart would not be able to manage seeing her vulnerable or in pain.
‘Go on, boys, back to kip,’ she said encouragingly. ‘I’m a tough old boot!’ She reached down to tickle Bobby and give Freddie a hug, before pulling the little curtain that separated their half of the room from the boys’ beds.
‘It’s so unfair, Al,’ she went on in a whisper. ‘He treats me like I’m still a child, but if it weren’t for me he’d have no one to cook and clean for him, or to look after the boys.’
She was seething as Alice tried to calm her.
‘Don’t leave us, Nell, will you? He’s harder on you than the rest of us and I know it’s not fair, but we’d be lost without you.’
When Nellie saw her sister’s lip trembling, she forgot her own injuries. It was easy to forget Alice was little more than a child herself.
‘Shhh, love, ’course I’m not leaving you, it’s just I think he could let me have a bit of a life.’
They didn’t dare light the lamp, so in the darkness, Alice helped Nellie out of her blouse and skirt. And when they were in bed, the sisters put their arms round each other, till they had both stopped shaking.
3
A Day Out
Fine pale powder hung in clouds above the women, drifting down slowly to cover window sills and walls with a gritty veneer. A blazing August sun glared through the high windows, striping the mote-filled air with light, turning the powder into a fine gold dust. It billowed up in vanilla-scented blooms each time a woman reached to fill a new packet at the delivery chutes, which ran in straight lines down the length of the factory floor. The women stood at a long bench, where one pulled a lever to release custard powder into an empty packet, then passed it on to her neighbour who deftly pasted it closed, while the third in the team stacked filled packets on to a trolley cart. Above the women, a cat’s cradle of steam-driven belts chugged and clattered, filling the vast hoppers that fed the delivery chutes. Unending streams of cloying powder chuted down, sending up yet more clouds of choking yellow smoke. Though the women wore rough cotton smocks, all were covered in a fine, sticky coating of custard powder.
Nellie Clark licked her lips, sweet, always sweet. Sometimes she longed for a trickle of sweat to reach her lips, just for the blessed difference of salt. On a day like today, she was likely to get her wish. It was sweltering in the factory and Nellie was suffering, in her voluminous cotton smock. The thought of putting on her best wool jacket made her feel faint. But they had decided to wear their best, and as she only had one good jacket, the woollen one it had to be. At least no one would be able to say that Bermondsey girls didn’t look smart. She looked at the clock. Not long now. She licked her lips again and tasted salt. Sweat beaded her upper lip and her face was covered with a sheen of moisture. She brushed her damp brow with the back of her hand, tucking away a strand of chestnut hair, and glanced over at Lily. Lily nodded towards the clock and mouthed, ‘Ten minutes.’
‘I’m not sure I can last ten more seconds in this oven!’ she whispered back.
And when it came to it, could she go through with it? She liked to think she was strong, but even at sixteen years old and a woman earning her own keep, it irked her that her father could still make her quail like a child. The rows over her late arrival home, on the night of the meeting, had lasted for weeks. He would surely throw her out for this.
Nellie raised her blue eyes at the thought and blew out an overheated breath, which lifted another dank lock of hair from her forehead. Her stomach was churning, though whether from fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell. Other women around her were getting fidgety. Ethel Brown, a rotund woman in her forties, was turning an ever deeper shade of lobster. Nellie had caught a glimpse of a feather boa under her bench. Maggie Tyrell was rooting around in a bag at her feet and Nellie spotted a black straw hat, with green feathers.
Suddenly she notic
ed a change in the sounds filtering through the high windows. Distant shouts at first, then snatches of song drifted in. Women’s voices sang out, high and excited: Are we downhearted no, no, NO! The chanting was coming closer and closer. Then the sound of feet, lots of them, hundreds of feet, boots ringing on the cobbles. The chatter of the women around her ceased, as they registered the noise of the approaching crowd. Just as the clock struck eleven, Nellie found herself standing up. Suddenly she was flooded with the knowledge that she could do it! She wasn’t on her own. But still her legs felt like jelly and a queasiness lurched in the pit of her stomach.
More than a hundred women rose, as one, from their benches and ran to the windows, craning their heads, looking down on to the street below to see the first of the women marchers. Nellie saw rows and rows of women, filling the street as far back as she could see, some linking arms and singing, others carrying banners. One read: WE’RE NOT WHITE SLAVES, WE’RE PINK’S!
The women around her called out excitedly. ‘There’s Pink’s Jam, can you see Crosse & Blackwell’s? Where’s Peek Frean’s? I can see Lipton’s. Have they all come? Have Hartley’s come?’
Albert, their astonished foreman, was running up and down behind the line of women at the windows. ‘Get back to your benches, what d’yer think yer doing!’
They pretended not to hear him and Nellie followed the others as they started to remove their smocks and caps.
‘This is it, Nell.’ Lily squeezed her hand. ‘You coming?’
Nellie paused for a heartbeat, then bent down deliberately and reached into a bag hidden behind a trolley. She pulled out her best wool jacket.
‘’Course I’m coming, I’m not missing this!’
Other women were putting on their fancy hats and feather boas, as they marched in orderly single file past the open-mouthed foreman. They joined a stream of women workers from higher floors. Jostling down the stone staircase, came the girls from baking powder and blancmange, distinguishable only by the white or pink powder coating them. When they reached the factory yard, Nellie glanced over at the jelly building. The foremen in charge of the great vats of fruit jellies had left the gelatine bubbling, coming out to stare incredulously as the jelly packers joined the other women marching out of the factory gates. They looked as if they were dressed for a day out, but they weren’t – they were on strike!
