In the seven years leading up to 1888, the women had struck three times.
They were unsuccessful, to be sure, but practice makes perfect.
PHOSPHOROUS
Veronica Schanoes
A man can strike a Lucifer on anything—the wall, the bottom of a shoe, a barstool. Sometimes the white head of the match flares up from the friction of being packed at the factory, and an entire box bursts into flames, releasing the rough poison of white phosphorus into the air, and the box goes on burning until the girl who was packing them stamps it out, and then the Bryant and May Match Company fines her.
London in the nineteenth century is marked, inside and out, by the black, burnt trails left whenever a Lucifer is struck. A series of black marks, scoring the city’s face, like scars.
The Lucifer allows an easy way to kindle fires, to provide light and heat and smoke without the unreliable and frustrating business of flint or the danger of Congreves, matches prone to exploding into burning pieces upon being struck, and so banned in France and Germany. And Lucifers are cheap, much cheaper than matches made from red phosphorus, which can be struck only on the side of the box, anyway. Lucifers are so cheap that, in the words of William Morris, “the public buy twice as much as they want, and waste half.”
Herbert Spencer calls the Lucifer “the greatest boon and blessing to come to mankind in the nineteenth century.”
The pathways the Bryant and May matchwomen take home from the factory every night are marked by piles of phosphorescent vomit.
It begins with a toothache. And those are not uncommon, not where you live, not when you live. Not uncommon at all. But you know what it means, and you know what comes next, no matter how hard you try to put it out of your mind. For now, the important thing is to keep it from the foreman. And for a while, you can. You can swallow the clawing pain in your mouth just as you swallow the blood from your tender gums, along with your bread during the lunch break. If you have bread, that day. A mist of droplets floats through the room, making the air hazy, hard to see through. They settle on your bread.
Your teeth hurt, but you can keep that from the foreman. You can eat your bit of bread and keep that secret.
But then your face begins to swell.
Property is theft, wrote Karl Marx, and for almost thirty-five years, Karl Marx lived in London. Private property, he said, is the theft from the people of resources hitherto held in common. And then that property can be turned to capital, which can be used to extort labor from workingmen and women for far less than its value. Another theft. Theft of communal resources, theft of labor, and for these women and girls, the matchmakers of the Bryant and May match factory at Bow, it could also become theft of bone, theft of flesh, and, finally, theft of life.
Not that they don’t put up a good fight. Fighting is something they’re good at. Fighting, dancing, and drinking, those wild Irish girls of London’s East End. That’s what reformers and journalists say, anyway.
Your old Nan came over with her husband back in 1848, during the famine forty years ago, long before you were born, but you and your siblings and cousins, you still have the map of Eire stamped into your souls.
Your Nan has the sight, or so she says. When you were naught but a small girl, not working yet, but only a nuisance underfoot, hungry all the time, she would distract you by telling you all the lovely things she could see in your future a husband handsome and brave, fine strapping sons and lively daughters, and a home back in Ireland, with cows lowing on the hills, and ceilis with the neighbors every weekend, and all the cheese and bread you could eat.
You couldn’t quite picture the countryside she described—the closest you could come was a blurred memory of Hampstead Heath, where your family had once gone on a bank-holiday outing, and being a London girl, you weren’t quite sure that you wanted to live there, but you liked the sound of the cheese and the ceilis and the husband that your Nan promised you. And you believed her implicitly, because your Nan had the sight, didn’t everyone on the street know that?
But perhaps she’d been mistaken because now your teeth hurt like hellfire and your face has started to swell. You can think of only one way for this to end, and it doesn’t involve any ceilis.
When you were little, the youngest of your family, the first thing you remember is your mum telling you to be quiet while she counted out the matchboxes she made at home. Your mum would put you into the arms of your sister, Janey, four years older, and shoo the two of you and your brother, and any cousins who happened to be around, outside to play, and there’d you be until late at night, when the matchboxes were dry and could be stacked in a corner out of the way, and you kids could unroll mats and blankets and sleep fitfully on the floor.
When you were old enough to be a bit more useful, soon after your mum died birthing one baby too many, you would sit with your Nan, cutting the rotten bits out of the potatoes so that she could cook them more easily, back in the days before she lost her vision, the vision of this world, anyway. Once you’d lost your temper and complained about how many rotten spots there were, and your Nan shook her head and told you that the half or third of good flesh you got out of one of these potatoes was a bounty compared to the famine years. “All rot and nothing else,” she said, “and you could hear the keening throughout the countryside, until you couldn’t, and that was all the worse, the despair and silence of those left behind.” She looked at the potato in your hand, took it from you, and dropped it in the pot. “And every crop melting into slime, and the English shipping out fat cows and calves and anything else they could get their hands on.”
Sometimes your Nan would lapse into Irish, the language she and your granddad had spoken before emigrating. You don’t speak; your mum spoke a bit, and so did your dad. Janey and some of your older cousins speak some, but after that, there were just too many kiddies to make sure of what they were saying. When your Nan uses Irish, you don’t know what her words mean, but it’s easy to make out the general tone.
In Irish, the potato famine of 1845-52 is called an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, or an Drochshaol, the Bad Times. During those seven years, around one million Irish died, most likely more, and at least another one million emigrated, reducing the country’s population by one-quarter.
England exported crops and livestock, off-limits to the impoverished Irish, to its own shores throughout the disaster. The food was exported under armed guard from ports in the areas of Ireland most affected by the potato blight.
The sultan of the Ottoman Empire attempted to send ten thousand pounds in aid to the people of Ireland; Queen Victoria requested that he reduce his charity to the sum of one thousand, as she herself had sent only two thousand. The sultan agreed, but nonetheless sent three ships of food to Ireland as well. The English courts attempted, unsuccessfully, to block the ships.
In America, the Choctaws had endured the death march known as the Trail of Tears sixteen years prior and apparently saw something familiar in a people being starved to death and forced off their land. They sent $710 for the relief of the Irish.
Sir Charles Trevelyan, the government official responsible for England’s relief efforts, considered that “the judgment of God sent this calamity [the potato blight] to teach the Irish a lesson.”
Your Nan lost her first two babbies, a little girl of two years who starved to death before she and your granddad left his farm, and another one that had yet to be born on the way over to England. Now she looks forward to holding both her babes once more when she meets them in paradise, which she describes as sounding much like county Cork in happier times.
When she used to tell you of your future life in Ireland, an Ireland under home rule, perhaps, an Ireland of Parnell’s making, and blessed O’Connell’s memory, she put herself there, too, back in county Cork in her old age, sitting by your fire.
When you were a little girl, you promised that you would bring her back to Ireland with you, and that when she died, you’d see her buried in the graveyard of the chu
rch where she’d been baptized and married.
Where will she see you buried, you now wonder.
There are no outside agitators in the factory at the end of June, and the only socialists are the same socialists who are there every day, dipping and cutting and packing for five shillings a week.
The only new thing is a bit of newspaper being passed around furtively, read out in whispers by the girls who can read to those who cannot: an article from The Link entitled “White Slavery in London,” telling the middle-class folk of London about work at the Bryant and May factories.
You read with interest the details of your own life, and you make haste to hide the paper when the foremen come in.
A letter at your workstation states that the article is a lie, and that you are happy, well paid, and well treated in your work.
You rub the place at the bottom of your swollen cheek where the sores first opened up.
Instead of signing the preprinted letter to The Times, which has become the mouthpiece for middle-class outrage at Bryant and May, you spit on it.
Not one of the women in the entire factory signs the letter.
In the entire factory, the only letter with a mark at the bottom is the one with your spittle on it, shining faintly in the dark.
Fourteen-year-old Lizzie collects the unsigned letters and hands them to the foreman, staring him straight in the eye, and in that moment you know that it was Lizzie who’d gone to The Link with the story. And so does the foreman, perhaps, because he smacks her across the face with the sheaf of papers. Lizzie spits between the foreman’s feet.
Lizzie is sacked the following Monday. When she’s told to leave, she considers for a moment, then breaks the foreman’s jaw with a single punch.
As she turns to leave, all of you, you and your friends and rivals, put on your hats and follow her out.
The strike flares up like a Lucifer. When you look back at the long line of women behind you, you have to blink to be sure that there aren’t white trails of phosphorus smoke floating off all of you, disappearing into the sky.
They said it was Annie Besant’s doing, that Mrs. Besant had been the ringleader, an outside Fabian socialist agitator. And perhaps there is some truth to it, as she did write and publish “White Slavery in London,” the article that so shamed Mr. Bryant that he tried to get his workers to repudiate it.
But Mrs. Besant called for a respectable middle-class boycott, not for working-class girls and women to take matters into their own hands. The strikers did not contact her until some days after the initial walkout.
The East End of London did not need middle-class Fabians to explain socialism.
In the seven years leading up to 1888, the women of Bryant and May had struck three times. They were unsuccessful, to be sure, but practice makes perfect.
You’re getting ready to go out marching, collecting for the strike fund, when you hear your Nan calling for you. You hold off on wrapping up your suppurating face and turn to find her, bent almost double with her dowager’s hump, staring up at you with her milky, sightless eyes.
“Yeh’ve got the phoss, a cushla,” she says. “Had it for a while, I reckon. When were yeh plannin’ to tell me?”
You shrug, saying nothing, then remember that your Nan can’t see you. You open your mouth to talk when she turns and shuffles back to the chair she had been sitting in.
You find your tongue. “You can smell it, eh, Nan?”
She swats at the air. “Can’t smell a damn thing. Haven’t been able to since before you were born. Makes all the mush I eat taste the same. Not that I figure what I eat tastes of anything worth eating anyways.” She shakes her head. “Nah. I just know. Known for a while.”
You wait to see what, if anything, she’ll say next. Her eyelids droop, and before you know what you’re doing, you burst out angrily, “And what about my children and husband and cows and ceilis every weekend? When will I get them, Nan?”
Her eyelids snap up again. She makes a sort of feeble fluttering gesture with her hands, which still look surprisingly youthful. “Never, a cushla, my darling. Never for you.”
Your eyes widen in shock, and for the first time you realize that part of you had been hoping that your wise, witchy Nan would pull an ould Irish trick from up her sleeve, send the phoss packing, and send you away to Ireland, away from Bryant and May.
“I lied to you, my love,” she says. “All those times, for all those years, I lied. I never saw nothing for you. Just a greenish glow where your long life should have been.”
“Why?” you ask, glacial with the loss of hope.
“Ah, darling. Don’t you know yeh’ve always been my favorite?”
You turn abruptly and resume tucking your scarf around your decaying jaw.
After a few seconds, your Nan speaks again, softly. “Darling, don’t be so wretched, the phoss in your jaw is a horror, it’s true, but it’ll soon be over, it won’t be long now.”
You picture yourself coughing up blood, your jaw twisted, black, and falling to pieces, and you take little comfort in the image.
“Worse off by far,” says your Nan, “are those who get the phoss in their souls. “They’ll never see paradise at all.”
We’ll hang Old Bryant on the sour apple tree,
We’ll hang Old Bryant on the sour apple tree,
We’ll hang Old Bryant on the sour apple tree,
As we go marching on.
Glory, glory hallelujah . . .
—Matchgirl strikers’ marching song, 1888, sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” a song popular among Union soldiers and abolitionists during the US Civil War
A few days after the walkout, you and Annie Ryan from next door make your way to the Mile End Waste. You don’t say much on the walk. Moving your jaw has become too painful, every slight flex of your facial muscles redoubling the bone-grinding ache, the soreness stretching poisoned tentacles out from your slowly decaying jaw to grip your skull and bore into your brain.
You’ve taken to eating the same soft, gray pap your Nan lives on. It saves you chewing and leaves more hard bread for your brothers and sisters and their kiddies. And since you’re constantly queasy if not worse, you don’t even miss it.
Some days you don’t want the gray mush either, but your Nan won’t eat unless you do. And some days you’ve half a mind to let the ould bitch starve, serve her right for lying to you all these years.
But after all, she is your Nan.
You leave your scarf on inside, even at home, so as not to scare the kiddies, but they avoid you anyway. It’s the smell.
When you were a wee lass yourself, you and the others used to play on the corpses of horses, worked to death and left to putrefy in the street.
Nothing still walking around should smell like that.
So you walk in silence toward the rally, even as the men and girls around you break into song. And in a crowd of thousands, your patch of silence isn’t likely to be noticed.
Annie draws your arm through hers. “You’ve a marvelous singing voice, Lucy, she says, pulling you near, near enough that you can see her nostrils flare as she works to give no sign that she’s noticed the smell. “Don’t you remember when we were only small, and you made up that skipping rhyme about Mrs. Rattagan’s warts? You sounded like an angel, counting off her warts as you skipped.”
You nod, and even that hurts.
“They’ve got to hear us, Lucy. All the way to Mayfair and Parliament. Maybe all the way back to Ireland. That’d make old Parnell proud, wouldn’t it?”
Annie leans in even closer. “You know nobody’d ever put you out, Lucy, don’t you? And even if they did, well, you’d just trot down the block and come stop with me and mine. Take care of you right to the end, we would.”
You nod slightly and she squeezes your hand. “Make the end come a bit sooner, too, if need be.”
She draws away again, and after a moment you find your voice.
You can barely hear your own singing above the n
oise of your headache, but you see that Annie and the other girls can, and that, you suppose, is what counts.
When you return home, you finally relax and remove your hat and scarf. Something small, like a pebble, falls to the floor.
It’s a piece of your jaw.
In 1889, Annie Besant exchanged socialism for theosophy. Despite its esoteric reputation, theosophy reflected conventional Victorian values in at least one way.
According to the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy’s founding mother, each and every person has exactly what he or she deserves in this life. Theosophists believed that sickness, suffering, deformity, and poverty were punishments for sins committed in a past life. “This belief can be dressed as God’s will, or as social Darwinism, but it comes to the same thing.
It is a reassuring thought to those whose lives are not thoroughly saturated with such suffering. Sometimes it can be a comfort even as one is led to the guillotine or faces the firing squad.
When Besant traded in socialism for theosophy, she bought spiritual certainty at the price of her compassion.
Though Annie Besant was by no means a strike leader—indeed, she had written on more than one occasion about the futility of trying to organize unskilled labourers—she’d had enough sympathy with the strikers and care for her good journalistic name to counter management’s claims of innocence by publicizing the working conditions, wages, and abuse that Bryant and May expected the striking matchwomen to accept.
And she had a word with her good friend Charles Bradlaugh, MP.
As you and the other girls make your way to parliament, heads turn at the sight of so many tattered dresses, the sound of so many rough accents outside the East End, and not in any uniform, either.
“What’re you lookin’ at?” Lizzie shouts at a group of young ladies who, having forgotten the manners drilled into them by their governesses, stare and gape as you walk past.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 20
