Asta's Book

by Ruth Rendell

  All Arthur’s comments on his family members are so eulogistic that we are obliged to take what he says with a grain of salt. Some of this determination to aggrandize what was, after all, a very ordinary and on the whole respectable family, has led to obvious inaccuracies. He writes, for instance, of his grandfather Samuel Roper as superintendent of the Botanic Gardens in Bury St Edmunds in 1830 while in fact N. S. H. Hodson, the Gardens’ founder, held that office. Samuel was probably one of the gardeners employed there. Arthur’s maternal grandfather William Eighteen may have been employed by the Post Office but was not the Bury St Edmunds Postmaster in 1844. This position, at the Post Office in Hatter Street, according to White’s Suffolk, was held at the date he mentions by John Deck.

  His brother Alfred he describes as a thoughtful and inquiring man, even something of an intellectual, an enthusiastic member of the Public Library and also a user of the large library at the Bury Mechanics’ Institute. While living with his mother and brother Joseph at the family home in Southgate Street, he spent his evenings reading, often reading aloud to his mother whose sight had begun to fail and who seems to have depended on him for this and many more attentions. Without formal training in his trade of pharmacist, he was interested, according to Arthur, in all forms of ‘chemistry’ and in his own room in Southgate Street, conducted experiments of an exploratory nature. He also built model steam engines, which he set puffing furiously away on the burners of his mother’s gas stove.

  Arthur gives us no description of Alfred’s appearance beyond stating that, like all the male members of his family, his brother was very tall, something over six feet. From the photographs we have of him it can be seen that he was correspondingly thin with narrow shoulders and a frame which does not appear robust. His hair was dark and already starting to recede from the forehead when the portrait photograph was taken in July 1898, just prior to his marriage. His features were regular, he was clean-shaven, and his eyes were dark, though of what colour is not known. A faint darker mark on the bridge of his nose suggests that he may habitually have worn spectacles, which he removed for the purpose of having his picture taken.

  It was some years after he became manager at Morley’s in the Butter Market—Arthur does not say how many but we know it to have been about six—that Alfred encountered Robert Maddox, a visitor to the town putting up at the Angel Inn on Angel Hill. Mr Maddox came into Morley’s, asking for a specific for a bad finger, and was attended to by Alfred Roper. Instead of supplying a placebo, Alfred lanced the whitlow himself and dressed the finger so expertly that Maddox returned on the following day to thank him and to ask if the pharmacist could prescribe a remedy for the nasal catarrh from which he was a chronic sufferer. This Alfred did and Maddox expressed himself delighted with the results.

  Exactly why these actions on Alfred’s part should have fitted him to become under-manager of a patent medicine advertising company is not known. At least, Arthur does not say why and Arthur’s account of these events is almost all we have on which to base our knowledge of his brother’s early life. Probably Robert Maddox simply took a fancy to him. By their very quietness and serious demeanour, men of Alfred Roper’s type very often make an impression which is quite at odds with their actual abilities. At any rate, the offer of this position with the Supreme Remedy Company in High Holborn, London, of which Maddox was part-owner, was made to him and was accepted.

  Had old Mrs Roper not died some four weeks previously, it is doubtful whether Alfred would have considered this post. He would not, indeed would have felt he could not, have left her. In the latter years he had been doing much of the work of the house as well as carrying his mother up and down stairs and often preparing her meals. Now his brother Joseph was about to be married and intended to bring his bride home to Southgate Street where Arthur was also living. Reading between the lines of Arthur’s memoir, we may believe that Alfred was relieved to have the opportunity of making his escape and, perhaps, his fortune.

  In London he appears to have put up temporarily at a commercial hotel in the Gray’s Inn Road and to have set about immediately looking for more permanent lodgings. At his trial it was stated by a witness, John Smart, a fellow employee at the Supreme Remedy Company, that he, Smart, suggested to Alfred over supper in a chop house that Fulham might be a suitable place for him to seek accommodation. Indeed, Smart himself lived in Fulham and believed there was a vacancy in the house where he had rooms. Travel was easy, a fifteen-minute train journey from Walham Green to Charing Cross on the District Line of the Underground, followed by a walk across the Strand and through Covent Garden.

  What prevented Alfred from taking this excellent advice is not known, but it can indisputably be said that if he had taken it he would never have been tried for murder nor passed the subsequent twenty years of his life as a virtual outcast. Arthur has nothing to tell us of what circumstances led his brother to Navarino Road, Hackney, in East London, nor why he chose Mrs Hyde’s house as his future abode. Instead, perhaps through lack of knowledge but more likely through general dismay at subsequent events, he has only the most meagre facts to state about Alfred’s life until the dangerous period is past and the year 1906 has been reached.

  It was in 1895, when Alfred was twenty-three, that he moved into Devon Villa, Navarino Road, where he took a bedroom and sitting room on the first floor. Devon Villa was four storeys high, not including the basement, and Alfred’s rooms were large and even handsome with high ceilings and long windows. For these he paid twenty-five shillings a week, this to include the provision of breakfast, tea and supper each day. In receipt of an annual salary of £150, he was well able to afford it. The rooms were adequately, if not luxuriously, furnished, the sitting room enjoyed a view across leafy gardens to London Fields, and his accommodation was cleaned and his meals cooked for him.

  Hackney had been a village ‘anciently celebrated for the numerous seats of the nobility and gentry’ which, by the eighteenth century, was said to number among its residents so many merchants and persons of distinction ‘that it excels all other villages in the Kingdom, and probably on earth, in the riches and opulence of its inhabitants, as may be judged from the great number of persons who keep coaches there’.

  Before the railways made swift travel possible, Hackney represented the greatest distance at which a man of business could live outside London and come comfortably to his work in the city. The district became a suburb of large houses surrounded by their gardens, these separated from each other by market gardens and meadows in which cattle grazed. It was the occupants of these houses who built the fine churches and chapels of Hackney and who left endowments for the benefit of the poorer classes.

  For the poor, as we are told, are always with us and for a long time slums had existed round about Homerton High Street. During the second half of the nineteenth century the tendency was for Hackney to become poorer. By the time Alfred Roper arrived there in that century’s last decade there was a good deal of poverty and considerable overcrowding. For instance, statistics show that in the twenty years between 1881 and 1901 the population had increased from 163,681 to 219,272. In 1891 more than 3,000 people were living four or more persons to a room and nearly 8,000 were living three or more persons to a room.

  Mare Street was one of the demarcations between a surviving middle-class occupancy of the grand old mansions and the dwellings of an increasingly miserable working class. The neighbourhood of London Fields was rough, while the indigenous poor of Hackney lived in the vicinity of Homerton High Street and Wells Street. In the north by South Mill Fields, Hackney Wick and All Souls’, Clapton, unkempt poverty prevailed. It would seem that there had been a general spreading outwards and the rejected from the centre had been sent to occupy the decaying jerry-built houses on the ill-drained marshes of the River Lea.

  Navarino Road lay just to the west or ‘wrong’ side of Mare Street, a flourishing shopping area with a market, and Mrs Hyde’s house was the former dwelling of a city merchant who had moved up
to Stamford Hill. The railway station called London Fields which transported workers into the city was but a stone’s throw away. There were horse-drawn trams and omnibuses. Hackney Common was not far distant and Victoria Park with its cricket ground, bowling green and boating lake no more than a good walk away. Everything the heart could desire was obtainable in the big department stores of Mare Street and Kingsland High Street and the emporium of Matthew Rose and Sons provided a number of services including a refreshment room.

  Entertainment abounded in the form of music hall, plays and music. The Hackney Empire was famous and had many top music hall stars, including Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley and Little Tich. Moving pictures were not to arrive until 1906 but there was drama and comedy at the New Alexandra Theatre in Stoke Newington Road, the Dalston Theatre and the Grand in Islington. Most put on pantomimes at Christmas.

  This then was the expanding London suburb into which Alfred Roper moved, a place of poverty and hardship, comparative comfort and middle-class values, a church-going society of burgesses and their wives, a pagan huddle of poor dwellers four to a room. He was to live there for the next ten years.

  It is time to say something about Mrs Hyde, her family, her lodgers and the house in which Alfred Roper found himself settled, of their history and character.

  Maria Sarah Hyde was a widow, or called herself a widow, and in 1895 she was somewhere about fifty-seven years of age. She never spoke of a husband and no one seems to have known where she came from when she moved into Devon Villa five years before. It was a large house, on four floors, which had seen better days. There were in all twelve rooms plus the usual offices. The two reception rooms on the ground floor were spacious and high-ceilinged, the drawing room divided into two when desired by folding doors. At its lower flights, at least, the staircase was handsome and the hall had a floor of brick-red marble. Another, narrower, staircase led down to the basement kitchen and scullery and the windowless hole where the maid had her being. A widely held belief was that Mrs Hyde had come into this house as a gratuity for services rendered. In other words, the man who had been keeping her had paid her off by this means.

  It was undoubtedly hers. She brought to it an elderly man called Joseph Dzerjinski, a Polish or Russian immigrant, who occupied the best part of the second floor, and her daughter Elizabeth Louisa, always known as Lizzie, who slept on the first floor. Mrs Hyde had then taken two more lodgers, a Miss Beatrice Cottrell, an elderly lady describing herself as a former court dressmaker, who occupied another room on the first floor, and George Ironsmith, a traveller in canned-meat products, with two rooms above hers next door to Mr Dzerjinski. Mrs Hyde herself occupied the whole of the top floor.

  Nearly all the work of the house fell to the lot of the maid, Florence Fisher. Having left school the previous year, she was a mere child when she came to work at Devon Villa a few months before Roper moved in. Prior to her arrival Maria Hyde had employed an older woman who left her service to get married. Only two per cent of Hackney householders kept servants at all, so Florence Fisher, aged thirteen, very likely thought herself lucky to have acquired a good place not far from her mother’s home near the Disinfecting Station at South Mill Fields. It was her task to clean the rooms, carry coals upstairs, sweep the front steps and the yard, wash the dishes and often do the shopping. The cooking, at that time, was shared between Maria and Lizzie Hyde.

  Maria Hyde claimed to have a serious heart condition which she made the excuse for doing very little apart from drinking with Joseph Dzerjinski in the Dolphin Tavern in Mare Street. Gin seems to have been her preferred tipple but she possessed the ability to hold her liquor and no one could claim ever to have seen her the worse for it. According to Miss Cottrell, she often said spirits were good for her heart.

  There were those who said that she was on the lookout for a husband for her daughter. Others averred that this daughter was, in the phrase current at the time, ‘no better than she should be’ and that, though she had never been married, she had borne at least one child. What had become of this child or children was not known. George Ironsmith, the traveller in canned meat, with the rooms on Dzerjinski’s floor, was said to have been engaged to Lizzie Hyde and there was talk of a marriage in the following year. But for some unknown reason the engagement was broken off and Ironsmith went to America where the company of meat exporters by whom he was employed had their main base. After his departure his rooms were let to a married couple called Upton.

  Lizzie Hyde claimed to be twenty-four years old in 1895. She was probably at least six years older than that and therefore seven years Alfred Roper’s senior. The few photographs of her which have come down to us show a woman of undoubted beauty, albeit a beauty somewhat coarsened by time and rough usage. She has a full oval face, regular features, a straight nose and small full-lipped mouth, large bright eyes and strong shapely eyebrows. Her hair is massy and light in colour, her neck swan-like and her figure well-developed without being stout. According to a newspaper article written by a neighbour and a memoir left by Miss Cottrell, she had held various situations in the locality, as an assistant in a draper’s shop and later as a milliner, she having been apprenticed to a dressmaker in her youth. She certainly had no outside paid work in 1895 but remained at home to help keep the house.

  It was into this household that Alfred Roper came as the most favoured lodger. Each and every one of them recognized his respectability from the first and his desirability as a tenant, and this seems, for a while at any rate, to have regulated their behaviour. According to Miss Cottrell, meals became more regular and the cleanliness of the place improved. A ‘gentleman friend’ of Lizzie Hyde’s, who had been a frequent visitor and, Miss Cottrell said, had been known to stay overnight, though in what circumstances she could not say, was no longer seen.

  However, Miss Cottrell did take it upon herself after Alfred had been resident in Navarino Road for about a week to advise him to stay no longer than he could help. In fact, she suggested he would be wise to look for other accommodation at once; this house might be good enough for an old woman like herself with no character to lose but was ‘no place for him’. Needless to say, Alfred did not heed this warning. Whether this was because he was the innocent Mr Howard de Filippis, defending him at his trial, suggested he was or whether his vanity got the better of him no one can say. Certainly, at this point the women all waited on him in a way he had never previously been used to. He was allowed to conduct his chemistry experiments in his room and use the gas stove in the kitchen for his steam engines. No doubt he also found something gratifying about living in a big house for the first time in his life, enjoying the size of his rooms and his view, even though the house was not his.

  Perhaps he had already learned to take pleasure in the society of Mrs Hyde’s daughter. As for Fulham, the train journey was just as easy from the nearby station at London Fields and the walk at the end of it a matter only of heading south rather than north.

  We have little information on what happened to Alfred during the next three years. It is known that he rose to become manager of the Supreme Remedy Company with a consequent increase of a pound a week in his wages and known too that he returned only once to Suffolk in those years. This was for the funeral of his sister-in-law, Joseph’s wife, who had died in childbirth. The next firm fact we have is the record of his marriage in August 1898 to Elizabeth Louisa Hyde, spinster, at St John’s Parish Church, South Hackney.

  More surprising is the date of his son’s birth on February 19th, 1899, six months after the wedding. This gives the appearance of Lizzie Hyde’s having entrapped Alfred into marriage and certain it is that whatever happiness they may have enjoyed prior to their wedding and up to the birth of their son, their contentment with each other was not to be prolonged.

  Beatrice Cottrell later wrote and had published a scurrilous account of her life at Devon Villa. It was very much biased in Alfred’s favour. Alfred ‘doted’ on his wife in those early days. Lizzie waited on him hand and foot and wa
s often heard to call her husband pet names and to say that nothing she could do for him was too much trouble. But this devotion was short-lived. Alfred was an ideal husband and a man superior to his associates. A neighbour, Cora Green, as a friend of Maria Hyde’s, was always in and out of the house. She told her ‘story’ to a newspaper after Alfred’s acquittal and said she sometimes found Lizzie Roper too demonstrative for her taste, always hanging on her husband’s neck and kissing him in public. The two couples, Maria and Dzerjinski, Alfred and Lizzie, went to music halls together and often to the Hackney Empire. Alfred was also seen to be visiting the Dolphin with his wife and mother-in-law, surely another new departure for him.

  All this seems to have come to an end with the birth of Edward Alfred, their first child. Cora Green averred that Lizzie lacked any maternal instinct and found herself incapable of caring for a baby. The child was dirty, inadequately fed and soon failed to thrive. Lizzie made terrible scenes, threatening to kill the child and herself, then took to her bed for days on end. Florence Fisher had too much on her hands to undertake the care of a baby as well as clean the house. Besides this, her mother was seriously ill and any free time the sixteen-year-old had was spent with Mrs Fisher in her squalid rooms off the Lea Bridge Road. Beatrice Cottrell noticed that the house became progressively dirtier at this time. Alfred was obliged to engage a nurse. This he could ill afford, especially as Maria Hyde, now that she had, so to speak, a breadwinner in the family, could see ahead of her an end to lodging-house-keeping and repeatedly said so in Miss Cottrell’s hearing.