Christmas for the Shop Girls

by Joanna Toye

  Not that Sid seemed bothered. He kept up a lively conversation all the way, pointing out such sights as there were. Lily supposed he was used to what he was seeing. There was nothing unusual in his chatting up the conductress either, or the hopeful look in her eye when he said cheerily ‘See you on the way back, maybe?’ as they got off. He’d looked up Dr Barnardo’s home in the telephone directory: they were aiming for Stepney Causeway.

  It was a bit of a walk from the bus stop, through a market, over slippery cabbage leaves and rolling potatoes, dodging children playing tag and harassed mothers with their shopping bags, then under a dripping viaduct with a train thundering overhead. Gladys was already trailing behind – convinced she was going to be meeting Bill’s mother that same day, she was in her best dress and shoes, which rubbed. Lily had had the good sense to wear her work shoes which she knew she could stand in all day, but she was feeling pretty weary herself thanks to the early start.

  They couldn’t miss Dr Barnardo’s – it occupied almost all of one side of the street and half of the other, with the name etched in the stone pediment across the top. They also couldn’t miss the fact that the windows were boarded up and the doors barred with corrugated iron.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sid. ‘Looks like they’ve shipped out, moved the kids somewhere safer. Let’s see if there’s anyone we can ask.’

  Sure enough, almost at the corner where the Causeway met a busy road, there was something called a Boys’ Hostel – and it was still open. They mounted the steps.

  Inside, it was all brown linoleum and a smell of disinfectant, but at least that meant it was clean, Lily supposed. What had she expected, carpets and a vase of flowers? It was a hostel, not a hotel. There was a little cubby hole with a window and a brass bell. Sid made it ping and a middle-aged woman in a neat black dress appeared. She was slightly over made-up and brought with her an overpowering whiff of cigarettes, but her smile was friendly enough.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Good morning!’ Sid said brightly, in his winning way. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if you can. We’re looking for some information about a boy who, er, was in your care. His name’s William Webb.’

  ‘Now look here,’ she said, and the initially refined accent dropped into a broad East End drawl. ‘We get a lot of people asking this kind of thing. I can see you ain’t police, but who are you exactly? Is it trouble?’

  ‘No, no,’ Lily butted in. ‘We’re his friends.’

  ‘More than friends,’ Gladys piped up. ‘I’m his fiancée!’

  ‘Congratulations,’ the woman replied tartly, folding her arms. ‘Well, I can’t help you, anyway. I’m only temporary while the matron’s in hospital, and all our records is locked away in the basement next door. And that’s shut up for the duration, and the kiddies gone to safety.’

  Gladys’s face fell, but Lily wasn’t giving up that easily. This was exactly why she was here.

  ‘Look, you might not remember him, but there must be other people who do – other staff who might?’

  ‘Other staff? You having a laugh? There’s me and the cook and a maid of all work, to look after twenty lads all working … I say they’re working! We work our fingers to the bone and not much reward—’

  Sid put his hand in his pocket and jingled a few coins.

  ‘I’m sure you do a wonderful job. But these young ladies have come a long way, and it’d be a shame to send them home disappointed, wouldn’t it?’

  He took his hand out of his pocket and examined a palm full of silver, as if idly counting it.

  The woman licked her lips and Lily noticed her yellow-stained fingertips. The only cigarettes in the shops were the dreaded ‘Spanish Shawl’. They were advertised as ‘perfumed’, but Lily had heard smokers say it was to cover up the fact they tasted like stable sweepings. To get hold of Players or Craven A you had to pay black market prices.

  ‘I suppose you could ask Miriam,’ said the woman. ‘She’s been here since the year dot, first the children’s home, then here. That’s the cook,’ she added graciously.

  ‘We’d be very grateful.’ Sid laid a couple of coins on the cubby hole’s little counter and the woman pocketed them swiftly. She moved to the door at the side of the window and opened it.

  ‘Come through,’ she said.

  Then she left them squashed together in the cramped office while she went to another door and hollered.

  ‘Miriam! Miriam! People to see you!’

  For a long while nothing happened. Behind Gladys’s back, Lily raised her eyebrows at Sid. He gave her a sort of waggling thumbs up, thumbs down.

  The woman shouted louder.

  ‘MIRIAM!’

  ‘Deaf as a post,’ she huffed. ‘Got an aid, but she won’t wear it. It’s a wonder I’ve got any voice left.’ It was certainly hoarse, but Lily had put that down to the smoking. ‘Oh, here she comes.’

  They heard the heavy tread of feet, then some puffing as Miriam heaved herself up some steps. She was a storybook cook – fat, florid and her face dabbed with flour. She was like a half-risen loaf herself, bulging doughily in her white overall. But it was immaculately clean, and her frizzy grey hair was secured under a net. She looked from one to another.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you at work,’ said Sid, speaking loudly and clearly. ‘But we’re hoping you remember one of the boys. Name of William Webb.’

  Miriam shook her head and Gladys gave a cry of disappointment.

  ‘She won’t have heard you,’ said the other woman. ‘Her left ear’s the better one.’ She moved towards the door. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Laundry to sort.’

  Sid repeated what he’d said into Miriam’s good ear, adding,

  ‘He was a Barnardo’s boy all his life – he must have spent the last couple of years here in the hostel. He worked the lighters on the river, then the pleasure boats, till he joined up. William Webb. Bill.’

  Light broke over Miriam’s face.

  ‘Bill?’ she said. ‘Billy Webb? Blond, well, ginger-blond – strawberry blond they call it now, don’t they, since that film! And a face full of freckles! You’re friends of his?’

  ‘Yes, we all are.’

  ‘I’m his fiancée!’ Gladys was like a stuck record.

  ‘Young Billy? Getting married? Well, blow me down!’ Instead, Miriam sat down, squeezing herself into a captain’s chair. Her doughy middle bulged between the arms and the seat. ‘Joined the Navy, didn’t he, bless him, the minute he could, even though he was only seventeen. What’s he doing now? I’d love to hear how he’s getting on.’

  So they explained, enunciating clearly, how Sid and Bill had met in training, how Sid had introduced the happy couple, and all about the forthcoming wedding.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Gladys urgently. ‘I want to find his mum and invite her.’

  ‘Bless me, well, that’s a different matter.’ Miriam looked doubtful.

  ‘We don’t know anything about her,’ Gladys added ‘Nor does Bill. I suppose – he’s always supposed – she wasn’t married and had to give him up.’

  ‘Oh, no, duck, you’re wrong there,’ said Miriam. ‘It wasn’t like that at all!’

  Then she explained.

  Bill’s mother had been married. Bill’s father had had a perfectly good job – ‘a porter down the market – Billingsgate – you know, the fish’ – but he’d been wounded in the Great War and couldn’t go back to heavy work. Like so many maimed ex-servicemen, he was reduced to selling matches on the street and the couple had fallen into poverty. When his father contracted pneumonia and died, Bill’s mother had no way of supporting herself, let alone a child.

  ‘That’s why she brought him here.’ Miriam shook her head. ‘Breaking her heart, she was, to leave the little mite, he can’t have been much over a year. Now, the manager in them days of the kiddies’ home, she was a good sort, not like her you just met.’ They all knew who she was talking about. ‘Sent her to me for a cup of tea, that’s why I remember,
and I’d seen her around, up the market and that. She told me she’d be back as soon as she could afford to keep Billy. But we never saw her again.’

  Tears had begun to leak from Gladys’s eyes halfway through Miriam’s story; now they flowed. Lily reached for her hand.

  ‘I’m not crying for me,’ sobbed Gladys. ‘It doesn’t look like we’ll find her, but I’m not crying for me, I’m crying for her! We always thought Bill was abandoned by a mum who didn’t love him, or at least didn’t care, or couldn’t care, for him. But to find … to have a baby and love him for over a year, to know everything about him, his favourite toy, what he likes best to eat, to teach him to say mama and dada, watch him take his first steps, and then to have to give him up …’

  She gulped a noisy sob. Sid nudged Lily and passed her his handkerchief; Lily passed it on to Gladys, who pressed it to her eyes.

  ‘We’re not giving up, Glad,’ he said. ‘It’s good news! We know she was Mrs Webb; it wasn’t her maiden name. So it should be easier to find her.’

  It was still a vain hope, but Lily didn’t say anything. Twenty years had passed and the disappearing Mrs Webb could be anywhere by now. Even if she’d stayed fairly local, this part of London, near the river and the docks, had been bombed to destruction. Whole neighbourhoods had disappeared overnight and the people who lived there at best evacuated and resettled, at worst, killed. And given that Bill’s mother had never come back for him when he was younger, she could have died well before the war anyway.

  But Sid had turned back to Miriam and spoke into her good ear.

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember where she’d been living? It’d be a start.’

  If Miriam thought the same as Lily, she didn’t say so.

  ‘She must have been local,’ Sid persisted. ‘You said you’d seen her around.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ Miriam sounded doubtful, as well she might. ‘Like I say, they’d come down in the world. A long way down. One room it was, on Steel’s Lane.’

  ‘And where’s that?’ asked Lily.

  ‘Not far, duck. Runs along the back of the Commercial Road. That’s where he used to sell his matches and all.’

  Sid didn’t produce any money this time; they could tell Miriam wouldn’t expect it and might even have been offended. She eased herself out of her chair like a cork from a bottle – Lily almost expected a ‘pop’ – and spoke to Gladys.

  ‘Don’t be crying for what’s past, love. He wasn’t unhappy here – it was all he ever knew, see. But you make sure and give him a happy marriage and happy future, eh?’

  Gladys sniffed and flung herself at Miriam.

  ‘Thank you!’ she snuffled. ‘I will! I will.’

  This time it was Sid who raised his eyebrows at Lily, thanking Miriam and hustling them out into the street.

  Blinking in the sudden sunlight, Lily asked, ‘Steel’s Lane next?’

  ‘No,’ said Sid. ‘You must both be worn out. I know I am, after that lot, the She-Wolf and the Fairy Godmother!’ Sid had always had a habit of giving people nicknames – Bill had been ‘Cobby’ Webb when he’d first mentioned him to Lily as a possible boyfriend for Gladys. ‘Right now, I suggest some dinner!’

  Chapter 13

  As they were in the East End, Sid said it had to be jellied eels, but when Gladys quailed, found them a pie and mash shop. Everyone agreed they felt a lot better for being outside of something hot and having asked in the pie shop for Steel’s Lane, they set off in reasonably high spirits – until they saw it.

  It wasn’t much more than an alley, with tiny lock-ups and dingy doorways leading to tenement rooms above. Dustbins stank with rubbish and a gutter down the middle ran with water – at least, Lily hoped it was water. She was beginning to think Bill’s mother had made the right decision. Putting a child in a Barnardo’s home didn’t sound ideal, but it had to be more hygienic surroundings for a young child than a filthy hovel here.

  Sid told them to wait by a grubby little shop offering electrical repairs while he went to ‘make some enquiries’. Gladys was looking about in a mix of fascination and horror. Lily watched Sid go in and out of various tiny establishments – a cobbler’s, a tobacconist’s, a pawn shop – with their dirty windows and faded lettering. He worked his way all up and down the street. It must have taken him over forty minutes, but when he came back, he was shaking his head.

  ‘No joy,’ he said. ‘No one remembered her and young Bill. Mind, it was twenty years ago. I got some interesting offers though. I could have had thirty bob for my watch in the pawn shop. Cheek!’

  Lily had noticed it: it was new – an oblong gold-coloured face with a brown crocodile strap.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ said Gladys.

  She was over her outburst at Barnardo’s and seemed perfectly calm. Perhaps, thought Lily, simply finding out that Bill had been loved and wanted was enough for her, and she was going to take Miriam’s advice and look to the future. But she hadn’t reckoned on Sid taking the search so much to heart.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘We’re not leaving it there! I sit at a desk all day, shovelling bits of paper from one side to the other. This is the biggest challenge I’ve had since I bust my ankle and had to give up my training! Come on, girls!’

  He led them back to the Commercial Road and the pie and mash shop. It was still busy, even though dinnertime was long gone.

  At the counter he ordered three cups of tea, and as the man went to the urn, asked casually, ‘We’re looking for someone that used to live round here – on Steel’s Lane. A Mrs Webb. Remember her at all?’

  The man, occupied with not scalding himself, shook his head and brought the cups to the counter.

  ‘Can’t help you, mate, sorry,’ he said, flicking a fly away from an open jar of pickle with a filthy tea towel.

  Sid paid for the tea.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said brightly. ‘Worth a try.’

  They took their cups to a shelf fixed in the window at the front of the shop. Gladys went off to find a WC (‘No more to drink till I’ve been – I’m desperate!’) and Sid and Lily hitched themselves up on two high stools.

  ‘How much longer are we going to carry on?’ she asked. ‘We can’t go in and out of every shop and café in Stepney.’

  ‘Not like you to fall at the first fence, Lil.’ Sid sipped his tea, making a face at the taste. There was no sugar, of course.

  ‘I know, but if Gladys is happy with what we’ve found out – that Bill’s mum did at least love him—’

  ‘Let’s give it another hour, eh? If we haven’t struck gold by then, we’ll call it a day.’

  ‘Only a day?’ Lily was aghast. ‘You mean we’re going to come back tomorrow and try again?’

  She looked at the scummy film on top of her tea. She wasn’t from a fancy background herself, nor was Gladys – their homes were simple two up, two downs in a terrace, but they were clean and – though she hated the word – respectable. Women whitened their steps and polished their door knockers and washed their nets. Hinton had its less desirable areas but they were nothing like this. Even before the war had battered it and covered it in filth and dust, it must have been grim, and the people depressed and dejected and not even shabby – ragged, almost, some of them. So much for jolly Cockneys in their Pearly Queen outfits having a knees-up round the old joanna. Oh, there were good people in the East End, she was sure, kind people who looked out for each other and helped in time of trouble – people like Miriam – but how she stayed so cheerful in this place was a mystery. Lily felt ashamed as she realised what a sheltered life she’d led. There were slums like this in all big cities; she’d known that, but had never seen them for herself, not close to, and if she never saw Stepney again it would be too soon.

  Sid shushed her as Gladys came back and drank down her tea, her eyes fixed glassily on the street. Lily and Sid let her be; she had a lot to think about.

  An old man had followed Gladys back in – well, limped in after her on a crutch held under his good arm; the ot
her sleeve hung empty. A threadbare Army cap showed he’d fought in the First War – no medals, but he’d probably had to sell those to stay alive. He was going round the tables begging for coppers for a cup of tea. No one had given him any, but he was coming towards them now and Lily reached for her bag. She could spare a few pennies – he looked as if he could do with a square meal, let alone a cup of tea. She fished threepence out of her purse and gave it to him. He gave her a terrifying grin out of a mouth of broken teeth, touched his forehead and shuffled off out again.

  ‘I thought he wanted a cup of—’ she began.

  ‘Straight to the pub, I imagine,’ said Sid drily. ‘But hang on – stay here!’

  ‘Sid! What are you—?’

  Surely he wasn’t going to go and demand her money back?

  Lily and Gladys craned through the window. Sid caught the old man up easily and touched his arm: she saw them have a conversation, then they went off together out of sight. Lily turned to Gladys and shrugged. What was Sid up to now?

  ‘Elementary, my dear Watsons,’ he said smugly when he got back. ‘We were so hung up on finding Bill’s mum – the elusive Mrs Webb – we’d forgotten about his dad! When we knew all along he was a war veteran who sold matches on this very road! Well, you know how those old pals stick together – one of them would surely remember him!’

  ‘And that old bloke did? Remember him?’

  ‘Yes, or he said he did – but he took me to the bloke who’d taken over Bill’s dad’s pitch. He’d known them well, remembered Bill being born, and her having to give him up. She had to go looking for work, the idea was to come back for Bill when she’d got enough put by to be able to give him a good home.’

  ‘But where is she now?’

  ‘That he didn’t know.’

  ‘Oh Sid! I thought you were going to say—’

  ‘But we can find out easily enough.’