For this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people, thought Uncle D., as he was telling a story to Alice and her sisters. He considered the two girls sharing the name of Alice, the quick-witted, pretty-faced child with a dark bob and profound eyes on the one hand, and her reflection, the sulky plump blond girl with long hair, reaching through to grab the first girl’s soul, on the other. He has read fairy tales of wicked magicians who stole shadows and mirror-reflections as a way of stealing souls, but never in all these tales has he read of a foreign reflection being sent to take the place of a stolen one.
He shades his eyes against the afternoon sun and watches the three girls making daisy chains.
Or should he say, the four girls?
The rest of the afternoon passes in a dream for Alice. Uncle D. saw the other girl. She knows that he will not betray her, for they have secrets together, she and he, mainly that she is going to marry him when she grows up. Together, she is sure, they can thwart the wicked plans of the looking-glass girl.
Later that week, Uncle D. invites Alice for a photography session. This is not at all uncommon and it is one of the reasons Alice loves him so; Uncle D.’s photographs are the only way she has of knowing what she actually looks like. She poses as a beggar girl, in her best dress, and in Chinese costume. And then it happens. Something wonderful.
“Alice,” says Uncle D., “would you like to help me in the darkroom? I shall show you guild secrets.”
Would she? To assist in the dark alchemy of mixtures that sometimes stain Uncle D.’s hands quite black! To be allowed into the sanctum sanctorum, the room of no light, there to assist in the mysteries of artistic creation! To move from mere muse to able assistant!
Of course she would.
So, carrying the photographic glass plates in both hands, Alice is ushered into the darkest of rooms. She brings over bottles of foul-smelling chemicals at Uncle D.’s direction and watches as he bathes the glass plates in shallow tubs. After she watches him treat two plates, he sets up another tub of mysterious substances and asks Alice to take charge of the third by herself.
Thrilled and solemn, Alice carefully, gently rocks the glass plate back and forth, back and forth. And for the first time, she sees, O wonder of wonders, she watches as first a trace and finally a speaking likeness of her own face appears on the glass.
For her part, the looking-glass girl lurks in the mirror, in the water, and waits. Her time will come, she knows. She needs only to bide her time. Long after dark-haired Alice and her sisters have faded into old age, long after Uncle D. is dead and buried, she will still be reigning in triumph and majesty. She can afford to wait.
3. ALICE AT THE CLANG ASSOCIATION
The Red Queen, the dread clean lead mien calls the Clang Association to order, to water, O my daughter. O daughter Alice, alas, a lass, the dafter daughter with laughter ought to jump down, drown in her wonderland, under hand, the sundered band, a hundred grand wild creatures, mild teachers, O child’s features, peering staring quizzically physically from a glass plate, a raucous fate stilled in pages, filled in stages as malice goes underground with wonder found.
O Malice! O Mouse! Let me douse the fire of your pyre, the mire of your gyre, you ferocious liar! And the moral, O adorable malice, is to take care of sense and the sounds will take care of themselves, but what selves! What delves into the dense sense of tragic magic and emerges in surges of blue? Only a few of the merry cherry toothsome dairy, running true and fast at last, in all kinds of mauled minds with lightning tightening like ice, callous Alice, cruel and caustic, a ghoul, a girl, a true dew pearl afloat in milk and honey.
Thundering hands, wondering lands, wandering sands, brushed with silk and money, hushed and lush with giant mushrooms and sticky sickly treacly bloodred falls and squalls. The tea party departing in a ruffled huff paused with its claws dragging and snagging, dripping and clipping, clapping and snapping, catching and snatching at the hair that needs cutting, ruddy in the fading light, the light kite that shudders through the heir.
O airy fairy free! To be own invention, the known convention of flight, lily-white child, wild in her eyes, shifting size and losing temper. For the egg and the sheep and crystalline sleep join hands at the feast. O beast of burden at the final curtain, weep for the shining sea.
Down that hole in the all she calls for the gold, but who holds the pen? The tears on the beach, calling to each duck, dodo, eaglet, and wren? The race and the bill taking in their fill, O fill with the day’s kill the eager mouth—see how it stands to bite the hands hid amid the lilies’ press-gangs. Lilies and rushes in armfuls and bunches melt into air at the touch—for the glory, the crush, the uncertain hush, the story’s own lurking rush.
The serpent that wriggles at the tops of the trees, giggling, snickering while the eggs take their ease, the pig in the rig figures on the trigger as she gets bigger than any set of keys. The looming head, the booming dead, cries off with the moth in the boat. While the beautiful soup and contraband tarts soften damned hearts on the grounds, the winter abounds with uncertain hounds tracking the stops of the story’s great pet, the reflected, perfected, inflected girl. Girl! Churl! With nary a curl of the lips as she slips through the gray mist into the gardener’s train—for a queen again! O heartless, vain, and needless meme. The fawn is soon gone with fear drawing near and alarm at the child’s bright charm. And the boys in the fright of the night’s black-winged kite, the sheep in the shop and the wool by the wall before the big fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.
The trying lion in the might fight ate plum cake from the red right hand of the monster. It’s my own invention, he said, that two-tone convention, the dry bone and the golden crown. All around town, another queen, the mother dream, at the midnight feast with the right lease and an explosion of hankering hunger.
So she grabs the unfed dread red and shakes and shakes and shakes her—
and it was a kitten, it was all written, only a kitten after all that fall, only a kitten after all.
And life, all life, rife with strife and agleam with dreams, moves phantomwise in deep disguise, in saddened but still brilliant eyes.
PHOSPHORUS
A man can strike a Lucifer on anything—the wall, the bottom of a shoe, a barstool. Sometimes the white head of the match will flare 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 t
he 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 you’d 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 it; 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 1845–1852 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 $170 for the relief of the Irish.
Sir Charles Trevelyan, the government official responsible for England’s relief efforts, considered that “the judgement 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 church 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 fla
res 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.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 6