“Why not?” I said. “Is it because you stole five pounds from the till?”
She nodded.
“They’ll kill me if they find me. And they will find me, somehow, I’m sure of that. Then they will kill me.”
She said these last words in a flat matter of fact voice, as though she had faced and accepted the inevitable.
It was my turn to be silent. I knew that the East End was a violent place. The midwives did not see it because we were deeply respected, and on the whole only dealt with the respectable families. But this girl could easily have been in potentially violent company and if she had stolen from them that undercurrent of violence could erupt into reality. Her life might well be in danger. I had not yet heard about the notorious cafés of Cable Street.
I said, “Have you got anywhere to sleep tonight?”
She shook her head.
I sighed. The responsibility was beginning to dawn on me.
“Let’s go and see if the YWCA is open. It’s very late, and I am not sure what time they close, but it’s worth a try.”
We thanked the proprietor, and left. In the street I gave Mary her money, and we walked the mile to the YWCA. It had closed at 10 p.m.
I was weary and tired. My stiletto heels were killing me. I had another mile to walk back to Nonnatus House, and a heavy day’s work to come. I cursed myself for getting involved at all. I could so easily have said at the bus stop, “No, I do not have change for five pounds”, and walked away.
But I looked at Mary standing outside the closed door. She looked so small and vulnerable, and somehow utterly docile in my hands. How could I leave her in the street with, possibly, men looking for her who might kill her? Who would notice if she disappeared? I thought, There, but for the grace of God, go I, and that solemn thought was truer than you might suppose.
She shivered in the cold night air, and pulled her thin jacket around her neck. I was wearing a warm camel hair coat with a beautiful fur collar of which I was very proud. The collar was detachable, so I took it off and put it round her thin little neck. She gave a sigh of joy and snuggled into the warm fur.
“Ooh! that’s lovely,” she said, smiling.
“Come on,” I said. “You had better come back with me.”
ZAKIR
The mile walk from the YWCA to Nonnatus House seemed endless. I was too tired to want to talk any more, so we walked in silence. At first all I could think about was my feet and those infernal shoes, designed for elegance, not for hiking. Suddenly the bright idea came to me to take the damned things off! So I did, and my stockings too. The cold pavement felt lovely, and cheered me up.
What was I going to do with Mary? There were only ten bedrooms at Nonnatus House, all of which were occupied. I decided to put her in the staff sitting room, and to find some blankets from the general storeroom. I knew I would have to be up before 5.30 a.m. to tell Sister Julienne as she came out of chapel. I could not risk anyone finding the girl without my first having informed the Sister-in-Charge. The nuns did not and could not take in every down-and-out who turned up at their door. If they did, they would be inundated, and the ten bedrooms would soon have ten sleeping in every bed! The nuns had a specific job to do - district nursing and midwifery - and their calling had to be directed to this end.
As I trudged along in my bare feet, I pondered Mary’s words about the lorry driver, “He was the last good man I have met in this country.” How tragic. There are millions of good men - the vast majority, in fact. How was it that she, a sweet and pretty girl, had never met them? How had she come to this destitute state? Was it all, perhaps, due to love? Or the absence of love? Would I have been in Mary’s position, had it not been for love? My thoughts went, as they always did, to the man I loved. We had met when I was only fifteen. He could quite easily have used and abused me, but he didn’t, he respected me. He loved me to distraction, and wanted only my ultimate good. He had educated me, protected me, guided my teenage years. Had I met the wrong man at the age of fifteen, I reflected, I would probably be in the same position as Mary now.
We trudged on in silence. I didn’t know what Mary was thinking about, but my soul was longing for the sight, the sound and the touch of the man I loved so much. Poor little thing. What sort of touch had she known if the lorry driver was the only good man she had met?
We arrived at Nonnatus House. It was getting on for 2 a.m. I fixed Mary up in the sitting room with some blankets, and said, “The lavatory is down the end of this corridor, dear. Sleep well, and I will see you in the morning.”
I went wearily to bed, and set my alarm for 5.15 a.m.
The Sisters were surprised to see me as they came out of chapel. It was still the time of the Greater Silence of their monastic vows, so there was no speech. I went up to Sister Julienne and told her exactly what had happened. She did not speak, but her eyes spoke their understanding. The nuns passed me in silent procession, and I went back to bed, resetting my alarm for 7.30 a.m.
At 8 a.m. I went to Sister Julienne’s office.
“I have spoken to Father Joe at Church House, Wellclose Square,” she said. “They can take the girl, and will look after her. I have peeped into the sitting room. She is sound asleep, and will probably sleep until midday. We will bring her some breakfast when she wakes up, and then take her along to Church House. You go and have your breakfast now, and then start your morning’s work.”
Her eyes smiled at me, and she added: “You could not have done otherwise my dear.”
Once again, I was struck by the kindness and flexibility of the Sisters, compared with the rigid inflexibility of the hospital systems under which I had worked. Had I taken anyone into a nurses’ home without permission for a night, there would have been hell to pay, simply because it was against the rules.
Mary did not wake up until four o’clock in the afternoon. It was our teatime, just before we started the evening work, so I did not have long to see her before I had to go out. Sister Julienne had taken her some tea and bread and butter, which she was eating when I went into the sitting room. Sister was explaining to Mary that she could not stay at Nonnatus House, but could go to a house where she would be welcome to stay. Antenatal care would be provided, and arrangements made for delivery. Mary looked at me with big solemn eyes, and I nodded and said that I would come to see her.
And that is how I got into the world of pimps and prostitutes, the foul brothels, masquerading as all-night cafés, that lined Cable Street and the surrounding area of Stepney. It is a hidden world. The same goes on in every town and city the world over, and always has done, but few people know anything about the business, nor indeed do they want to.
There are two sorts of prostitutes: the high class ones, and the rest. The French courtesans were probably the top of the market, and we read about their salons, their lavish entertainments, their artistic and political influence with amazement.
In London, the smart West End call girls today normally work within a very expensive establishment with a few select clients, and can command enormous fees. These are usually very intelligent women who have worked it all out, planned it, studied it, and entered prostitution with a true professionalism. One such girl said to me: “You have to go into it at the top. This is not a job where you start at the bottom and work your way up. If you start at the bottom, you just sink lower.”
The vast majority of prostitutes start at the bottom, and their life is pitiable. Historically, prostitution has been the only means of earning a living for a woman who is destitute, particularly if she has children to feed. What woman worthy of the name Mother would stand on a high moral platform about selling her body if her child were dying of hunger and exposure? Not I.
Today - and indeed in the 1950s - such starvation is not seen in Western societies, but there is a different type of hunger which feeds the prostitution trade. It is starvation of love. Thousands run away from desperate circumstances, and find themselves alone and friendless in a big city. They are craving affectio
n, and will attach themselves to anyone who appears to offer it. This is where the pimps and madams score. They offer the child food and lodgings and apparent kindness, and within days, prostitution is forced upon them. The only difference between the twenty-first century and the 1950s is that back then, the children procured for soliciting were around fourteen years of age. Today the age has dropped to as low as ten.
Mary’s lorry driver was heading for the Royal Albert Docks, and so he had dropped her off in Commercial Road. She told me, “I felt so terribly alone, more alone than I had ever felt before. In Ireland, when I was making my plans to come to London, I was all excited. The journey was thrilling, because I was going to the beautiful city of London, and I didn’t feel alone, because my thoughts were full of dreams. But when I got here I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
Who was it that said “’Tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive?” I daresay we have all experienced this in one way or another.
Mary went into a confectioner tobacconist, bought a bar of chocolate, and ate it as she wandered down the busy road. At the time, Commercial Road and East India Dock Road were said to be the busiest roads in Europe, because the Port of London was the busiest port in Europe. The continuous stream of lorries bewildered and frightened her. By contrast, Dublin had been as quiet as a country village. The shrill blast of a siren nearly gave her a heart attack, and then she saw thousands of men pouring out of the dock gates. She flattened herself against a doorway as they passed, chatting, laughing, squabbling, shouting and talking to each other. But not one of them spoke to the shy, small figure in the doorway. In fact it is doubtful if any of them even noticed her. She said, “I nearly cried with loneliness. I wanted to shout out ‘I’m here, just beside you. Come and say hello to me. I’ve come a long way just to be here.’”
She didn’t like Commercial Road much, so she turned off into a side street where she saw children playing. She was scarcely more than a child herself, but they didn’t want her to join in the game. She continued on until she came to what was known as the Cuts - the canal that went under Stinkhouse Bridge on its way to the Docks. It was pleasant standing by the bridge, looking down at the moving water, and she stood there a long time watching a water rat pop in and out of his hole and seeing the shadows lengthen.
“I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t cold, ’cause it was summer, and I wasn’t hungry, ’cause that nice lorry driver had given me sausage and chips. But I felt so empty inside, and sick with longing for someone to talk to me.”
Night came, and she had nowhere to sleep, nor the money to purchase a night’s lodgings. She had already spent many nights in the open, and the prospect did not bother her. There were bomb sites all over the East End at the time, and she found one that looked as though it might do. However, it was a bad choice.
“I was woken in the night by the most terrible noise. Men screaming and fighting and cursing and swearing. In the moonlight I saw knives and flashing things. I crawled deeper into the hole I was in, and hid under some foul-smelling sacks. I just kept quite, quite still, and didn’t breathe. Then I heard the police whistles and dogs barking. I was frightened the dogs would smell me, but they didn’t. Perhaps the sacks I was under smelt so bad they couldn’t smell anything else.”
She giggled. I didn’t. My heart was too full for laughter.
Apparently she had stumbled into a bomb site regularly used by the meths drinkers. After the police had cleared the place, Mary crept out, and spent the rest of the night by the Cuts.
The next day was spent in much the same way as the first, just wandering around the Stepney end of Commercial Road with nothing to do.
“There were a lot of buses around, and I wondered if I should get on one and go somewhere else, because I didn’t really like it where I was. But they all said places like Wapping and Barking, Mile End, and Kings Cross, on the front, and I didn’t know where these places were. I had wanted to come to London, and the lorry driver said it was London when he put me down, so I didn’t get on a bus, because I wouldn’t know where I was going to.”
Two more days were spent like this. Completely alone, talking to no one, sleeping in the Cuts at night. On the third evening Mary spent the last of her pennies on a sausage roll.
The fourth day in London would have been without food, had she not seen an old lady in a churchyard feeding the sparrows with breadcrumbs.
“I waited until the old lady had gone, then I shooed the birds away, and crawled around scooping up the breadcrumbs and putting them in my skirt. The sun was shining, and the trees were nice. I saw a little squirrel. I sat on the grass and ate a whole lap full of breadcrumbs. They tasted all right. The next day I went to the churchyard again, thinking that the old lady would come to feed the birds. But she didn’t come. I waited the whole day but she still didn’t come.”
In the evening she scavenged some bits of food from a dustbin.
As she was talking, I wondered why it was that a bright young girl, who had had the initiative and enterprise to plan her journey all the way from Dublin, could not have been more resourceful and forward thinking when she arrived in London. There were places she could have gone - the police, a Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, the YWCA - where people would have helped her, sheltered her, and probably found her a job. But such a course of action did not seem to have occurred to her. Perhaps it would have done, given a little more time. But instead she met Zakir.
“I was looking in a baker’s window, sniffing the bread and thinking what I wouldn’t give to have some. He came and stood beside me, and said, ‘Do you want a cigarette?’
“He was the first person who had spoken to me since the lorry driver. It was so nice just to hear someone say something to me, but I didn’t smoke. Then he said, ‘Do you want something to eat, then?’ and I said: ‘I’ll say I do.’
“He looked down at me and smiled, such a lovely smile. His teeth were gleaming white, and his eyes were kind. He had beautiful eyes, a dark black-brown colour. I loved his eyes the moment I looked into them. He said, ‘Come on, let’s get some of their nice filled rolls. I’m hungry too. Then we’ll go and sit by the Cuts and eat them.’
“We went into the shop, and he bought lots of rolls with different fillings, and some fruit pies, and some chocolate cake. I felt very scruffy beside him, because I hadn’t washed or changed my clothes for days, and he looked so smart and well dressed, and had a gold chain on.”
They sat on the grass of the towpath, leaning their backs against the wall, watching the barges go by. Mary said she was tongue tied. She felt overwhelmed by this kind, handsome youth who seemed to like her, and she couldn’t think of a thing to say, even though for four or five days she had been longing for someone to talk to.
“He talked all the time, and laughed, and threw bits of bread to the sparrows and pigeons, and called them ‘my friends’. I thought someone who is friends with the birds must be very nice. Sometimes I couldn’t understand quite what he was saying, but the English accent is different to the Irish accent, you know. He told me he was a buyer for his uncle, who had a nice café in Cable Street and who sold the best food in London. We had such a lovely meal sitting there on the towpath in the sunshine. The rolls were delicious, the apple pies were delicious, and the chocolate cake was out of this world.”
She leaned back on the stone wall, and sighed with contentment. When she woke up the sun was behind the warehouse, and his jacket was over her. She found that she was leaning on his shoulder.
“I woke up with his strong arm around me, and his beautiful brown eyes looking down at me. He stroked my cheek, and said, ‘You’ve had a nice big sleep. Come on, it’s getting late. I had better take you home. Your mother and father will wonder what has happened to you.’
“I didn’t know what to say then, and he didn’t talk either. After a bit, he said: ‘We must get going. What will your mother think, you being out with a stranger all this time?’
“Me mam’s a
long way off in Ireland.’
“Well, your dad then.’
“Me dad’s dead.’
“You poor little thing. I suppose you are living with an auntie in London?’
“He stroked my cheek again when he said ‘you poor little thing’, and I thought I would melt with happiness. So I snuggled up in his arms, and told him the whole story - but I didn’t tell him about me mam’s man and what he’d done to me, because I was ashamed, and didn’t want him to think badly of me.”
“He didn’t say anything. For a long while he just stroked my cheek and my hair. Then he said: ‘Poor little Mary. What are we going to do with you? I can’t leave you here by the Cuts all night. I feel responsible for you now. I think you had better come back with me to my uncle’s place. It’s a nice café. My uncle is very kind. We can have a good meal and then we can plan your future.’”
CABLE STREET
Pre-war Stepney, just east of the City, with Commercial Road to the north, the Tower and Royal Mint to the West, Wapping and the Docks to the South, and Poplar to the east, was the home of thousands of respectable, hard-working, but often poor East End families. Much of the area was filled with crowded tenements, narrow unlit alleyways and lanes and old multi-occupant houses. Often the old houses had only one tap, and one lavatory in the yard, to serve between eight and a dozen families, and sometimes a whole family of ten or more might occupy one or two rooms. The people had lived like this for generations, and were still doing so in the 1950s.
This was their inheritance and their accepted lifestyle, but after the war, things changed dramatically, for the worse. The area was scheduled for demolition, which did not actually take place for another twenty years. In the meantime, the area became a breeding ground for vice of every description. The condemned houses, which were privately owned, could not be sold on the open market to responsible landlords, so they were bought up by unscrupulous profiteers of all nationalities, who let out single, derelict, rooms for fantastically low rents. The shops were bought up in the same way and turned into all night cafés, with their ‘street waitresses’. They were, in fact, brothels, making life hell for the decent people who had to live in the area, and bring their children up in the midst of it all.
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