Shadows Of The Workhouse: The Drama Of Life In Postwar London

by Jennifer Worth

  Poor woman! She had cried all over again. What mother wouldn’t?

  “You must keep some for yourself, my son.”

  “Nope. Not a penny. I done it for you, and you shall get the pay.”

  “My boy! Oh, my lad!” She kissed his hands and wiped her tears on his sleeve. “My dear boy. But I fear for you. My heart is heavy. I fear for you.”

  She finished the tea, and pulled herself together. The rum helped. The children would soon be in from school, and later the girls from the factory. She couldn’t present a tearful face to them.

  “You start getting your things together in a bundle, while I go down to the yard to wash my face. Then we’ll use your shilling to buy some whelks and a loaf, and some real butter and a saucer of jam for the little ones. We’ll have a real feast your last evening at home.”

  And that is exactly what they did. The younger boys were over the moon about their big brother’s uniform. Each of them tried on the jacket, and the six-year-old pranced around the room with the jacket trailing on the floor and the sleeves flapping wildly. The sisters were agog with admiration. Suddenly Joe had become a man in their eyes. Only their mother was silent, but she kept a brave smile on her face.

  Time passed all too quickly. The laughter, the cheers, the songs, had to come to an end. Joe had a train to catch from Waterloo at ten o’clock that night. He dared not miss it.

  ARMY LIFE

  Guardsman Joe Collett arrived at Waterloo Station at 9.30 p.m., along with about sixty other young men recruited that day. Each of them thought that he had been singled out for special consideration by a recruiting sergeant. They were all very poor boys and were surprised to see each other. None of them knew that the army was obliged to recruit twelve thousand men each year to make up the numbers, mostly lost through death.

  Also at Waterloo Station were around a hundred girls, dressed to kill. Oh, the skirts, the ribbons, the laces, the tucks, the frills and flounces! Oh, the boots with dainty buttons, and the wide-brimmed hats, heavy with fruit and flowers and feathers! And what was that Joe saw? Could it be paint? Joe had never seen rouged lips and cheeks before, and he was enchanted.

  The girls clung to the soldiers, two or three to each. Some of them carried a phial of gin or rum in their garters, and these were brought out with much skirt-rustling and mock modesty. There was only half an hour before the train was due to leave, but the girls knew how to use the time to advantage. Much can happen in half an hour, and each girl knew that the recruits had been paid a shilling that day.

  Most of the new recruits had gone alone to the station, but some were accompanied by mothers, aunts or sisters. These young men were put to great embarrassment by the girls, who openly sneered at them, and cast bold, contemptuous eyes on their womenfolk. These good women were scandalised by the wanton behaviour of the girls, and tried to protect and warn their sons, which only made matters worse.

  Joe, being alone, taller than average, and undoubtedly good-looking, was mobbed. He was offered a phial of rum which, laughing, he swallowed in one gulp. It went straight to his head. He clung to a brunette, who cuddled him, and led him round the station, singing. Joe felt he had never been so happy in his life. Two more girls joined them and led him out of the station into the little lanes. It was a quarter to ten. In the lanes the girls cuddled and kissed him, and fondled him all over. In his intoxicated state Joe felt that more than his blood was rising. It was then that the girls discovered that Joe did not have his shilling on him. They screamed with rage. They kicked him and pushed him and he fell against a wall, hitting his head. They tore his jacket off him, frantically going through the pockets, threw it on the ground – Joe’s beautiful red tunic – and trampled it in the mud. He cried out, but could not stop them. They pulled his hair and scratched his face until the blood ran. They spat on him and then rushed off, with a flick of skirts, around the corner.

  Dazed, bewildered and bleeding, Joe leaned against the wall. He tried to gather his senses, but couldn’t think what had happened. His head hurt from the blow. He was sliding comfortably down the wall when a sharp noise penetrated his fuddled hearing. What was it? It was repeated. Dear heaven, it was the train whistle. Aldershot . . . the last train . . . must catch it . . . desertion . . . flogging . . . prison. He snatched up his jacket, nearly falling flat on his face as he did so, staggered towards the station, hurtled towards the moving train, was pushed onto it by a porter and fell into a seat.

  “Blimey, mate, you look as if you’ve had a good time,” said his companion, with a sardonic grin.

  The train gathered speed, and Joe fell asleep. He was awakened by a rough hand shaking him. “Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty. You’re a soldier now, and we’re at Aldershot. You can dream of her another time.”

  Aldershot? What was that? Joe woke to see half a dozen grinning faces above scarlet tunics staring at him, and it all came back. He was a soldier now . . . the recruiting sergeant, that was it. Head up, shoulders back, chest out, breathe deeply, no slouching now. He jerked himself upright, and pain split his head from ear to ear. He groaned.

  The men roared with laughter. “He’s only a kid, leave ’im be. He’ll learn. Here, mate, give us yer arm.”

  Joe staggered off the train on the arm of his unknown companion, and a staff sergeant stepped forward. “Right men. In line. Roll call. Look sharpish.”

  The motley group of raw recruits shuffled backwards and forwards, sideways and hitherways, trying to make a line. The staff sergeant bellowed and swore and brandished his regimental swagger cane, trying to get them into military line. He was not successful, but had to make do with second best.

  “Right, you horrible men. You wait till I get you on the parade ground. You’ll damned soon learn how to form a line. Roll call.”

  An old duty sergeant stepped forward with two sheets of paper in his hand containing lists of names, which he proceeded to read out. His reading was not very good. No doubt the process would have been quicker if a duty sergeant who could read properly had been sent, but the ability to read was not an accomplishment that was rated very highly in the army.

  He got through several simple names without mishap – Brown, Smith, Cole, Bragg – but then was stuck.

  “Warrarramb . . . ” he shouted.

  No one answered.

  “Warrarrnad” Louder.

  No response.

  “What you say?” yelled the staff sergeant.

  The duty sergeant tried to look confident, and shouted “Warrarrandy”

  No response.

  The staff sergeant strode over to him, his cane swishing, his boots clicking, and snatched the paper. In the flickering gaslight of the station he squinted at the page. “Warrenden,” he shouted.

  A man stepped forward. Roll call proceeded in this manner. The duty sergeant did his best, but got stuck on Ashcroft, shouting “Askafoot”. Bengerfield, Willowby, Waterton set him stuttering, until everyone thought roll call would never be finished.

  One man was missing. The name was shouted backwards and forwards several times, but no one stepped forward. The staff sergeant struck the calf of his leg with his swagger cane and, with great deliberation, pulled out a stub of pencil and underlined the name.

  “It will be the worse for him,” he said menacingly. “Right men, form a column, four abreast, quick march.”

  Forming a column for untrained men is as difficult as forming a line. The staff sergeant swore and cursed and used his cane liberally, eventually getting some sort of ragged column together. With a “left, right, left, right” they marched off.

  It was four miles to the camp, which did Joe good. By the time he got there, his head had cleared from the effects of the rum, and ached only a little from the crack on the wall. The night air refreshed him, and the men surrounding him gave him a feeling of security.

  The sentries at Aldershot Barracks leaped swiftly to attention when they heard the column approaching. An incomprehensible word was barked out by the staff sergeant, soundi
ng something like “Awt”. No one in the column thought it meant anything and continued marching. The four at the front were confronted by a menacing row of guards, each with a bayonet raised at forty-five degrees, and pointed directly at their stomachs. Another step, and they would have been skewered. They halted. The men behind carried on marching, straight into the backs of the men in front. About half the column fell on each other in this way. Being fresh from a sane world where this sort of thing is considered funny, they fell about laughing, but the staff sergeant failed to see the joke. He swore and raged at their imbecility.

  The column re-assembled inside the gates and marched another quarter-mile to the billet, a grey rectangular building, four storeys high.

  A short way off from this building the staff sergeant shouted.

  “In a minute, I am going to say ‘halt’, and that means ‘stop’, and when I say ‘halt’ I want you to stop. Got it?” They continued marching.

  “Awt.” Half the men stopped, the other half didn’t. The result was exactly the same as at the gate. The staff sergeant nearly went berserk. Somehow he managed to re-assemble them, marched them another fifty yards and shouted, “Halt.”

  This time everyone stopped.

  “Right. In line.”

  This was no easier than it had been at the station. In fact it was harder, because it was pitch-dark. Men stumbled and fell over each other, muttering and laughing.

  “Silence!” roared the staff sergeant.

  “Silence yerself, yer bloody windbag,” shouted a voice.

  “Who said that?” roared the sergeant.

  “Father Christmas,” said the voice.

  “Corporal, open the door,” roared the sergeant.

  The corporal on duty opened the door of the billet.

  “Forward. Quick march,” roared the sergeant, leading the way up four flights of stone steps. At the top, the corporal in charge of the billet opened the door, and the disorderly line of men entered.

  “New recruits, Corporal, and a bigger bunch of stupid bastards I’ve never met.” The staff sergeant turned to go. He turned to the men. “You wait. You just bloody wait. You’ll wish you’d never been bloody born, you will.” And with those pleasant words, he departed.

  I roared with laughter at this story. We both laughed, Mr Collett and I. Nothing binds people more strongly than the same sense of humour, and the ability to laugh together. I was thoroughly enjoying my evenings of sherry and an old soldier’s reminiscences. The British Army of the 1890s was not something I would have expected to find interesting, but in the firelight, with a good storyteller like my companion, the years came alive.

  I was also aware that Mr Collett had become deeply fond of me, which was touching. One of the pictures on his walls was of a pretty young girl in 1920s dress. I understood that this was his only daughter, who had been killed in the bombing in the Second World War. Perhaps I was becoming a substitute granddaughter to him. I didn’t mind. I liked him. He was a dear old man, and reminded me of my own grandfather, whom I had loved and admired deeply, and who had been more of a father to me than my own father. He had died a couple of years previously at the age of eighty-four, and I still felt the loss. If Mr Collett and I were both substituting another person into our growing affection, it was all right by me.

  He refilled my glass. “Do you like chocolates, my dear? I bought a box of Milk Tray this morning, with you in mind.”

  He reached up to the mantelshelf, and felt for them. I was still a bit chary about eating anything, because of all the filth around the place, and once, when he had produced a grubby plate of biscuits, which I had seen him drop on the dirty floor and pick up, I had said that I didn’t like biscuits. But an unopened box of chocolates was a different matter. Anyway, I loved them. After that, it was always sherry and chocolates. Incidentally, I never saw the bugs again, and after a while I ceased to look for them.

  “So you got to your billet, and your head wasn’t too bad. What happened then?”

  “We were told to make up our cots. A soldier sleeps in a cot, not a bed. They are constructed in two halves, the bottom half of which pushes into the upper half. This allows for more space during the day in the centre of the billet. The corporal showed us how to do it. The biscuit, which is a soldier’s straw-filled mattress, and two rough blankets, were folded on the top part of the shortened bed. We had no pillows, no sheets. Nothing fancy like that. The corporal told us the sip-but was on the landing.”

  “What on earth is a sip-but?” I interrupted.

  “Oh, that’s back slang for a piss-tub. There’s a lot of rhyming slang and back slang in the army. At least there was in my day. It may have been dropped by now.

  “I remember my first night very well. It was so new, so exciting, that I couldn’t sleep. Apart from which I still had a headache from the girls pushing me against the wall. My thoughts were racing – those girls, my mother, the recruiting sergeant, the staff sergeant, the station, the march through the night. I must have dozed off towards dawn and in my dreams I vaguely heard a bugle call. Seconds later the corporal burst into the billet, shouting: ‘Show a leg now, get out of it. Open those blasted windows and let some fresh air in. It smells like a bloody farmyard in here. Get out of it now, do you hear me?’

  “Perhaps I didn’t move, but the next thing I knew was that my cot collapsed, and I landed on the floor. The corporal had pulled the bottom half away from the top half, which was a very effective way of rousing anyone who did not leap out of bed the instant reveille was blown. This sounded at 5 a.m., summer or winter.

  “The corporal ordered us to dress and put away our cots and fold the biscuit and blankets. I was in a daze, but the roar of the corporal kept me on my toes. He kept bellowing on about the blankets not being folded straight, and how, he’d never seen such a useless, slovenly bunch of recruits, and how we would be licked into shape and no mistake. He ordered two men next to the door to carry the sip-but to empty it down the drains and clean it at the pump, where it would be left until the following evening.

  “‘Right now. Stand by your cots. This is only the reception centre, where you are treated gentle-like. Later you will learn what army life is, when you have been sorted into the regiments what you have enlisted for. Get me. You will have an hour’s drill before breakfast. Then your breakfast, then an hour’s parade, then present to the colour sergeants for sorting. Got it? Right. In line. Down to the parade ground.’

  “We got into some sort of line and filed down the stone stairs. In the darkness outside we could hear voices rather like the staff sergeant’s barking out orders. We were put to physical exercises – press-ups, star-jumps, squatting with straight back, step-ups. Imagine all that with a headache and no sleep! But I kept thinking this was better than hanging around the dock gates looking for work, and it was. The last quarter of an hour consisted of the most exhausting exercise so far – running with your knees lifted high at each step. After this, we were starving for our breakfast. This consisted of dry bread and sweet tea. It tasted delicious. After that we were led to the parade ground for another hour of drill. At 9 a.m. a bugle sounded and the colour sergeants marched onto the square, each followed by a duty sergeant carrying a list of names, which they read out in turn. The recruits were sectioned into their colours, and marched off. This happened every day, because the recruiting sergeants were busy enlisting unsuspecting young lads like me every day of the week.

  “There were only four Scots Guards recruits that day. It’s a crack regiment.” (Mr Collett said this with great pride, lifting his chin high.) “We were taken in marching order to the quartermaster’s stores, where we were issued with top-coat, cape, leggings, one suit of scarlet, one of blue for drills, boots, shirts, socks, and numerous pieces of regimental dress. We were issued with a rifle, bayonet, and two white buff straps, with pouches that could hold fifty rounds apiece. We were also issued with a busby, the tall fur headdress reserved for Guards. Everyone in the regiment was very proud of these.

>   “We – the four of us, that is – were shown to a whitewashed barrack room overlooking the square. A corporal was in charge of each billet, and a couple of older duty-men also kept billet there. They showed us how to fix straps for drill purposes, how to roll the top-coat and fix it to the kitbag, how to fix leggings, what cleaning materials we would need, how to place our cape and scarlet top-coat, when not in use, on the racks above our cots – even how the straps of the kitbag should hang from pegs above the head of the cot.”

  The pettiness of it all, the meticulous attention to detail, reminded me of my nurse’s training. I told Mr Collett about it. We were issued with three fitted dresses, twelve aprons, five caps and a cape. We were given precise instructions on how they must be worn at all times. The hem of our dresses had to be fifteen inches from the floor, no more, no less. Caps, which were flat pieces of starched linen, had to be folded and pinned to an exact shape and size. Aprons had to be pinned at an exact point above the bosom, and adjusted to the precise length of the dress. Shoes had to be black lace-ups, of a specific style, with rubber soles for quietness. Stockings were black, with seams. Belts and epaulettes were of differing colours, distinguishing the different years of training a student nurse underwent. Full uniform had to be worn at all times when on duty. I recall, in my first year of training, being ordered out of the dining room by a third-year nurse, because I had forgotten to put on my cap. Later, when I became a ward sister, I forgot my cuffs on one occasion when I went to the matron’s office, and was sent back to the ward to get them before I could address her!

  We discussed whether this sort of discipline was necessary. Mr Collett said: “Well, it certainly is for men, because large numbers of men living together can easily become like wild animals. Men are brutes at heart, and without the civilising influence of women they quickly revert to savagery. The discipline of the armed forces is the only thing that keeps them under control. I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary for women, though, would you? But I maintain that nurses always look lovely, and so I approve of the uniform.”