As soon as your day’s work was done.
Satisfying coins were being pressed into her outstretched hand. Lily was just popping another up beyond her knicker elastic when ruin came. A large, heavy hand was laid on her shoulder, and a familiar voice boomed in her ear, ‘Lily!’
Charlie, who had been putting in the window frames of a house in Brondesbury Park, had, because of the dark and threat of snow, been sent home early. He had decided to treat himself to a pint in his local pub before going home. This was where Lily had made her mistake, in picking a familiar pub, Charlie’s local, the only one she knew well.
Then came the second parental thick ear of the day for Lily Strugnell, followed by her second bout of crying, and Charlie’s interrogation on the pavement. Why was she here? What had she been thinking of? Didn’t she know you could be arrested for begging in the street? Did she want to be picked up by the police and taken to an orphanage and never see her mother and father and brothers and sister again? What would her mother say when she heard about it?
Lily sobbed out that Queenie wouldn’t care, didn’t care what happened to her, had called her a liar. She had run away and was collecting money to buy a ticket to take her to stay with Auntie Mavis and Uncle Bert and their dog Brownie in Gravesend.
‘Oh God Almighty, Lily,’ Charlie groaned over his sobbing daughter, deprived of his pint and knowing that all he had to look forward to when he arrived home was a fierce domestic dispute.
‘Ain’t my fault – it’s Ma’s,’ Lily sobbed.
A man came up and clapped Charlie on the shoulder. ‘Hullo there, Charles, my man,’ he said, affecting a toff’s voice. Then, reverting to his own, he asked, ‘Do you always conduct your family affairs in the street? Better come in for a warm, and bring your little girl. She’ll catch her death out here with no coat.’
‘Can’t take the kid in a pub,’ Charlie said.
‘Oh, come on,’ said the other man, a ruddy forty-year-old in a tweed suit and overcoat. ‘I’ll hide her under my coat and smuggle her into the snug. Mrs Trotter’ll look the other way on a day like this. After all, I’m in the trade myself.’
So Lily, highly excited, was picked up by Jack Cunningham, the landlord of the Rose and Crown in Madge Street, and, thrust under his overcoat, smelling of Jack and his cigars, was spirited into the pub and placed in a small corner near a brightly burning fire. Soon, her body more or less masked by Charlie’s, she had a glass of lemonade in her hand, while Charlie had a pint of beer and Jack a whisky.
Charlie knew Jack quite well. He’d carpentered the stage in the building beside the Rose and Crown, where actors, singers, jugglers and acrobats now appeared. Cunningham, Queenie said, lived with a woman who was not his wife. Not content with that, he still went after other women. She also said that the girls in short skirts and low comedians on his stage were there to make weak-minded people drink more than they could afford. True, no doubt, but Lily decided she liked this big man, who grinned a lot, had invited her to call him Uncle Jack and had bought her a glass of lemonade.
‘Your health, Charlie,’ Jack said, lifting his glass ‘and yours also, madam,’ he said to Lily. ‘And what’s the little problem that caused your dad to call out to his Maker on the pavement in tones of mental anguish?’
‘Only run away from home,’ Charlie told him. ‘I found her singing temperance songs outside the pub, with her hand stretched out for pennies and ha’pennies, which she planned to use to take her down to my sister’s in Gravesend. I ought to get her home – Queenie’ll be demented worrying where she’s gone to.’
Jack roared with laughter. ‘You’re a caution, you are,’ he said to Lily. ‘Fancy that, singing in the street.’
‘Other girls do,’ Lily pointed out.
‘Yes – but your ma’s trying to keep you respectable. Be careful, Lily,’ he said. ‘It’s a hard world for a girl. Once she’s lost she can’t never come back.’
‘That’s enough of that, Jack,’ reproached Charlie. ‘Lily’s too young to understand what you’re telling her – and I’m surprised to find that you’re suddenly an expert on female purity.’
Jack just blew his nose with a large red handkerchief, muttering, ‘Well – yes, all right, Charlie, ‘nuff said.’ Emerging from the handkerchief he asked, ‘So what’s all this about running away?’
‘I think we’d rather keep that to ourselves, Jack, if you don’t mind,’ Charlie said, but Lily confided instantly.
‘My teacher came round to the house – about my apron.’
‘That ruddy apron again,’ Charlie said.
‘Seems a funny thing to run away about,’ commented Jack.
‘How would you know – you’ve only got one kid, Jack. You’d be surprised. A broken teacup’s a hanging crime in the average household.’ To Lily, he said, ‘I can’t understand why your ma hasn’t bought you the pinafore already.’
‘Because you said not to,’ Lily responded.
‘I never,’ Charlie said indignantly. ‘Look, Lily, drink up and let’s go and get to the bottom of this.’
‘She’ll only beat me,’ said Lily.
‘She’ll beat me if she finds out you’ve been in a pub,’ Charlie said.
‘And she don’t like him’ continued Lily helpfully, nodding at Jack.
Charlie was deeply embarrassed. ‘Lily, you bad girl,’ he said with indignation. ‘How can you say that?’
But Jack was laughing again. ‘Don’t go all red in the face, Charlie,’ he interrupted. ‘’Course Queenie don’t like me, a respectable woman like her. None of the respectable women round here like me. Quite right, too. Luckily for me, the unrespectable women don’t take the same view. I expect you’ll be growing up to be a respectable woman like your ma,’ he said to Lily.
Lily knew she would never manage it. Her big blue eyes found his small brown ones, and she shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she announced.
As Jack laughed yet again, Charlie dragged Lily up and began to haul her out of the pub. ‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ he said. ‘This girl’s getting to be a proper handful. She needs taking down a peg; got to learn a few manners.’
Jack called after them as they left, ‘Don’t beat her, Charlie. She means no harm. She’s just high-spirited.’
Charlie, dragging Lily through the dark streets, under gaslamps around which snow swirled in what Lily thought of as a fairy dance, kept up a grumbling monologue on the topics of what her mother would say, how she had come to turn out such a cheeky girl, and what they had done to deserve her.
After Lily’s disappearance, Queenie had run with baby and toddler next door to Martha Barrington for suggestions and comfort. Martha, having reassured Queenie that Lily would soon be back, dispatched James and John anyway to scour the neighbourhood for her. She then heard Queenie’s story about the arrival of Miss Garton, the row and Lily’s running away. Martha said that in her opinion the argument was merely a misunderstanding such as often occurred in families. She stressed the distinction that Lily’s starring role in the carol concert would bring not just to Lily but to all the Strugnells, and added that naturally the school desired Lily to look her best, since local dignitaries would be attending. After twenty minutes of such soothing remarks, Martha had managed to calm Queenie down a little, so that when Charlie and Lily came back, the ensuing row was milder than they had anticipated. It was quickly agreed that the pinafore, the hair ribbon, even new stockings should be bought for Lily’s great day at St Jude’s church. Charlie’s idea that Rose should be given the same items, even if she was not singing in church, was vetoed by Queenie on the grounds of economy.
No one knew then how dearly Lily – and all of them – would pay in years to come for five-year-old Rose’s being deprived of a new apron, hair ribbon and stockings that Christmas.
Into the hushed church, lit by lamps, marched St Jude’s church choir, twenty chosen children, led by Miss Garton. Aged between six and ten, these boys and girls came from backgrounds ranging from utmost povert
y to comparative affluence. Harry Baines’s father was in prison, Judy Smith’s was dead, Jenny Watson had no father at all, while Samuel Bradley’s owned two greengrocer’s shops. Alice Jones’s father was the local bookmaker.
In the back pews sat all the classes, with their teachers. In the middle of the church were the children’s parents, and in two dignified rows at the front sat the headmaster, the school governors, Nathaniel Hodge, the local LCC representative, the Deputy Mayor of Bethnal Green, and many other dignitaries, gentlemen in dark suits with watch-chains, their wives in smart coats and hats. Also there, of course, were the Strugnells, all washed and brushed up. They searched for Lily in the choir, and spotted her marching altarwards with an air of repressed excitement and confidence.
The children banged into their places in the choir stalls. The vicar went to the lectern, greeted the congregation and invited them to kneel in prayer. The carol concert, interspersed with readings from the Bible, began. Then, with the rest of the choir seated, Lily began to sing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’. Her voice, large for a child, soared up into the beams of the church; her eyes were fixed on the stained-glass window opposite her.
‘O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see thee lie…’ sang Lily.
The congregation was transfixed by the sweet voice of the pretty little girl, and her air of grave innocence. The Deputy Mayoress, who had lost a small daughter to diphtheria the year before, stared at Lily with tears in her eyes. Mr Hodge whispered to George Phipps from the local council, ‘Heart-breaking, isn’t it?’ to which remark Phipps, a known heavy drinker and adulterer, responded, ‘Isn’t it just, though.’ Right at the back, Queenie said to Charlie, ‘Oh Charlie, I can’t believe this. Look at her. Look at our Lily.’
Up aloft, looking down at the rapt faces of the schoolchildren, parents and local notables, Lily, who had begun by being very frightened, gained the confidence available only to gods or performers who know they can get the audience in the palm of their hands. Her voice soared, and when she got to the final lines of the carol, she allowed the little tremolo she had worked on herself, but which had been strictly forbidden by Miss Garton, to enter her voice. Having finished, she stood for a little while, genuinely believing that the congregation would start to clap and cheer, which indeed they would have done had they not been in church. The boy beside her pulled her down into her seat, and the service went on. The collection, which was to go to the school funds, was very large, and the vicar, as he handed it over to the headmaster, remarked, ‘For some of this I think you have to thank the little lady who sang a solo in the choir.’
Lily, on top of the world, skipping home with the family, was quickly told by Queenie not to get swollen-headed. Singing was all well and good, Queenie reminded her, but it was more important to keep clean and do as you were told.
For the next month or so, at home and at school, it was held necessary to do everything possible to stop the swelling of Lily’s head. Queenie slapped her. The other children pushed and poked at her. But Lily’s head swelled just the same. On Boxing Day Charlie had taken them all to the pantomime. Lily was in a dream for two days. Then she began to get ideas. She reasoned that first she’d got money for singing outside the pub, second, she’d sung in the carol concert and made the lady cry. Back at school after the holidays, she began to tell the others her idea. She would go on the stage when she was older. Her class responded by beating her up in the playground. Even her best friend, Maggie Sullivan, joined in.
Lily quickly recovered, undeterred by the bruises. Finally, Miss Garton was forced to say, in front of the whole class, ‘Lily, you’re a nice singer, but you’re a girl from a humble background who has to grow up and do her duty to friends and family. And don’t think that singing carols will help someone who’s made four spelling mistakes in five lines of writing – such easy words, too. I hope your head hasn’t been turned by all this.’
But Lily was getting older all the time, and beginning to realise that somehow the aim of everybody around her was to make her the same as everyone else. And she was developing grave misgivings about the future.
She went into her third, then fourth, then fifth year of apprenticeship as a cook, bucket-carrier, pegger-out of laundry, saucepan-stirrer, washer-up and child-minder. She had no desire to complete the apprenticeship and become fully qualified.
Lily was twelve, and about to leave school, when she told Queenie that she had firmly decided, once and for all, to make a career as a singer when she grew up. Queenie told her that singers needed lessons, and there was no money to spare for those. The Strugnells, she said, might be poor people, but they were honest and respectable. Singing in public was no life for a well-brought-up girl. She added that if Lily didn’t go over straight away and stir the stew before it caught and burned on the bottom of the saucepan, she’d land her clout which would soon have her singing in earnest.
The problem of the singing lessons worried Lily mightily for some time, but she solved it in the end by saying to herself that she didn’t care, not a bit. She would find a way. She would certainly find a way. I’ll do it. I’ll do it somehow, she told herself, and deep down, she knew she would.
However, a theatrical career was not Queenie’s idea for Lily. Through the forewoman at Robert Warren’s clothing factory in Cork Street, she got Lily a job as a machinist’s helper. She led Lily off there one bright morning in June just after her twelfth birthday. Lily, almost as amazed and stunned at this as she had been when taken to school for the first time, went without protest. There she worked ten hours a day, at first sweeping the floor clear of pins and bits of fabric, making tea and being shouted at by everybody – though her responses began to make the others laugh. Soon she was leading them all in singsongs, when the forewoman was out of the shed in which they worked. Then, because she was quick and intelligent, she was put at the workbench, machining khaki shirts for the army. She didn’t like Warren’s factory. She was determined not to stay. But she stuck at it, until one fateful day in August 1899.
Chapter Five
1897
‘My goodness, Bella, can’t you stop those girls squabbling?’ Robert Warren observed, holding out his cup for a refill at the same time. The noise from the hall was shocking: ‘It’s mine!’, ‘It’s not! Look, there’s a little slit in mine, that’s how I know it’, ‘It is, Cora’s, it is’. Then Elizabeth’s wail: ‘You lost yours yesterday. I’ll get into trouble with Mrs Hamilton if I go again without my hair ribbon. It’s the second time this week.’
Meanwhile Bella Armitage filled her brother’s cup and left the room, not hastily but like a lady, her black skirt rustling over the Turkish carpet of the dining room, the room looking on to the garden which had been her late husband’s surgery.
The hall was wide and had a marble floor made up of many colours. There the three girls, all in black dresses and pinafores, were scuffling. Outside the dining room door, Bella sighed. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Elizabeth’s got my hair ribbon,’ said Cora. Her big blue eyes were innocent. Her long plait of hair was secured at the end by a rubber band, over which there ought to have been a black bow. Ten-year-old Elizabeth’s bright-red plait already had a badly tied bow on it.
‘She lost hers yesterday,’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘Now she says mine’s hers.’
‘Don’t call your cousin “she”,’ Bella reproved.
‘I saw her take it out of Cora’s drawer,’ Frannie said.
‘Liar!’ said Elizabeth.
‘You must not, ever call your cousin a liar,’ said Bella.
‘Well she is.’
Bella took her daughter by the shoulder. ‘Darlings – darlings. You must all try to get on. You should all be friends.’
Cora and Frannie looked on, faintly satisfied that the question of the ownership of the hair ribbon was at least temporarily suspended. Elizabeth was in trouble with her mama again.
‘But – but how can I be friends, if they tell lies about me?’ Elizabeth bu
rst out.
Harriet Warren now appeared at the head of the curving staircase in her wrapper. ‘What on earth is going on? The girls will all be late for school.’
‘It’s a question of a missing hair ribbon—’ Bella began.
‘Have we no other ribbons?’ enquired Harriet. Bella had not thought to ask about this.
‘Have we?’ she asked.
‘Not the right colour,’ Frannie said. ‘We have to have black.’
‘Someone will have to wear a white one,’ declared Harriet, turning and going back to her bedroom.
‘I daren’t,’ said Cora. ‘I’ve already been told off and given lines.’
Bella looked at Elizabeth. Elizabeth drew her plait over her shoulder and pulled off the ribbon, then gave it to Cora, picked up her school bag and said, ‘There you are, Cora. Let’s go, or we’ll be late.’
She did not look at her mother as she left. She would have to spend her dinner hour writing lines in the school hall, ‘I must not come to school without a hair ribbon’, over and over again. But there was no point in carrying on the argument against her cousins. They usually won. There were two of them, and they backed each other up and were backed up by their parents, while her mother, keen to placate the Warrens, sided with no one, but merely appealed to Elizabeth to get on with her cousins. In all issues, whether it was who had let their new kitten escape from the kitchen before it was old enough to find its way back, or who had lost this or damaged that, only two outcomes were possible: either Elizabeth alone was blamed, or they were all blamed together. Frannie and Cora always got away with it. It had in fact been Frannie who had sneaked into the kitchen late at night to see if there was any food about, a habit of hers, and unbolted the back door for some reason, allowing the kitten to creep out. Cora, Elizabeth and Dolly Gage all knew this. Elizabeth had searched the streets for the kitten after school, then sobbed for the poor, cold, lost thing for hours in the bedroom she now shared with Cora, but all she’d got from Cora was, ‘Stop snivelling, Elizabeth, the kitten’s gone and that’s that. I want to go to sleep.’ Somehow it had been concluded that Elizabeth, whose job it was to open the dining and drawing room windows when she got up, to air the rooms, and close them for warmth before leaving for school, had been responsible for the kitten’s escape.
Elizabeth and Lily Page 5