*
Fearful as I was, as the voyage came to an end I began to look forward to my arrival. I wanted to set foot on solid pavements again, not wooden boards above a dirt street. London! Pavements! Gas-lamps! Theatres, music-halls, bookshops, department stores! Buses! Oh – the wonder of it all.
I began to remember one of the frightening times in Canada when we were stuck on the mountain with an axle broken, just the Irishwoman, Dolly, the half-breed and me, while Pat, the Irishman, slogging off to the camp five miles away to borrow a wagon. The dark was coming down, a sprinkle of snow, too, and there was only one little lamp and a small fire we’d made beside the line to fight the solid darkness and the wild beasts in the forest. We sang every song we knew to cheer ourselves up and ward off the bears and wolves, though many of Dolly’s own songs were so mournful and eerie I soon had to ask her to stop. When I tuned up with ‘God Save the Queen’ she protested that this was a song she could not abide, seeing our soldiers in Ireland as an army of occupation and the English as conquerors of her native land. Pat got through to us not long after dawn, by which time we were frozen and tired and reduced to chewing strips of pemmican, the dried buffalo meat the half-breed had in his pocket. This was a delicacy to him, so many of the buffalo being gone. But he had been reared in winter on it as a boy and it’s the food of childhood you crave. Approaching England I couldn’t wait for some good old cod and chips, piping hot and wrapped up in newspaper to keep in the warmth. Endlessly eating river fish got on my nerves and I yearned for a taste of that deep-sea fish they brought into the docks on North Sea trawlers.
Excitement gained on me. Whatever you think about London it’s the hub of the universe, and if you’re brought up near the docks you know it. Everything is sent to London – wood, gold, fruit, tobacco, rice, cloth. The dark warehouses of London docks suck it all in. It’s as if a great pair of hands reached out from Britain, one holding a gun and the other seizing things from all over the world, grasping them and carrying them back to deposit at home. If you have money there’s nothing in that city you cannot buy. If you have not got money, of course, it’s God help you, but that’s the same wherever you go.
Now, on my bunk, my head filled with scenes from the world I was returning to – the lights at night from gas-lamps and houses, the sounds of dogs barking at daybreak, cocks crowing, women quarrelling at the pumps in the yards, then wagons passing full of beer barrels, rolls of hessian, or piled high with bananas, with children leaping on and off, risking death to grab one.
In my head I heard costers calling ‘Fruit, hardly bruised’, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-oh’, the barrel organ playing, and at night, pianos in the pubs, people singing, footsteps – staggering drunks, strolling tarts, people going off to work at all hours – the voices of straying gangs of sailors calling out to each other in foreign languages, men and women shouting and always, at all hours of day and night, crying babies. What an anthill it is, always stirring, not like Calgary. Apart from my own establishment, and some like it, or the odd mounted policeman riding in late, this town mostly closed down early, started up in good time and had, all around it, the quiet of the prairie and towering above it the silence of mountains all untrodden except for generations of redmen. It is a frightening, empty feeling you get under a huge sky in landscapes so deserted, mile on mile of waving grass and rivers. There were times, especially in the railway camps on the prairie, when I’d have given my soul for the sight of a crowded pavement, a pub, a woman coming out of a fish and chip shop with the family dinner, a boy selling matches, a couple of girls, arms linked, walking along singing, some boys sitting with their feet in the gutter playing cards, while an omnibus rattled past. In Canada, sometimes, I’ve felt as if I were living on the moon.
Part II
We docked at Southampton on 29 August and I took a first-class ticket to London, sitting in the compartment reserved for ladies only, together with my governess friend and a severe-looking lady in mourning. I planned to avoid Baverstock and Brown, since both had said they were travelling to London. Both had, in fact, separately asked me where I would be living after my arrival. I had answered both, shortly, that I should be spending only a day or two in London, then going directly to Scotland. Both, in fact, turned up in the corridor outside my carriage: Baverstock smiled and raised his hat, but dared not approach because of the other ladies; Brown actually put his head round the door and invited Miss McKay and myself to have tea with him in the restaurant car. I refused, Miss McKay accepted, which I think must have been a disappointment to him.
The fields, with their hedges and small clumps of English trees, seemed very small, the little villages we passed very permanent, as if they had rooted into the landscape, like the trees. In Canada I had heard exiled men talk nearly in tears of the fields, the old country churches, the brooks and streams of home but like any slum girl I had barely seen any of this before I left. I saw the beauty of it now. They were harvesting the corn. Big horses were pulling reapers along the fields; one farm had a steam engine pulling. Puffs of smoke hovered over the yellow field of corn, half reaped, while men in open shirts and women in sun bonnets were tying sheaves and loading them on to carts. A woman sat under a hedge, feeding a baby.
We arrived in London in time for me to find accommodation in Fleet Street, which I did by the simple expedient of taking a cab there and entering shops asking if respectable lodgings were to be found in the neighbourhood. I had a job to keep calm and sober, as befitted a widow, because the short journey from the station to Fleet Street in a cab, at dusk, just as the lamps were being lit, the sight of the crowds, shops, restaurants and all the advertisements excited me so much.
I was directed by a Jew who owned a leather shop selling boots and bags to a place some doors up, a tobacconist; and so, just as the woman in charge, a Mrs Isabella Cooper, was closing her shop, which purveyed superior tobaccos and pipes, I arrived and asked for accommodation. She offered to rent me her own rooms above the shop, which consisted of a bedroom, parlour and a small room for luggage and boxes. I agreed and took the apartment for three months, saying that I had business to attend to, and friends to visit in London before joining my late husband’s parents in Scotland, and that I wished to have my own rooms as I had a good deal of luggage and did not want to be a permanent, over-encumbered visitor in other people’s houses.
My landlady was the plump and respectable widow of a captain of merchant ships plying between Liverpool, Africa and the West Indies, carrying cotton, tobacco and slaves, and, she confided, often outrunning the guns of the Royal Navy ships after trafficking in slaves was outlawed by Parliament. She had invested her husband’s savings in this shop, dealing in one of his late commodities, after he’d died of a fever in Kingston, Jamaica. She was delighted to let her rooms to a respectable widow like herself. I explained my lack of mourning clothes as I had done to others: my husband, I said, had implored me on his deathbed not to wear black for him.
I was pleased to obtain the apartments, which suited my requirements exactly. They were conveniently near to the East End where I would be looking for my sisters, but well inside the City, on the right side of London Wall. That is the city frontier, originally made by the Romans, which these days separates the world of riches and order from the world of grinding poverty and lawlessness. I knew enough about the latter not to want to live in it while I conducted my search. I was pleased, too, that after eight or nine o’clock at night the shop would be shut and there would be no one on the premises except for the servant girl to note my comings and goings.
And so I was given keys to the door at the side of the shop which would be my entrance, sent a cab to the station for my trunks and settled in, having first asked my landlady to place a bath in the boxroom, for I am always keen on cleanliness, probably because I have experienced so much of the opposite. I then got some tea sent up from the kitchen behind the shop. The maid of all work was a skinny London girl, Dora, underpaid, underfed and overworked, I guessed.
I drank the tea, unpacked a few of my books and personal items and hung up some of my dresses. Mrs Cooper then entered with her brother-in-law, who was to assist her in carrying her own effects to his house, where she would lodge while I was occupying her rooms.
I was raring to go after several days aboard ship, quickly changed from my travel-weary clothing, put on a simple rust-coloured cotton dress and matching bonnet and left, saying I was invited to supper at the house of a friend near Hyde Park and would get a cab in the street. I had become accustomed, I told her, to a greater degree of independence than might seem usual, because frontier life demanded this of women.
As I left I observed the servant girl, still at the mangle, wringing out sheets. I thought the less she knew of me the better. She was a sharp-faced girl, no more than sixteen and about five feet in height, thin as a rat, with a transparent, pale skin, like a ghost, fair hair scraped back over her forehead and bundled into a wispy bun at the back. Her pale blue eyes had flickered round the room quickly taking in everything when she brought up the tea. Her appearance, as much as anything else, reminded me of where I was going. So far I had only travelled through the better parts of London, where the more affluent were to be seen. This girl was a city rat. Children born in Canada, if their parents have any luck at all, grow tall (I have seen ten-year-olds as big as their own immigrant mothers) and their skins take on a healthier tinge. This girl looked like a stick of celery, reared in soot; her legs, under her skirts, were bowed; everything about her appearance spoke of London streets, including those sharp, pale eyes, for however much that poor upbringing damages the body, it sharpens the wits. Babies like Dora are born in a leaky room, with the others sitting on the stairs outside, put all day in the care of the oldest girl, who may be no more than five or six herself, while the mother works. They learn to play on the pavement, see what’s to be seen, hear what’s to be heard, keep away from the traffic on the road. Those who survive accident and sickness do not thrive well, but they come out of childhood with unequalled mental agility, though it is not of the kind an Oxford professor would recognize or commend.
I dodged past Dora without attracting her attention as she sang, rather wearily, ‘Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay,’ and slipped out, marching past St Paul’s, just to look at it, treading the mile through Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate to quieter streets of banks and the premises of those dealing in all commodities, mostly closed now. Lights still burned in a cobbler’s windows, and there was the tap-tap-tap of his hammer.
It was nearing ten o’clock by then, but I knew that unless Whitechapel had changed a good deal since I was last there, the streets would still be full of people. At Liverpool Street I crossed to Spitalfields Market, where people were still rummaging on the heaps of discarded fruit and vegetables, even as the men were trying to put the refuse on the rubbish carts. ‘Hurry up, mother,’ a man said, leaning on his broom, as an old lady picked up a few leaves of cabbage or some such and put them in a sack for her rabbits or herself, I don’t know which. I tripped across, avoiding the stares and trying to keep my kid boots clean. People were huddled around the big, soot-blackened church there. As I slid past down the street beside it a black shape rose up and a woman with a baby at the breast, barely covered by a shawl, said, ‘Lady, have you anything for a poor woman with a baby?’ and launched into a tale of a husband injured at the docks. I sped up, knowing that if I stopped and produced so much as a penny I’d be mobbed in a flash.
I cut away down the streets towards Commercial Street, moving fast, but not too fast, which would attract attention. I became more vigilant. I was a stranger, like an animal that’s been away from the pack too long. I knew I must look and smell unfamiliar now to the inhabitants of those streets. A young drunken man, cap tilted cheekily over one eye, swayed up and offered me his arm. ‘Might I escort you, madam, to wherever you are going? A lady such as yourself is in need of protection in an undesirable neighbourhood such as this.’ Knowing he’d have his hands on my bag in a flash, then wrench it out of my hands and leg it down an alley, I gave him a violent jab in the ribs with my elbow and marched on, hearing him gasp out satirically behind me, ‘And I thought you was a lady.’ I threw my head up and sniffed, Whitechapel-style. I had my gun, of course, in the large black leather handbag I carried, although it wouldn’t save me from a sudden mobbing, or a crack over the head from behind. But the narrow streets were crowded, as usual, which is a defence of a kind. And so, a little the worse for wear, I reached my destination, Cora Mundy’s alehouse, which she had always kept in the front of a two-up-two-down on the corner of Brushfield Street and Commercial Street. A cage bird hung in a wicker cage out of an upper window, next to a drying petticoat. And what a smell in the street! That real smell of poverty, made up of overflowing privies at the back, broken drains, damp houses, cooking, unwashed bodies living at close quarters. Even the soap used to try to keep floors and stairs clean mingles with the other odours, making them somehow worse. How it all came flooding back – but I stepped boldly into Mrs Mundy’s, putting a good face on things, and there she was, just as before, still standing there behind her trestle, a barrel on either side, tankards across the front. She was pulling pints for a couple of men in collarless shirts and heavy boots, who had, I guessed, just finished work. Out of necessity people work all hours in Whitechapel.
In Mrs Mundy’s cramped front room there were three small tables in the middle with chairs and benches all round the walls except for the wall behind where she stood. There a door behind her led into the back kitchen. There were only three customers – the two men, and a woman slumped half asleep on a bench in a corner. There were gas mantles burning on either side of the empty fireplace but the woman was in the shadows so I could not see her clearly. Poor old cow, I thought, and went up to Cora Mundy. ‘Hullo, Cora. Recognize me?’
She was a big, shapeless woman in an old black dress with a cameo at the neck and she wore a sacking apron because I suppose she’d been bringing in a new barrel from the yard at the back. Her face was big and pale and she looked at me shrewdly from two little black eyes, like currants in a suet pudding, the eyes revealing nothing of her speculations, although I knew their nature. Had she seen me before? If she had, was it wise to admit it? If she had not, what did I represent? What use could be made of me? Was I bringing good luck or bad? After a pause she said, ‘Can’t say I do recognize you. You put me in mind of somebody, though. Now, who is it?’ Then she pondered, or pretended to.
‘Come on, Cora. Think. You know me.’
She looked again and laughed. ‘Oh my Gawd – it’s Mary. Mary Kelly. I spotted that little mole on your neck and suddenly it came back to me. Well…’ she said on a long note, regarding me, ‘you look fine. You’ve come to no harm since you took off.’ The little currant eyes went all over me. ‘You never got that dress here, nor them boots. Where you been? Not up north? You’d never have got that stuff there. Don’t tell me – let me guess – that dress is French,’ she concluded triumphantly. ‘But’, she added, ‘that makes no sense because we know you shipped out of St Katharine’s Dock, third class for New York.’
I nodded. ‘Right on all counts, Dora.’
‘There was a man scouring the streets for you for days after you left so sudden. You know who. In quite a state, he was, saying all kinds of wild things. He was like a wild man when he found out. But’, she said quickly, seeing my expression, ‘that’s all in the past. Here you are back again. Married well, too.’ She had spotted the outline of my wedding ring under my glove.
Whether she believed I had really married or not I don’t know. I didn’t contradict her. I did say, ‘There’s a certain person who I don’t want to know I’m here. The individual just mentioned.’
‘Of course,’ she responded promptly. ‘Say no more. It’s understood. Let the dead bury the dead, that’s what I say. Now then. What will you have? A nice glass of ale? Or …’ She winked at me.
I nodded. She wasn’t meant to sell spirits for she had no licence,
but she kept a bottle or two of gin under the bar for favoured customers. She tipped some in a beer glass and handed it to me, helped herself and made me a toast, ‘England, home and beauty.’ I drank to it. Though’, she said, ‘you’ve been well away from this place, in my opinion. Glad you left, I expect, and finding things no better now than when you left. They’re worse in fact. Trade’s worse. Folk flood in from all over – Scots, Irish, country bumpkins, not to mention the Jews, they’re all over the place, and the Chinks, they’re everywhere else, so the rents go soaring up. Times must be mighty hard where they all come from, I say, if they want to come here and help themselves to the little we have.’
‘More trade for you,’ I ventured.
‘Trade?’ she said disgustedly. ‘The Jews don’t hardly drink and as for the Chinks, gambling’s their game, that and sitting about fuddling their brains with opium. Well,’ she added, on a less bitter note, ‘it’s good to see you back, and looking so bonny.’
The rumour was that Cora Mundy had a small fortune in gold hidden away somewhere on the premises, but such stories are common in poor places. Many an old man’s had his head bashed in by some villain, or desperate soul, and floorboards pulled up to find the gold he never had. Myself, I think half her profit went to her pet son Harry, a giant even bigger than she was, who spent most of his time sitting idle in an armchair in the back room, reading the paper and marking up his bets in the Sporting Life. She needed him for moving the barrels, though half the time she did it herself, and sorting things out when it got rowdy in the alehouse and even her strength was not enough to stop the fighting. A fight at Cora’s was worth running to watch. A crowd would gather to laugh when one occurred and the Mundys started throwing out drunks into the street like so many rag dolls.
The Cry from Street to Street Page 4