When, finally, Brewer put his head round his office door and invited me to step inside, I found myself in a long room with large windows at the end. Brewer did not offer to shake hands and got quickly behind his heavy desk, on which were silver inkpots and a silver-framed photograph with its back turned to me. I guessed it was a family portrait. In a sad and patronizing tone he said, ‘Well, Mrs Frazer. I have checked the details in the case of Miss Kelly, your sister. They may not be pleasant to your ears.’ I think he found the details very pleasant and the chance of humiliating me through Mary Jane even more so. I could tell the contemplation of all this had stirred him up. He looked at me as if I were about to lead him off up an alley, or he wished I would.
‘Intimations of my sister’s way of life have reached me, Mr Brewer,’ I said. ‘But blood is thicker than water, as they say. So it’s her whereabouts I’m most interested in.’ I was trying to be civil, but the little toad was angering me.
He would not to be cheated of his fun. ‘The neighbourhood in which she lodged is not a good one. Many unfortunates dwell there.’ I nodded. ‘Sadly,’ he continued, ‘this city is full of them.’ He would have been delighted to expand on the subject. Men like nothing better than to talk of sin to pretty women. For some, it’s better than the act itself.
‘Just as sadly, these unfortunate women find many men to take advantage of their plight,’ I countered, to cool him down.
He pulled himself together a little and said, ‘Yes, yes indeed. A deplorable situation all round, I’m afraid. Anyway, to the matter in hand. Your sister, if indeed the woman concerned is your sister, lived at the premises known as Murgatroyd’s in Goulston Street, for which I’m responsible, from August to December last year. I believe she was living with a man, I don’t know his name or his trade – I believe he had no trade. Disputes arose between them and he left, according to neighbours. Now, by December she had paid no rent for two months, and I decided it was time to confront her about the matter, and invite her to leave if she could not pay. When I arrived, she’d been gone for several days, and, of course, had left no address, in order to prevent me from finding her and demanding the arrears of rent. Doing a moonlight flit, this is called in local parlance.’
‘I know the term,’ I responded soberly. And had done the deed, more than once, I thought.
‘Local rumours enabled my clerk, Mr Churchill, to track her down to Gun Street, at the back of the old convent, if that’s any help to you. A building run by a Mrs Smith.’ He paused. ‘Her lodgings aren’t becoming any more select, Mrs Frazer, I’m afraid. The arrears of rent amount to four pounds and ten shillings.’
Brewer had had her, I was sure, in lieu of rent. Otherwise, how could she have stayed in Goulston Street for two months without paying? Perhaps Mary Jane preferred it that way, I couldn’t tell. At all events, he was a dirty dog, Brewer. I think he was feeling his private parts behind his desk. I stood up.
Some anger must have shown on my face. He knew I had found him out and quickly realized I was not going to pay Mary Jane’s outstanding rent, ‘If you find her, tell her Brewer has her best interests at heart, will forget the past and if there’s any service he can render her, in her misfortunes –’
I left. At the door I said, ‘Mr Brewer, do you take me for a fool?’
‘I take you for one of the same sort as Mary Jane,’ he snapped.
I opened the door. ‘And that is a sort you must know well. Indeed, know intimately.’
I stamped angrily, leaving the clerks goggle-eyed in the office, and walked off in a rage, heading blindly for Fleet Street. These hypocrites! First they took what they wanted, then condemned it. Perhaps they really believed as they spoke, the way children sometimes do, that they were the men they claimed to be, and lived as they said they did. And how they hated those who tempted them, whether they succumbed to the temptation or not. How they tried to humiliate the women they could not resist, but by whom they felt humiliated. How they blamed them, how they whitened themselves by blackening them. And my sister had pulled up her skirts for that man! What disgrace, even if she’d thought it worth the price to get her lodgings free. What a place this was, I thought, as I stomped through Trafalgar Square, where the people were already, like so many roosting birds, settling down for the night, and the whores starting their early shift round St Martin’s, down the street to the Strand. What a place of smoke and smells, beggars and drunks and people toppled in doorways, where a girl would sell herself to the landlord for five shillings’ rent. What chance had a poor woman in this city? Where were my sisters? What had happened to them since I’d shipped out eight years earlier, leaving Mary Claire, a hard-working, quiet-living fourteen-year-old, and Mary Jane, only twelve, getting jobs in shops or factories, stopping one, starting another, abandoning that one also, growing saucier, bolder and stronger by the day?
Back in Fleet Street I stretched out in the chair in my lodgings, quite worn out, and considered my course of action. I recognized I might have to go deep into the East End to find my sisters – if Mary Jane was there at all now, for I had as yet had no reports of her. I fell asleep, and dreamed of a red room, where a terrible event had taken place, a warning I could not properly hear, a threat to myself. I woke after only a quarter of an hour, terrified, wondering if I, who had slept soundly all my life, would ever enjoy quiet rest in this city again.
It was a hot night. Tired as I was, I had street fever in my veins. At half-past eleven I was trying to pick up news in one of the many lodging houses in Flower and Dean Street. How many were there – five, eight, ten? One thing was for sure: there were no flowers and precious few deans in that street. There were bedrooms upstairs at number 5, or mattresses anyway. The place acted as a lodging house, brothel and thieves’ kitchen all at the same time. By the fireplace a man was pushing scraps of food from his pockets into a dented saucepan, his two children standing by, staring hungrily. He pushed his hand into the boy’s shirt, pulled out a potato, shoved it in the pan, put the pan on the fire. A man in rags, feet stuck out, sat propped against the wall, head back, tilting a bottle towards his mouth. In a dark corner a man opened his jacket, slid in his hand, pushed what he took from it into a woman’s open palm. A mangy puppy lay in the arms of a skinny boy. He was feeding it with the heel of a loaf. There must have been fourteen people in that hellhole of a kitchen, less than sixteen feet square. I was in a corner with three women. A middle-aged one, with dyed red hair and very bad teeth, sat against the wall in an old wooden chair. Young Kitty was on the floor with her spindly legs, ending in cracked boots, stuck out in front of her. The other woman and I leaned against the filthy wall. We were all sharing a bottle of gin I’d brought in with me. I’d pulled my hair about, wore a shawl instead of a bonnet and an old grey dress, but I still didn’t fit. The gin helped, though.
Suddenly there was the erratic clatter of feet on the stairs, and a tipsy girl in a short scarlet skirt, scarlet and black hat, a man’s jacket draped round her shoulders, came through the open door. She leaned against the wall laughing. Heads turned.
‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Any of youse in here seen Liam Flynn? Come on now, Flynn’s the name. Have you seen him?’
‘Has he got a wooden leg?’ enquired a thin, pale girl near me. There was some hope in her voice.
This made her laugh more. ‘He has not. Ah – no point in asking here, yez all dead here, but you don’t know it. Christ!’ she cried out, as the big black cat who lived there stalked up to her. ‘What in God’s name is that – the devil?’
‘Oh, clear off,’ shouted Bess Watkins, the woman I’d been talking to. ‘There’s no Flynn here, as you can see, so just get out.’
The drunk girl made a tottering curtsy. ‘Your wish is my command, my lady. I wish you well of your castle, so goodbye, chimney sweeps, goodbye.’ She burst out laughing again and departed.
‘Get herself murdered one day, running about like that,’ grumbled Bess. ‘Skirt half-way up to her knees, bosom there for all to see –’
‘Leave her alone, Bess,’ said skinny, red-headed Jane. ‘She’s no different to what we were at her age. Let her enjoy herself while she can.’ Rouge stood out on her cheeks. She looked ill. ‘Give me another drink, dear, my teeth are torturing me. I’m in agony day and night. Why did God give us teeth?’
‘Get them drawn, my darling. Get them drawn,’ advised Bess, whose front teeth were lacking top and bottom. ‘What ain’t there can’t hurt you.’ She grinned, to demonstrate. She could have been a pretty woman once. Now, with her straggling hair and veined face, her looks had gone. ‘Swallow your gin down, Kitty love,’ she advised. ‘Did you take the powders the woman gave you?’
‘I did,’ said the young woman on the floor. ‘They’re not working.’
‘They will, believe me,’ the other advised grimly. ‘Poor girl,’ she told me. ‘She’s in a bit of trouble. She had to run away and come here or she reckons her brothers would have beaten her, nearly to death. Now she’s trying to get shot of the baby.’
There was a silence. I had to speak. ‘I’m in no danger of that,’ I volunteered. ‘I’m scarred inside.’
‘Oh,’ Bess said, understanding. ‘Like that, is it? And you so young.’
The girl, Kitty, didn’t seem to follow any of this. I don’t think she understood half of what was going on. Her eyes were rolling round the darkness of the room in panic. She was like a lost dog, which has been running about fearfully trying to find home, and when it stops all of a sudden realizes that, after all that effort, it’s even further off, in a strange place. Shadowy figures leaned, lay or sat in the gloom, one bolting down scraps of food from a handkerchief he’d pulled out of a pocket. A woman had crept in and sat by the door, suckling a child. Two boys played knucklebones on the floor. A thin voice, a man’s, started a song – ‘A-roving, a-roving, I’ll go no more a-roving, For roving’s been my ru-in’ – but no one joined in and he broke off with a terrible graveyard cough which went on and on.
It must have been a pretty fair version of hell for the girl, who, a month ago, must have been looking out over empty fields and a long white road stretching for miles with not a soul on it. Not hell; perhaps for her it was a limbo. She was stunned. She’d had the strength to leave but I doubted if she had the strength to survive here.
‘Even so,’ Bess said after a pause, ‘I wouldn’t regret those scars if I was you. Look at me, married at thirteen, I’d four youngsters by the age of nineteen. Five before I was twenty-one.’
‘I don’t know why you don’t go to a mission, say you’ve been a bad girl and promise to reform,’ I told Kitty. ‘They’d feed you, at any rate, and take care of you till your troubles were over.’
She didn’t respond. Perhaps my words sank in, to be remembered at a later date. Perhaps not. I turned to my own business. ‘I’m looking for my sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane Kelly. One’s twenty-two, one twenty. I left them here eight years ago. Mary Jane was in Goulston Street, then they’re saying she may be living down by the old convent, but I daren’t go looking at this hour, by myself. You wouldn’t have heard anything of either of them, would you?’
Red-headed Jane just stared at me, with some hostility, I thought. She guessed I was only slumming. Bess was softer-natured. ‘No, love,’ she said. ‘Can’t say I’ve heard anything about either of them.’
‘If you hear anything would you leave a message at Mrs Mundy’s, in Brushfield Street?’
A man stumbled through the door. He was a surprise in that dismal room. He wore a clean white waistcoat, a white shirt open at the throat, a fresh red neckerchief and black trousers. He had on his head a round black hat with a brim. The boy holding the puppy gaped. The men in the corner summed him up and evidently dismissed him as a threat. But the woman, Jane, shrank back against the wall, ‘Oh my God,’ she said, to me, and Bess, I suppose. ‘He found me.’ I thought her fear was mingled with excitement, that need to figure in another chapter of the romance unfortunate women write for themselves, to make up for having no work and no position in life. The pimp in this novel is transformed into an ardent lover, the whore is a much-courted virgin. Thus a spangled veil is thrown over squalor.
The man spotted her, cried out, ‘Jane!’ and came forward, stumbling through the others as he went. He was a bit drunk. ‘I’ve been searching hours for you. You come along of me, Jane. I need you.’
I did not stay for the drama to follow, her cries and reproaches, his threats and protestations. I nodded to Bess and Kitty and got up out of the pit by the wooden steps into the fresh air. It was fresh enough for me anyway, after that kitchen.
It was by now midnight, for I heard the church clocks striking, and I made my way from Flower and Dean Street, with my shawl over my head and dangling down to conceal the bag at my side, across Whitechapel High Street, which was even now fairly crowded. The pubs were still open, smoke and music coming from the doors, and scores of children waiting outside for their parents.
‘Come where the wine is cheaper,
Come where the beer is free,’
sang a man coming past me, up close, with a gang of others at his heels. I snarled the East End response to this, ‘Garn.’
‘Lady, can you spare a copper for a woman and her baby?’ said a wan woman with a very rosy baby, goodness knew how it could be, under her old plaid shawl. Then, ‘Bitch!’ she shouted after me as I walked swiftly on, jumping on the last tram down Leman Street for the docks.
There were seamen everywhere, of course, and tarts moving like moths round the street lights, and people carrying around bundles of this and that, anything from a baby to a sack of coconuts pinched from a ship.
At the seamen’s home by Dock Street twenty sailors got on. They found they were going the wrong way and jumped off again. There were warehouses on either side. I got off in the looming shadow of the tea warehouse and turned on to the street running parallel with the river. Here, there were warehouses on the other side; the docks lay beyond them, and there was a pub every 200 yards, and a whore every ten paces. I walked past these women, staring in each face. They stared brazenly back. A whore can get killed, slashed, filled with disease, but she’ll never cast her eyes down. That’s for the respectable woman.
‘Move along, darling,’ said one, painted to the hairline and old enough to be my grandmother. Pocked, too.
I looked at this travesty of a visage, said, ‘I’m looking for my sister, Mary Kelly. Do you know her?’
‘Just move on, will you?’ she demanded, and I did, for a woman like her will fight you for twopence and God knows what diseases a bite from her wouldn’t convey to you. Such a brigade of faces, old, young, sick, well, novices and old hands. What risks didn’t they run, beside warehouse walls, down behind pubs, in the dark, with the smell of the river in their nostrils? But I was getting the scent of the life now: river smell, beer, the cheap scent they wore, the sitting on his knee in the pub, singing, then the darkness, the fast money from his pocket. I knew how it ended, too – rotting in a basement room without food or fire, raving mad with disease in the Lock Hospital, or just jumping in the river to finish it all.
I had to move quickly. The women didn’t want me standing about gossiping. I might be after their pitch; I might deter the clientele. So I went, getting no good answers and some bad ones from all and sundry. All the time, I could smell that black and stinking river, the tide rising now, hear it slapping the dockside, hear the cables of ships at anchor grinding and straining.
Then I heard hooves and wheels behind me and turned. The carriage stopped a little way off and two men in evening dress got out and began to move along the pavement looking into the faces of the women, who spoke to them in the usual cant, ‘Hullo, my dear. Do you want a nice time?’ and the like, while they, not responding, patrolled on. All the while the carriage kept pace with them on the street, for fear of toughs and robbers. It was the custom, I knew, after dinner at the club, instead of a game of billiards or cards, for a man or a party of men to go whoring down at t
he docks, for the novelty of fucking dirty women, is how they put it to themselves, the same as cards or going to the theatre. Never believe it! They need what we have to offer more than that. There’s talk now of the destruction of pure women by the diseases caught by their husbands, or bachelors who’ve been sowing their wild oats and bringing the harvest with them on their honeymoons. To tell the truth, I’ve little sympathy with these pure women. It seems to take too many whores to keep them unsullied and unseduced before marriage and unburdened by children or lustful demands afterwards. You’d think they could endure from time to time just a particle of risks we have to take to keep them pure. Still, that’s our living. And if the likes of us weren’t guarding their virtue with our bodies we’d be working in their kitchens. The rich will use up the poor, one way or another, that’s always true.
Anyway, the gentlemen moved on. I was under a lamp with a rosy girl in a big flashy bonnet. They stopped, one middle-aged, red-faced, the other a bit younger with straw-coloured hair. I moved back into the shadows, but the straw-haired one spotted me. ‘Aren’t you in business then, my dear?’
‘Not tonight, guvnor,’ I whined. ‘I’m sick.’
He looked disconcerted, but plunged on, saying to the rosy girl, ‘What about you, my darling? What’s your name?’
The rosy girl said, ‘I’m on my way home, sir.’ A likely story.
The men moved on and apparently made a bargain further up, for they went off with two women into the shadows. The coach waited for them. The rosy girl spat discreetly in its direction.
‘Do you always turn down wealthy customers?’ I asked.
‘The young one’s the barrister who prosecuted my dad down in Kent,’ she said. ‘I knew him the minute I clapped eyes on him.’
‘I’m looking for my sister, Mary Kelly,’ I said.
She summed me up. ‘I worked with a girl called Kelly in a hat shop,’ she told me. ‘She looked a bit like you. She run off with a sailor. It’s a few years ago now.’
The Cry from Street to Street Page 8