The Cry from Street to Street

by Hilary Bailey

  This was the second time now I’d heard the same story about Mary Claire. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want her for?’ she asked. ‘Anyway, you’d never find her down here. She was a good girl.’

  I told her I had two sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane. I told her about getting news to Mrs Mundy, if she heard or remembered any more. I asked for her address, saying I might be able to offer her employment in Canada later on. Of course, she refused to give it, but she did give me the address of a big house in Kent where her sister worked, and said a message sent there would find her.

  I tried a few more women, but a Chinese with a pigtail came out of the darkness, said I was disturbing trade and theatened me, so I wandered off back to the Lamb and Flag, thinking I might find a cabman there, prepared to take me back to my lodgings. I felt too tired to walk there. I could have slept on a stone, but I still dreaded the bad dreams I was having in my lodgings. I wondered if the rooms were haunted. At all events, I would have to move elsewhere if the dreams continued. Strong as I was, I could not go on like that, night after night.

  At the Lamb and Flag a man in an Arab robe and a bowler hat was playing ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery’, singing in a falsetto, and a group was joining in. It wasn’t very full now. Many of the customers had retreated to get some sleep for work next day. Jack ran a respectable house.

  He was drying glasses at the bar. He looked less cheerful than usual.

  ‘Anything wrong, Jack?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well – it’s the old woman. She’s expecting another kid and she don’t seem too well. The doctor says it might be a hospital job. Now she thinks she’s going to die – and she’s bothering on about not letting him send her to the London Hospital. Make sure it’s Bethnal Green, Jack. Make sure it’s Bethnal Green, she keeps on pleading.’

  ‘No one wants to go to the London Hospital,’ I pointed out.

  ‘It’s nearer,’ he said.

  ‘Safer to go further and fare better,’ I told him.

  ‘I suppose so. I’ve promised her over and over I won’t let her go anywhere, especially there, but will she believe me? No. Pregnant women are funny. She must think I’ve got it in mind to polish her off. Anyway,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘as to that other business you mentioned, try them old Jews over there playing dominoes. They might help.’

  I pushed past a group of navvies and stood by their table. They both had big black hats on, and greying beards. They looked as old as the hills. They knew I was waiting there, but they wouldn’t look up from their game.

  Finally I said, ‘I’m Mrs Frazer. I’m looking for my sisters, Mary Claire and Mary Jane Kelly. Can you help me? Do you know anything of either of them?’

  One of the old men, not so old really when you studied him, looked up after a pause and asked, in his thick accent, ‘What do you want with her?’

  ‘I’m her sister. I’ve been away for eight years.’

  He took another long, cautious look. At the end of it, I think he’d decided I was genuine, but to make sure, he said, ‘You don’t look much like her.’ He looked again at me, screwed up his eyes and finally said, ‘I took a girl of that name on for shirt-making. She was very good. Fast. A clever girl.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘June, July. At the end of July she said the room was too hot. She’d work faster at home with the window open. By then I trusted her. I’d had a big order in. So – she left one evening with twenty yards of best striped cotton to make up, swearing she’d be back in five days with the shirts. I smiled, she smiled, that was the last I saw of her, or my best cotton. When I went to the address she gave me,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘she’d gone.’

  The other man muttered something in Hebrew, or whatever he spoke. The robbed Jew replied in the same language.

  ‘What are you saying?’ I asked, thinking they spoke of Mary.

  ‘My brother told me it was my fault if I trusted her,’ he said. That wasn’t what he said, and I knew it.

  ‘Where was she living?’

  ‘She wasn’t. She gave me an address in the Old Nicholl. I had to go there with my sons for fear of trouble and after all that they say she’d never lived there, only for one week, on the run, they said, from some trouble.’ He paused, then said quickly, ‘If you’re her sister, you should cover her debt.’

  ‘If I find her and she supports your story,’ I said.

  ‘You tell me I lie.’ Suddenly the other man had me by the hand. ‘My brother is an honest, hard-working man. Your sister has robbed him.’

  I began to scream and yell. ‘Honest man? Don’t make me bloody laugh. Twenty women in a space ten feet by ten, working all hours for dear life at two bob a day and he calls himself an honest man? Sweat shop owner, killer, more likely. Let me go, you bastard!’

  Of course, people began to turn round and of course they’d side with me against a Jew, whatever I’d done or not done. That was taken for granted. A big man in shirt-sleeves, another only slightly smaller behind him, came up. ‘Let her go, Ikey Mo,’ he threatened. The Jew let go. They went back to the piano. I sat down at the table. We looked at each other.

  ‘Did you swear out a complaint against her?’ I asked.

  ‘I did. They’ll never find her now she’s disappeared into the rookeries.’

  Jack called, ‘Cab’s here, darling,’ and I got up.

  I sank back, looking out the window, when I spotted a lot of huge German sailors, about seven of them, staggering along the darkened street. Two of them had hoisted up a kicking figure. Her black stockinged legs came turmoiling out through ruffled petticoats, her hat was askew, and even from behind the closed windows of the cab I could hear her shouting. ‘Here you – Hermann – let me down. Bastards! Police! Help! Kidnap!’ Then she began yelling in another language altogether.

  With difficulty I stopped the cab. The cabman didn’t like the idea. One of the Germans laughed when I opened the door. He tried to grab me. ‘Let her go or I shall go straight to the police station,’ I commanded, very much the outraged lady.

  They sobered a bit and put the woman down. She looked at me and cried out, ‘Mary, my duck! I don’t believe this,’ and fell into my arms. The sailors milled about on the pavement. One grasped her. She gave him a backwards kick in the groin, jumped in the cab, fell into the seat, slamming the door at the same time. She cried, ‘Whip up the horse, my man.’ Then, turning to me, laughing, she said, ‘Phew – my honour saved again.’ The cabman’s horse set off, slowly, leaving the sailors milling about on the pavement.

  Rosie Levi was wearing a bright green taffeta dress, cut very low, a lot of rouge and a big hat with a feather in it.

  ‘Mary – I don’t believe it. How are you? Where you been?’

  The cabman, who had had no instructions, turned round, asking, ‘Where to?’

  ‘How about Mrs Mundy’s?’ I asked. ‘A drink after your ordeal.’

  ‘Blimey! Those Hermanns don’t half get boisterous,’ she said, unpinning her hat, settling it back on her head at the right angle and pushing the hatpin through again. Then she pulled at her decolletage to order her bosom correctly. ‘Well, Mrs Mundy’s it is. You can tell me where you’ve been and what’s been happening. I could do with a break. It’s been a night and a half, I can tell you. Them sailors was just the last straw. I had two jockeys earlier. Two at the same time, I ask you – I think they were twins – and the man before that was less than five feet tall. I got to feeling like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.’

  The cab horse was still plodding slowly forward. ‘Well, where d’you want to go?’ the cabbie asked impatiently.

  ‘Brushfield Street, my man,’ ordered Rosie in a haughty tone.

  He stopped the cab and turned round. ‘No, lady. I’m not going there. Don’t ask me.’

  ‘I’ll double the fare.’

  ‘Not for a fortune,’ he told us, and got promptly off his box into the road, opened the cab door and said, ‘Sorry,
ladies. I’ve got a wife and children and I stick to the main thoroughfares in this neighbourhood. Either get out or go somewhere else.’

  I shrugged at Rosie. She shrugged back. ‘We’ll get out then,’ I said.

  ‘Rather you than me,’ was the cabman’s comment.

  ‘So what turned you into a lady?’ she enquired once we were out on the pavement and the cab was moving off. ‘Did some rich gent adopt you and put you in a finishing school in France? La-de-da, la-de-da,’ she carolled, adopting the walk of a woman too good for these streets. Then I felt her shiver.

  ‘Cold?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. She dragged me off the street, through a dismal court I couldn’t remember. One gas-lamp shone weakly down on to its paving, slick with dirt and grease of every kind. The dark houses loomed on all four sides. A few windows were lit. A baby cried, high up. On another floor a couple shouted at each other, a candle flickering behind them. In doorways against walls were the dark bundles of sleeping people. One stirred, groaned, scratched, went limp again. There were footsteps behind us, a weary working man’s tread. Rosie hurried me down the alley at the end of the court, between high walls, with privies behind judging by the smell. Then she crossed another street, went rapidly down another alley, into another court – I was lost by now. At the end of the next alley three men stopped talking to each other and watched us as we stepped quickly past them. In the next street a big pack of dogs, about seven or eight of them, rampaged past us. Then we were in Brushfield Street. Keeping up with Rosie’s pace had made me breathless.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, as we went into Mrs Mundy’s. I sensed a desperation in her.

  ‘I don’t know. Things are getting worse. You have to keep moving. How long since you were here? Seven, eight years?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said.

  I wondered what had been happening to her. She was twenty-three now and losing her freshness, a fast-perishing commodity in those streets.

  Mrs Mundy’s was empty, except for Cora herself, of course, and a man asleep at one of the tables in the middle, a tankard by his side.

  ‘Hullo, girls. A reunion is it? What’s it to be?’

  ‘A pint of milk stout,’ declared Rosie.

  ‘The same,’ I said. ‘Any messages?’

  She shook her head and poured the pints carefully. I ought to have known from her silence that she was hiding something, but at the time I thought nothing of it.

  ‘So,’ said Rosie, when we were seated, ‘where have you been? Somewhere far off, judging by your complexion.’

  Her own, I noticed, was blotchy under the coating of white powder. She had always been very fresh-looking when I’d first known her, with big brown eyes, fluffy pale brown hair and a healthy flush beneath her skin. Now she was wearing a lot more rouge and she looked tired. Beneath the gaiety which was so natural to her that, as she said, she thought she must have been born laughing, some stale current ran. Still, life as an East End tart isn’t like being a patient in a sanatorium. I told her my lying tale of Canada, marriage, widowhood, the coming trip to Scotland. After eight years you don’t tell a friend everything. You never know what they might have got up to in the mean while.

  She took a long drink said, ‘Pull the other one, Mary, do. There ain’t no husband, is there, and never has been? I believe you’re in the same old game and doing very well. How’s that?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Look here,’ she said. ‘If you’re on to a good thing and there’s room for one more inside, share your secret.’

  ‘Perhaps I will, later on,’ I told her.

  She leaned back in her chair and stared at me. ‘You’re a hard one,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps I am. I’ve had to be. Apart from anything else, a doctor in New York made a mess of what was left of my inside.’

  She looked at me in alarm. Rosie never got anything wrong with her inside, to my knowledge. I don’t suppose she’d ever even had the clap. She kept herself very clean and ate a lot of fish, which might have helped. I went on, ‘Never mind that. Something’s worrying you, I can tell. What is it?’

  ‘Bless you, nothing worries Rosie,’ she said. Then, ‘It’s nothing – it’s everything, I suppose. Times are hard. I’m not getting any younger.’

  ‘You’re only twenty-three?’

  ‘I’m not advancing myself,’ she proclaimed.

  I stared at her. She was a funny girl, Rosie, or perhaps it was just being a Jew. They have a different way of looking at things. Where the English’ll stand in a pub spending the rent on beer and singing ‘God Save the Queen’ a Jew’s more likely to be found in a synagogue or a political club. Even in their own back kitchens, boots off, drinking tea, and smoking pipes, they’re having long discussions, while the old Jewess stuffs a few more coppers in the mattress, cooks up something smelly on her fire, and starts scrubbing and scouring all the pots.

  Rosie’s father was a cobbler who worked for another Jew in the city and she had three brothers and three sisters. From what she said, this was the form in her home, endless tea, religion and discussions of this and that, nothing practical, just God and the nature of man and putting the world to rights. The English don’t go in for all that. Not being English myself, but half French-Irish, I understand the Jews a little, for the French believe in education and, however ignorant an Irishman may be, or drunk, he usually respects a learned man.

  So, Rosie being a Jewess as well as a tart, I wasn’t completely surprised to hear her speak of progress in a measured and dignified way, as if it meant something, which it couldn’t in her case. The average East End tart doesn’t make progress – remorselessly down, from bad to worse, is the usual route.

  ‘I wouldn’t talk like this to anyone but you,’ she further confided, ‘only I can tell by looking at you that you’ve bettered yourself and, well, you know it. Now, look at me. For me, there’s nothing. Only the hope of rolling a sailor for his pay, a toff for a few sous, and how long do they last? I’m not one to dream of a duke or an earl taking a fancy to me, true love, or whatever. What I’ve got is what I’ve got and there isn’t any more.’ She paused, and added, ‘And now I’m in fear.’

  ‘What of?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She thought, then said, ‘Mary – you know there’s always trouble round here, plenty of it, but now, I don’t know – I feel bad, as if the whole neighbourhood was rotting like a piece of old meat. It’s full of people trying to save it, closing brothels, rescuing orphans, saving fallen women, handing out soup. But they’ve come too late. They can’t stop it. It gets more crowded and dirty and broken down every minute. Rents keep on going up. Trade’s in a slump. The kids are getting more wicked and bold, got to, poor little buggers. Mary,’ she appealed to me, ‘you know how it used to be – up with your skirts, huff, puff and it’s over – he felt better, you took his money, that was the way. Now – and it’s not just the East Enders, it’s the others too – they’re getting horrible. They want to hit you, spit on you, talk filthy talk to you. That used to be rare, now it isn’t. And they’re more after the little girls and boys now, there’s more of that kind of nasty business going on. Tell me, Mary, am I imagining it, am I going doolally, or what? Is it all in my own head, or is it this place? Sometimes I feel so bad …’ Her voice shook.

  I was staring at her. I didn’t know, either, whether she was describing something true, or whether it was all fantasy.

  She continued in a more normal voice, ‘I’m wondering if it isn’t because of these God botherers, saving souls all over the place. You’d think it’d improve matters, but maybe telling men all the time how evil they are turns them worse. There was a horrible murder of a woman just three weeks ago in George Yard Buildings, not a quarter of a mile from where we’re sitting now. That woman, an old whore of forty-five, was found on a landing, poor cow, stabbed thirty-nine times. It must have been a madman. They were that worried they called in the CID but they never
caught the man. That was round Thrawl Street. That’s why I raced you through at the charge. Now you know why. And she’s not the only one.’

  Horrible as this crime had been, the murder of a prostitute was not unusual in Whitechapel. There would be one or two a year, women killed by a rival, a pimp, a customer, maybe by one of the gangs of young men who used to rove about, preying on prostitutes.

  I asked Rosie what had become of her protector, a tall, handsome Swede who had jumped ship at Tilbury and taken to living off women.

  ‘Someone cut him up bad in a pub fight,’ she told me. ‘You remember how he used to drink. While he was in hospital I had other offers, but I thought I’d go it alone. They don’t like it. I don’t like it much myself. It’s lonely, but it’s helped me to save a little money.’

  ‘What about the danger?’

  ‘What danger? That Lars was never there – he used to wait in the Lion for us to bring the money to him: we used to look after each other, as much as we could. In the end it looked as if Lars couldn’t even protect himself. He wasn’t half a sight in the hospital, all done up in bandages.’ She burst into a roar of laughter. ‘I’m telling you he was so wrapped up it could have been anybody. Sal knocked on the bedstead and said, “Is anybody in?” God, how we laughed. Hey, Cora,’ she called out, ‘fetch us a couple of gins.’ She leaned forward now and said, ‘Come on, spit it out – what are you here for?’

  ‘I’m looking for Mary Claire and Mary Jane,’ I explained. ‘I told my dear mother before she died I’d look after them. But of course, I cut and run from Jim, so I lost them. So – I’m better off now and I’ve come to see how they’re faring. I’ve heard Mary Claire went to Liverpool some years back. Mary Jane’s in the neighbourhood, they tell me, but I haven’t caught her yet. I only arrived yesterday and as it seems she stole some cloth from an old Jew, she won’t be showing her face much. She’s been in Goulston Street, the Old Nicholl, all over the place, always in rat holes of one kind or another. Have you heard anything about her? Or Mary Claire?’