An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

  Collecting herself, Cissy managed a smile but Madam Noreah was already on course for a joyful reunion, as she took a deep preparatory breath her immense bosom swelled to even greater size.

  ‘My goodness, what a surprise seeing you, my dear. I said to myself when I noticed you on the other side of the road, “That must be young Miss Farmer, whom I used to teach elocution.” But how you’ve changed, my dear. It must be…why, several years since I last saw you. After all this time. How are you, my dear?’

  ‘I’m…fine, thank you,’ Cissy stuttered, non-committal.

  ‘How nice. Where have you been keeping yourself? I remember you left my lessons so suddenly. I did wonder what had happened, but the young lady who used to come with you to my lessons – Daisy something, wasn’t it? such a lovely singing voice she had – said you had gone abroad suddenly. I hoped it was for something nice rather than nasty. She left too, you know. To seek success with opera, but I heard she went in the chorus of some musical or other. Such a pity. Such a waste of talent. But there…How very fashionable you look. You must have been successful in life after all. Are you here on a visit?’

  ‘No.’ Forced into a reply, Cissy just hoped she could sidestep the woman and be away with the minimum of explanation.

  ‘Oh, you are here permanently. What are you doing with yourself these days?’

  ‘I…Please excuse me, Madam Noreah. I have to be on my way. I’m late for an appointment. It was nice to have met you again. I’m sorry it has to be so brief a meeting.’

  The large face, even more flabby than she remembered, beamed at her, Cissy’s excuses not even scoring a glancing blow. ‘I’m so glad you still speak beautifully – that you have not forgotten all I tried to impress upon you. One feels quite gratified to know one’s efforts have been rewarded. I do so trust it stood you in good stead, my dear. By your appearance…’ she surveyed Cissy’s light blue dress and smart jacket, painfully bought with a little of her fast-vanishing money. ‘I would say it has. Indeed so.’

  Cissy resigned herself to being polite until she could decently make her escape. ‘Are you still teaching, Madam Noreah?’ Best to keep off the subject of herself.

  The heavy features sagged a little. She looked old and sad. ‘Alas, no. It became too much for me, my dear. One reaches a stage…’ There was a huge sigh, the vast pregnant-looking bosom heaving beneath the ancient voluminous black coat. ‘I had to abandon my poor cats, you know. A very kind neighbour promised to look after some of them, and I found homes for three more, but the rest, the cats’ home, I’m afraid. I dread to visualise their fate. But I am consoled that I did my best for them while they lived, and many of them were, I think, approaching their time to leave this mortal coil, as the Bard would say. I have one now, to keep me company, a young creature I suspect will outlast me…’

  ‘Oh, Madam Noreah!’ Cissy cried in real emotion, but the elderly woman smiled.

  ‘I am quite content as things stand. One cannot go on for ever, and my health remains good. It is but the ravages of time that plague us who have grown old. I can view my life with some satisfaction.’

  Now was time to make her escape as a sixth sense began to denote the conversation threatening to return to herself. ‘I really do have to go, Madam Noreah,’ she exclaimed. ‘I shall be so late.’

  ‘Of course, my dear.’ Madam Noreah came out of her reverie. ‘I mustn’t stop you.’

  ‘It was nice meeting you.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. And mutually so. Well, goodbye, my dear. We may meet again. Who knows.’

  ‘Who knows,’ Cissy echoed, grateful to be off. ‘Goodbye, then.’

  ‘Goodbye, my dear. And be happy.’

  Smiling her own good wishes, Cissy went her way, but on a whim turned to glance back at the ample figure before the lunchtime crowds swallowed it up. She saw an old woman who in her day had enjoyed a full life, if not in fine operatic parts, then with opera’s celebrities, rubbing shoulders with them at opera houses, parties; no doubt once a vital young woman with peaches and cream complexion and vibrant shining hair (what colour, Cissy could not begin to know) and a bounce in her step, now reduced to a black-clad figure with bulging chest, hair grey rats’ tails. Her lonely life was now no more than scrapbooks, faded photo albums and a jumble of fuzzy memories. But she had her cat.

  Feeling strangely sad, Cissy watched her go. Such an ending to all that life – it could come to anyone. The thought brought a disquieting shiver which she hurriedly shrugged off – too close to home – and she turned abruptly away, heading towards the little Jewish shop that did those delicious hot salt beef sandwiches. A couple of those would soon dispel that last dismal thought.

  Nibbling her sandwich between sips of tea at the back of her shop, she thought again of Madam Noreah and hoped that the chance meeting would go no further. If news of her reached her family’s ears – but that was silly. Who would her old elocution teacher ever meet who would remotely know Cissy Farmer? Nor had she given Madam Noreah any clue as to where she lived. She was safe enough.

  Brushing away the crumbs and finishing her last drop of tea, she got up and went back into the shop – she had dispensed with the word boutique, no one in England quite knowing what it meant, and simply called it The Haberdashery Shop – to turn the ‘Closed’ notice around to ‘Open’ and unlock the door for afternoon customers.

  After her initial efforts these past couple of months trying to entice ordinary East End housewives, or even shop girls, into thinking Paris fashion, she finally realised the error of her ways. Young women working in the West End shopped in the West End and nowhere else, and the ordinary housewife sought more serviceable hats than the stunning ones Cissy had been displaying in her window. In fact such hats merely frightened off the ordinary housewife. Paris fashion hats were ignored.

  Slowly she’d been forced to lower her sights, removing her two fine jardinieres of flowers in her window and the half-dozen tastefully arranged Parisian hats on the stands the jardinieres framed. Instead she hung a dozen plain serviceable hats on hooks, giving over the rest of the window to things people around here would buy: scarves, gloves, socks, stockings, handkerchieves; knitting wool, knitting needles and patterns; crochet cotton, crochet hooks and patterns.

  Inside she rearranged the counters and shelves more modestly to hold humbler displays. In truth it was now a wool shop cum haberdasher’s and customers began coming in. There were always women who needed to mend and knit and darn, with a bit of cotton crochet thrown in to brighten up an impoverished home. She began to show a profit, though nothing like the one she’d first visualised so confidently. If the tiny profit kept the wolf from the door it certainly didn’t swell her savings or even help decorate the upstairs accommodation as she’d have liked; certainly it didn’t allow for trips over to Paris to see her daughter, and that was the worst of it.

  Daisy had paid another visit last month but after a good sit-down discussion, Cissy had agreed to her taking Noelle back with her ‘just for a little while longer’, as Daisy put it.

  Madam Noreah took it on herself to pay her old neighbour a visit, the one who had kindly taken in some of her cats, just to see if she had kept her promise to give eye to them, the poor strays.

  She was gratified to see that she had, although, unlike in her day, they were fed outside and occupied a somewhat tumbledown shed in the back yard.

  ‘At least they’re out of the rain,’ the woman defended, as she and Madam Noreah sat at the kitchen table over a cup of tea and, after her visitor had given a little sigh, went on to ask how she was faring.

  ‘I get by,’ Madam Noreah told her with a small shrug of her black cotton-draped shoulders, the hot August sunshine making no difference to her penchant for black. ‘It is a struggle making do on what little savings I have. I am glad of my pension, small as it is.’

  Her neighbour nodded, watching her own accent in the face of those beautifully rounded vowels so at odds with the shapeless black figure, scuffed handbag, tatty hat
and unkempt, dusty grey hair of her visitor.

  ‘Don’t you miss giving lessons? I expect the money came in handy.’

  ‘It did indeed. But I cannot sustain it now. Age, you know.’

  ‘I remember your pupils coming and going. That piano of yours going it, and them scales they used to sing. Went on for hours, it did. But of course, I didn’t mind really. D’you ever see any of your old pupils these days?’

  ‘Alas no. Young people forget. It is as though a tutor ceases to be once the lessons are done, the time gone by, the pupil grown. Though I did bump into one young woman, a pupil of mine, in Bethnal Green Road. Some two months ago, or was it three? Time has no meaning when there is nothing to fill one’s day. It was so gratifying to discover that what I had taught her at the time had been an asset to her, her diction still perfect.’

  ‘Who’d that be then?’ asked her neighbour, gulping her tea.

  ‘A Miss Farmer. Lived in Canning Town, but eventually went to live in France, so I was told at the time by her friend – another pupil. To have a pupil of mine who had done so well for herself in a foreign country is most gratifying. She has returned to England and was looking very prosperous when I met her.’

  ‘I’ve got a sister in Canning Town – Ruscoe Road. You’d think this Farmer pupil you had would’ve found lessons nearer where she lived.’

  ‘I pride myself that my pupils considered it worth their while to travel any distance to me,’ Madam Noreah put in, irked that her talents were in question. Her cup and saucer back onto the table, she made ready to take her leave. She had only come to satisfy herself that the welfare of her little strays was not in jeopardy, not to discuss her business. She didn’t think she’d be paying her former neighbour a second visit.

  Intrigued by one of Madam Noreah’s pupils from Canning Town having done so well as to live in France, the neighbour mentioned it to her sister a month later in passing, her vernacular more comfortable with her sister than it had been with Madam Fanny Adams as she scathingly called her.

  ‘Farmer?’ echoed her sister, immediately attentive. ‘Would that be Cissy Farmer? ’Er what went off to go abroad, walked out I was told, wivvout a word to ’er mum an’ dad. Just walked out. I wouldn’t ’ave known about them except it was talked about in the shop up the corner at the time. They tried to keep it quiet, but you know what people are like. Bit of good gossip. I wonder if they’re still livin’ there?’

  The telephone on Eddie’s desk rang. His father sighed and got up to go over to the vacant desk. Eddie was skippering one of the tugs himself these days, things getting tighter by the minute. World depression was biting everyone since the Wall Street affair last year. The fourth tug they’d bought that very week had sold at a loss; they were now seriously thinking of getting rid of another one, leaving just two. They’d had to let its skipper go, he taking it with a look of bleak desperation on his face – with over two million unemployed now, there were no jobs to be had.

  Eddie skippered now. Even though it would have saved another wage, Alf felt himself too old to go back on the river, contending with its tides and currents and God knows what else. He felt too old for a lot of things lately. He wasn’t old by any standard, just that he couldn’t stop worrying where the business would end up, and that was enough to make anyone feel old.

  He worried too about this pain in his chest when doing anything strenuous after resting. Indigestion maybe. On the other hand…He’d have to see the quack at some time, see what it really was. Probably the worry of the business, every penny sunk into it and less and less work coming in. Getting him down that’s what it was.

  Eddie didn’t help. This question of getting rid of that third tug; Alf felt it should be the Cicely. She’d soon be needing new engines and a big hull overhaul, but with no money, it was out of the question.

  ‘She’s not powerful enough for big jobs,’ he’d argued, but Eddie wouldn’t hear of getting rid of her.

  ‘I just need to see the bank,’ he’d said. ‘They’d give us a loan on security of the other two. No trouble.’ He wouldn’t hear Alf’s solid argument that loans have to be paid back, and from what?

  He clung to the Cicely as though she were that Farmer girl herself after whom he’d named her, the silly bugger. Still hankering after her, he was hanging on to some floating tub past her working days.

  ‘Throwing good money after bad, better she went for scrap,’ Alf had told him and had watched the look on his face as though a mother had been told to give away her baby. He manned that tub all the time now, hanging on to it like it was a lover, really acting like some silly sod, and that was putting it mildly.

  Reaching across the desk for the jangling telephone, his thoughts still on his foolish son, he announced: ‘Bennett’s Towage Company!’

  ‘Mr Bennett? It’s Bobby Farmer. Is Eddie there?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’ They had laid Bobby off in the early part of the year. It had been hard to do, the man needing to keep working, like them all. Eddie had felt guilty about it but it had been imperative to lay off several at the time. Of necessity, Bobby being extra to their needs had sadly been one of them. Keep only who you could afford was today’s motto. ‘Can I give him a message?’

  There was a long pause, then, ‘Look, Mr Bennett, I’m not sure if I should really speak to him. I’ve been worrying about it and I know I should at least say something. But now I’m not sure.’

  ‘What is it you don’t want to speak to him about?’ Alf felt a grin come into his tone, but Bobby’s remained deadly serious.

  ‘It’s like this. My mother met someone when she was out shopping the other day. I don’t know how true this is, but I still think Eddie ought to know – if you think he should, of course.’

  ‘What should he know?’ Bobby was being silly and Alf was getting rattled.

  ‘It’s this woman me mum met. She said my sister – you know, Cissy – she was seen in Bethnal Green Road, a couple of months back, I think.’

  ‘A couple of months?’

  ‘Me mum’s only just ’eard. Someone told this woman that Cissy is living there. Me mum’s really upset.’

  ‘So you thought you’d upset my Eddie too.’

  ‘I just thought…’

  ‘Look ’ere,’ Alf cut in, his amusement long disappeared. ‘It’s been over between them two for a long time. It’s all done and finished with and I don’t want ’im upset all over again. I think it’s best he don’t know anything about what your mother was told.’

  ‘But that’s what’s worrying me, Mr Bennett. He’ll know sooner or later and when he finds out that I knew, that everyone knows except ’im…Well, it just ain’t fair. I think he should be given the benefit of knowin’ before everyone else. I was worried about being the first one to tell ’im and I’m glad it was you answered the phone. I’ve got a clear conscience now. So, if it’s all right with you, Mr Bennett, I’ll leave it to you to tell ’im, shall I? If you think it’s right. Sorry to’ve rung to tell you. I ’ope it was okay? No jobs going, I suppose?’

  No, sadly there weren’t any jobs going. Alf put the phone down rather too sharply and sat staring at its black bulk on the desk as though it might tell him what to do now, the brow of his narrow, weather-worn face creased in dilemma, Bobby’s parting plea for a job occupying not the tiniest corner of his mind.

  Eddie came into the office around seven that evening looking weary, up since four-thirty that morning; dark starting work, dark finishing.

  ‘How’d it go today?’ were Alf’s first words, testing the air.

  Eddie grinned, dropping his cap and choker on the desk top and himself in the well-worn swivel chair which until lately had been his domain, twisting it round to look up at his father.

  ‘Bit of a heavy day, but a bit of luck too, thanks to the weather.’

  A force seven had been blowing all day, driving low grey clouds and squally rain before it, the river choppy as the North Sea, though Alf saw very little of it from the filmy yellowing windows
of the office, thanking his lucky stars on a day like this that he was warm and dry.

  On the Cicely Eddie would have had a hard day, him as skipper, his crew, mate, engineer, fireman, and a lad doing all the mundane work as well as making tea – buckets of tea to cheer them all up, huddled in the cabin between jobs, out of the rain. Still, despite the filthy weather, Eddie did look pleased with himself.

  ‘What bit of luck?’ Alf prompted.

  ‘Salvage.’

  All ears now, his father saw a ray of hope glinting on Bennett’s Towage Company’s horizon. ‘How big?’

  ‘Big enough. Freighter in collision with another ship. Ruddy great hole in her side. We got a rope to ’er and towed ’er ashore at Bugsby Hole. Stayed and pumped ’er out till the PLA came and took over.’

  His father’s eyes dubious now. ‘She took it okay, the Cicely?’

  ‘Why not? She’s a good workhorse despite what you think of her. She responded well today.’

  There was no quenching Eddie’s triumph, his pride, and something as near to love as a man might show the woman of his dreams. Seeing it, Alf frowned. Still associating his first ever tug with a continuing hope of one day claiming Cissy Farmer for his own. The dilemma came back to him – should he tell Eddie about her brother’s phone call? He decided not, at least not yet – not while Eddie was looking so mighty pleased with himself.

  Cissy was no good for him. He’d be better off without her. Even so, as Bobby had said, he’d find out eventually. But there was time enough to tell him. Meanwhile, giving it a few weeks, he would hike down to Bethnal Green and do a bit of reconnoitering. And depending upon what he found, then would be the time to tell Eddie what he had heard.

  *

  By mid-November, nothing had been heard. Alf breathed a sigh of relief, glad that he’d said nothing to Eddie. It had probably been just a rumour anyway. But he was still determined to find out for himself.

  It was nearly Christmas before he finally got round to taking himself to Bethnal Green. There was too much else on his mind, Eddie was talking again of getting the Cicely up to scratch on the salvage reward she’d made – it was all Alf could do to stop him spending it all in one go.