An East End Girl

by Maggie Ford

  The money had been a godsend. No need to go cap in hand to banks. The Dutchman had been carrying cargo worth some three hundred thousand pounds. The reward had come to around two and a half thousand, enough to get all three tugs in good order, pay three crews’ wages for a few months, plus a good cut for each of the Cicely’s crew, the largest to the engineer, then the mate, the fireman, and finally the deck boy. It did Alf’s heart good to see that young lad’s face as he received his six pounds ten shillings – a fortune compared to his weekly wage of one pound ten shillings, and enough, the boy had announced happily, to buy the bike he’d always wanted. As well as all that, the office lighting and heating bills and a little of the rent had been taken care of for a while and there was still something left in the bank.

  Eddie’s answer to his father’s argument that doing up the Cicely was just making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, was that winter might see more salvage jobs as good as that. It took quite a few heated arguments to explain that with the Depression still biting hard, every tug owner large or small on the lookout for work, he was counting chickens too soon.

  By mid-December Eddie had settled down a little, allowing Alf to think once more about finding out if Cissy Farmer really was living in Bethnal Green. If she was, then she had to be down on her beam ends in some squalid rooming house. Why else would she come back to England if she wasn’t broke? No doubt she’d been let down by whoever she’d gone off with. It served her bloody well right as far as Alf was concerned. But he didn’t only want to find her in order to gloat, but to warn her against any possible thought of coming whining back to Eddie in hope of him baling her out, which Eddie would do at the drop of a hat, even now, if his father knew him – the silly sod.

  In a biting wind on the Saturday afternoon prior to Christmas, leaving Eddie to mind the shop as it were, he took a tuppenny tram ride and with his long spare frame huddled inside his overcoat, began the long walk from the Victoria Park end of the road to the Shoreditch end. He passed shops with sprinkling of Christmas decorations in their windows; busy stalls under whose flapping canvas awnings acetylene lamps hissed and swayed in the cold wind, casting wavering stark-white light over shoppers and stallholders; varying smells – the stale-blood whiff of meat and chickens out on counters for half a day, the salt tang of fish, the sharp one of oranges and apples and the warm sugary smell of toffee kneaded by hand, stretched to unbelievable lengths on hooks and twisted together into colourful sticks ready for cutting with huge scissors into pillow-like lumps ready for sale. There was the savoury aroma of cooked pies, pork dripping, saveloys and meat faggots from the pork butcher’s on the corner of Wilmot Street. And all to the hubbub of everyone out doing last minute shopping for the weekend.

  How he expected to find Cissy Farmer was anyone’s guess. Odder things happen, he told himself, though by the time he’d gone halfway, he had begun to question what he was doing. Then a name over a small green and white painted shop made him pause: Fermier Paris Fashions half-obliterated while beneath, in more positive lettering, The Haberdashery Shop. Why he should connect this with the name Farmer he wasn’t sure, but he peered in through the door. The interior was bright against the dark outside, and the shop was busy. But he supposed women would always haunt shops selling knitting wool. Nothing to do with Cissy Farmer.

  He chuckled to himself at the thought that it could ever be. A slim young woman had come to the counter to help a customer select some skeins of blue wool. Holding them up to the light for the customer to better judge, her face flooded by light turned towards him.

  She hadn’t noticed him standing there beyond the ring of brightness but to him that face under the light was clearly recognisable. Smiling and prosperous, that face was enjoying a good trade. A bolt of disbelief and anger snatched at his chest. Prosperous. The woman who’d walked out on his son had done well for herself, while Eddie had spent his time struggling, watching a business he’d worked so hard to make a go of slowly spiralling downward, despite their salvage money those couple of months back.

  He could hardly breathe for anger. It actually hurt, his arm a heavy ache. Blasted indigestion. In his hurry to be away from the office he had bolted the fish and chips Eddie had brought in with him.

  He stood there, his fury hardly to be borne, ready to stride into the shop to confront her. But something more urgent was replacing fury. The cold biting into his chest, he’d seek shelter for a moment or two from the painfully bitter wind, then return to face her. He went on a few yards, felt himself begin to stagger and then to pitch forward with the increased pain, had a vague impression of people coming to his aid…

  Chapter Twenty

  Eddie sat in his office. He’d had to get out of the house, leaving his mother with his father’s relations – all the kin she had in the world and they merely in-laws. If only she’d been able to have more children. It would have been a comfort to her. But even he, her only child, was no comfort, running out like he had when she most needed him. But he’d had to get away for an hour or two.

  Now, in the darkened office, the moon glinting off the black river to throw a thin pale light across the ceiling, he sat almost savouring the empty sensation of knowing his father was no longer here.

  All over Christmas they had sat by his side in the London Hospital, gazing at his quiet grey face and closed eyes, then at the bare cream walls of the ward and the half-drawn green curtains around the bed while doctors and nurses came and went. Once or twice his eyes opened. Recognising his loved ones, the lips twitched faintly. On one occasion he had spoken, his deep voice rasping, a whisper. Eddie and his mother had simultaneously bent forward to catch the words…

  ‘Cissy…Bethnal Green…’

  Nothing more had passed his father’s lips and on Boxing Day he had passed quietly away.

  It was only now that Eddie thought again of the rasped whisper. To the very last his father had thought of him, his happiness, a wish for it, that one day he would find it – God bless him…

  Tears filled Eddie’s eyes, and in the loneliness of his office, he bent his head into his arm on the desk where his father would usually have sat, and gave himself up to the emptiness inside him.

  In her little living room above the shop, Cissy sat re-reading Daisy’s letter that had come with her Christmas card. It was New Year’s Eve, the shop shut that little bit earlier, but no one about to celebrate this last day of 1930 as yet. After a dinner of whatever had been left from Christmas, the food stretched to last all week, the stew of chicken bones and giblets getting thinner and thinner with more vegetables being added, the last bit of Christmas pudding with custard and what was left of any nuts there had been, the streets would soon come alive with people going off to parties, to relations, or to renew acquaintance with parents and family they’d seen only the week before. For her there would be no family to celebrate with.

  Cissy lifted her eyes from the letter to glance towards the scuffed oak sideboard at the tiny card from Noelle that had been included in Daisy’s card, the words ‘Happy Christmas, Mummy’, written in Daisy’s hand, though there had been three elongated, uneven, very shaky Xs – her daughter’s personal kisses to her. Not that they could mean much to a little girl who had seen her mother only twice this year.

  Cissy let her thoughts dwell on her daughter. At least she called Daisy auntie and not mummy. She called her mummy, but what did the name mean to her? What was in a name? It was feelings that counted; love and affection, and that she must show her Auntie Daisy more than her, being constantly with her.

  The last time Daisy had come over, Noelle had clung to her, holding her hand, hanging back from any move Cissy made towards her. She had allowed herself to be sat on her lap but after a while had wriggled off and gone to play on the other side of the tiny living room. They had taken a bus ride up West and had gone to Hyde Park for her to play, and it was plain the child had been happy feeding the ducks and swans on the Serpentine with the bread Cissy had brought along, running back to her for
more: ‘More, Mummy! More b’ead, Mummy!’ as though she really did understand what mummy meant in that sense of belonging.

  But when they had arrived back home, she had once again hung back from any contact with Cissy, quietly leaning against Daisy as though for protection.

  It had been an entirely wrong move to come back to England without her, she knew that now, whatever Daisy might say about unwholesome surroundings and lack of constant attention with her having to work all the time. She could of course demand her back any time she wanted, but she knew it would be considered senseless. Yet the longer she left it, the harder it would become to ask for her back. Yet again, Daisy was right – what did she have to offer her?

  To give her her due, Daisy wrote every two weeks, usually enclosing photos of Noelle, photos that always made Cissy’s heart die a little to see how fast she was growing, how lovely, how happy.

  Strangely enough, when she was working down in the shop, she hardly thought of her and often found it hard to believe she was a mother. Her life was so solo, it often felt strange to think that one day she would have her daughter here and couldn’t imagine how her life would be then.

  Cissy bent her head to read on. She had read the letter through the moment it had arrived, but with her simple meal for one eaten, a couple of sausages, baked beans and mashed potato, and the couple of dishes washed up, there was little else to do.

  Daisy’s other news these days tended to be a little glum. It seemed unfair, she wrote: people read in the newspapers how terrible unemployment was in America, England, Germany – especially in Germany – but apart from French newspapers, there was little said about how badly France was doing. As if other countries apart from those three hardly existed. Reading it, Cissy couldn’t help feeling how continental Daisy had become; hardly ever a sigh for England and her old life. But then, why should she? She was happy with her life, with her Theodore, with Noelle.

  Perhaps not so happy, though. The letter, like her others, bemoaned the lack of a child of her own, said they were trying hard but still nothing had happened. Teddy, she said, didn’t seem as disappointed as her, but he had his own troubles. His business wasn’t at all buoyant these days and he was feeling very down; he had found a sudden yearning to go back to Germany, constantly sighing for his homeland, Depression or no Depression. He seemed so unsettled now in France and said he’d feel more at home with his own countrymen – kept talking of visiting his father’s grave and putting a stone on it, the way Jewish people did on their loved ones’ graves. ‘A bit morbid if you ask me,’ Daisy wrote, ‘after all these years not bothering.’ But she did fancy the idea of going to live in Germany. ‘I’ve never been anywhere except France,’ she continued. ‘I’d like to see more of the Continent, and Teddy says once we’re settled in Dusseldorf, we might have a holiday in Austria or Switzerland, but that depends on how his business picks up of course.’

  And take Noelle with them, Cissy thought bitterly, lifting her eyes from Daisy’s exuberant pen. Her daughter would share this New Year’s Eve with them as she had shared every other one. Noelle should be with her – just the two of them here together. But what chance had she? Life was all skimp and scrape, the last of her savings gone into her shop and little of the profits she had hoped for coming in.

  Such were the dreams of the dreamers, she thought bitterly as she poured herself a small measure of whisky saved from a half-bottle she had been hanging on to for months for this evening. No matter how down on one’s luck, the New Year had to be toasted with something in the hope for better times, even by those celebrating on their own and with little to show for all their hard work, like herself.

  Every day she had to watch people looking at her window, debating if their money would stretch to that nice hat, those warm gloves, that fine wool scarf. But if they came in it was for a box of pins or a spool of cotton. That sort of thing brought in small profit, her initial stock of fashionable hats gathering dust at the rear of the shop and her hopes of bringing Noelle back or even visiting her as far away as ever.

  Her only consolation had been sending her Christmas present to her, a big fluffy teddy bear for which she hadn’t begrudged dipping into what little profit she had made this year. All her money seemed to be going on sending little gifts for Noelle so she would be constantly reminded of her mother, the rest on keeping up her own appearance. Looking at her, people saw a successful woman, but appearances were deceptive. If only they knew how she watched every window-shopper.

  Christmas shoppers, of course, were an exception, but she was acutely aware of the wrong impression it gave everyone, as though she were rolling in dough. After the holidays, with another long year of belt-tightening ahead, it would be back to seeing them gazing longingly into shop windows, pinched faces reflecting the wish that there was money enough to buy even the cheapest of luxuries. These days there was seldom enough to buy essentials. It reflected on the shop owner too. On everyone. In some ways she could count herself lucky she supposed, but it still didn’t enable her to bring Noelle back here, not yet.

  Placing her drink on the sideboard ready for midnight, she turned on the knob of the oval-topped, fret-fronted wireless bought second-hand. As soft dance-band music issued forth, she sank into her armchair by the coal fire letting the soothing rhythm of music wash over her, and wondered what Daisy and Theodore would be doing tonight. Were they staying quietly at home, Noelle already in bed, leaving them to see the old year out, or had they engaged a nurse for her while they went out on the town to mix with the crowds making merry in Paris? Once she had been part of all that. But that was all over now…

  She awoke with a start, almost on instinct that the New Year must be nigh. Outside her window she could hear East Londoners making ready in their own way: slurred singing, girls squealing, young boys calling cheekily to them; across the road in one of the flats above the shops a party was going on, the sash window up, despite the cold night air, to let out some of the heat and fug of close-packed bodies all smoking and drinking; old tunes thumped out of a piano, raucous voices singing away to them.

  The strokes of 1931 made themselves heard on Cissy’s wireless set. She got up and picked up her whisky from the sideboard in readiness, counted the strokes: one, two, three, four. ‘Fer the Sake of Ole Lang Syne’ rising from every throat beyond her window within her hearing.

  She followed them in her head: ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot.’

  Oh, my little girl…She felt a traitor, her child left behind in her own selfish need to prove herself. This year – this new year she vowed to have her back, Daisy’s views of unsavoury conditions or not.

  Oh, Daisy…her truest friend. How could she bear her a grudge just because she seemed to be taking more care of Noelle than she could herself? If Langley had been here…

  Oh, Langley – where was he now? Where were all the friends he had introduced her to? But she didn’t care about them. They were nothing – shadows of a distant past.

  Five, six, seven. She remembered instead the old friends she had once known, good friends, girls at school, at work, boyfriends, long since married she expected. And her family – Mum, Dad, Bobby, May…all of them.

  Eight, nine, ten. And then there was Eddie. Suddenly she wanted Eddie so much. Suddenly she felt lonely, so alone. On the spur of the moment she reached out towards the wireless set, with a sharp twist of her wrist switched off the last two strokes. Going to the sink in the corner of her neat but basic living room, she tipped the untouched whisky into it. Leaving the empty glass on the wooden draining board, she went into her bedroom, flinging off her clothes and scrambling into her nightdress.

  The bed creaked as she got in to pull the quilt over her ears to shut out the singing, the last good wishes in the street below, the cries of goodnight. ‘ ’Night, Marie! ’Night, Dan! ’Night, Violet! See you in the morning, Alice! ’Appy New Year! Yeah, ’Appy New Year!’

  Cissy closed her eyes and prayed for sleep.

  Every morning at crack of
dawn Bobby trudged off through all weathers, unable to afford bus fares, bound for the lighterage pool in hope of an employer giving out a bit of work.

  Today, after braving the February sleet, he stood watching the clerk as a leopard watches its prey, his eyes widening as the man reached out to answer the phone’s first urgent summons, every muscle tensed to spring to action as the receiver was replaced. How many wanted? The clerk surveyed the tight knot of hopefuls, called out that Bollins wanted men – two only – banana boat at Wilson’s Wharf. Bedlam broke out. The crowd of men surged forward, voices and arms raised, hands waving frantically for the job that meant the difference between a family eating and starving, the difference between the relief on a wife’s face and pinched resignation of another empty table tomorrow.

  They all knew it, were all desperate for the chance to work – there might be no other today. Every day it was a free fight to get it. This morning was no exception. Bobby shouldered with the rest, but many had gathered at the pool before him, early arrivals, could have even been waiting since the small hours for the gates to open at seven, though in this bone-chilling weather, he doubted it. Excitement died to a low mumble as the two lucky ones, triumph and anticipation on their grey faces, shouldered their way out, making for Wilson’s Wharf.

  Bobby watched them go and watched a few of the despondents ease out, too tired and fed up to wait. There were two options now, trudge back home or stay here, hoping something else would come up. It could be a futile wait, the damp air eating into the shed and himself as he waited the hours away. Or he could give up now, go home and at least get warm. But if he missed a chance of work, there’d be Ethel to face.