Once they were safely on their way back to the camp, and Maidstone and the possibility of detection had disappeared behind the trees, she retrieved the coat from under the camouflage of fruit and vegetables she’d arranged on top of it, gave it a quick dust down with her fingers, and put it on.
‘You look a real swell!’ Cissie said. ‘Whatcher gonna do wiv yer old one?’ Hoppers usually chucked their old clothes in the hedge the minute they could afford something better.
Ellie was more practical. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘That’s good enough fer the kids to sick on. This is fer best.’ And for protection, she thought, careful to keep her bargain secret.
She wore the new coat all the way home like a breastplate.
Her parents were most impressed, although her mother insisted that the coat be put away at once. ‘Wrap it up all nice in brown paper,’ she advised. ‘Keep it hid. Someone round ’ere might recognize it, an’ then what? Yer a real clever gel, yer don’t wanna get caught.’
‘Chip off the ol’ block an’ no mistake,’ Paddy told his neighbours, chuckling with pleasure. He was easy with beer and had quite forgotten the ill temper of the morning. ‘D’you get them powders, girlie? That’ll do the trick, you jest see if it don’t, Nell.’
But the powders were less impressive than the coat. Nell poured the prescribed dose down each of her son’s retching throats night and morning for the next four days, but they didn’t improve at all. In fact, Ellie was privately of the opinion that they were hotter than ever, especially in the middle of the night But at least they weren’t dying. And after a week they stopped groaning and rolling about, and Seamus said he was hungry.
‘Tomorrow,’ Mrs Shaunnessy said wisely, as Nell spooned a plateful of porridge into her son’s peaky face. ‘An’ not a minute too soon, with the weather the way it is, heaven help us. You got them tickets, have ye?’
Nell touched the pocket in her skirt where she’d pinned the return tickets late on Saturday night when Paddy had returned from the pub too drunk to stand and too insensible to know that she was picking his pockets. ‘We’ll go first thing,’ she said.
’E can do what ’e likes.’
So they left Paddy Murphy with his beer and his friends and went back to Whitechapel with as much of their takings as they could filtch from his drunken pockets or persuade from the tallyman. And twelve other families went with them. It was a train full of sickness. Ellie sat by the window nursing Tessie with one arm and trying to stop Frankie from trampling on the invalids with the other. Her new coat lay in the luggage rack above her head, and she was still perfectly fit.
It was pelting with rain when they arrived at London Bridge, long rods of white water falling vertically out of the sky, and with such force that they bounced off the cobbles straight up into the air again, sharp and white as sleet. The gutters were awash with a grey-brown torrent and the choppy surface of the River Thames was full of little black pits.
‘We’ll take a horse-bus,’ Nell decided, lifting baby Teresa onto her shoulders and doing her best to cover the child’s inadequate dress with her shawl. ‘We got the money.’
But there were many other passengers with the same idea, and although several buses came dripping up to the kerb it was more than ten minutes before there was room for all the sodden Murphys on one of them, and by then both the invalids were shivering, Tessie was wet to her skin and Ellie’s ostrich feathers were trailing a stream of ice-cold water down her back.
‘Ne’er mind,’ Nell tried to comfort. ‘Soon be ’ome, eh? Chaff ’is fingers for ’im, Ellie, there’s a good gel.’
Ellie took Seamus’s lifeless fingers into her hands and tried to rub a little colour back into them. ‘I don’t ’alf feel bad, Sis,’ he said.
‘Soon be ’ome,’ she said echoing her mother.
But the home they’d left so cheerfully just over a fortnight ago was occupied by someone else, and anyway they owed Mrs Fahey nearly three weeks’ rent, so they couldn’t go back there. They squelched up Commercial Street, stopping at every shop corner to read the advertisements, and growing colder and wetter and more depressed by the minute. The two boys were ghastly pale and the babies were grizzling. ‘Drowned rats, the lot a’ yer,’ Nell teased, trying to cheer them up. Ellie’s hair was stuck to her forehead and water ran down the straggly ends of her curls as though it was pouring from a tap. ‘Aintcher found nothink yet?’ she complained as her mother scanned the cards for a rent they could afford.
‘There’s a basement in Thrawl Street,’ Nell said. ‘Four bob a week. It’s a bit steep but it might do a turn till yer Pa gets back. You stay ’ere an’ I’ll see what I can fix.’ And she left them dripping in a doorway while she went off to try and negotiate a lower rent.
It was a square brown room which had once been the kitchen of the house when the house was a family home. It still contained the black kitchen range and a chipped butler’s sink and even a cupboard in the chimney corner, but it was dark and damp and stank of rotten vegetables and cat’s piss. The window was little more than a slit below the ceiling and the only furniture, apart from the fittings, was a rickety bed with a very damp straw mattress set squiffily across the springs.
Nell smudged the rain from her face with the back of her wet hand and tried to encourage them. ‘Soon ’ave this fixed up lovely,’ she promised. ‘Don’t lie on the floor, Seamus, there’s a good boy.’
But Seamus felt too ill to care whether he was good or not and stayed where he was. ‘We’ll get a fire going,’ Nell said, opening the coal hole hopefully, and finding only dust and a strong smell of mice. ‘Nip up the corner, Ellie, quick as yer can. We oughter get them kids in bed.’
For the next hour and a half Ellie ran one errand after another, for coal and kindling and Beecham’s Powders, to the pawn shop to redeem the blankets, and three times to the market to scrounge orange boxes, until she was so wet that the rain was running down the small of her back and her sodden shoes had rubbed blisters on both her heels. Back in their squalid room Nell coaxed their obstinate stove to light and propped the mattress in front of it to steam off the worst of the wet She stripped her two shivering sons of their soaking clothes and wrapped them in her newly redeemed blankets and laid them on the springs. Then she sent Ellie for bread and marg and a twist of sugar and a pinch of tea, and they transformed their orange boxes into a table and four chairs, unpacked the mugs and the kettle and the teapot and made themselves a meal. The mattress was still steaming like a great straw horse and it was taking all the heat from the stove, but at least the tea was warm.
‘We shall be all right now we’re ’ome,’ Nell said, wiping Tessie’s nose on the edge of her shawl.
But Ellie felt so cold she didn’t think she’d ever be all right again.
During the next few days she and her mother did what they could to transform their underground cell into a home, but it was a hard task. They cadged more boxes and bought more coal and even redeemed the table cloth and the curtains. But at night the black beetles came rustling out in their hundreds to scuttle over the hearth and the cupboards and their makeshift furniture, devouring as they went The mice were so daring they scampered across the blankets and crawled up the bedpost, whiskers twitching in the dusty light dropping down into the room from the street above. And Ellie, lying in the damp bed while her mother snored and her brothers coughed and groaned and burned with renewed fever, missed the green fields and the smell of the hops and thought how unfair it was that she should be dragged to Whitechapel just because her brothers had the measles.
The next morning she made a bid for partial freedom.
‘I oughter go ter school, Ma,’ she said, as she scraped a spoonful of jam over the remains of the bread. ‘Whatcher think?’
Nell didn’t think much of the idea. ‘Whatcher wanna go ter school for?’ she said. ‘You never learn nothink. Frankie, leave yer sister alone, yer bad boy. Eat yer own slice.’
‘I’m s’pposed ter be up in the big girls,’ Ellie said.
‘You’ll ’ave the School Board round.’
‘Don’t know where we are though, do they, lovey? Don’t you go worryin’ yer ’ead about school. I’ll see ter the School Board. You’re more use ter me ’ere.’
Which she was. It couldn’t be denied. And on that awful day she was particularly useful.
By mid afternoon their dank room was growing dark and the fire was beginning to give out quite a pleasant heat. Seamus and Paddy had been sponged down, Frankie was snoring at the foot of the bed and little Tess was sitting by the hearth, playing with a string of old cotton reels. Perhaps her mother was right after all and things really were going to improve.
But then suddenly and without warning, Seamus began to rave, sitting bolt upright in the bed and clawing the air with both hands, wheezing for breath and coughing and shrieking, ‘Get ’im off! Get ’im off. Don’t let ’im get me, Ma!’ over and over again. Nell tried to comfort and sooth but he was far beyond her, burning with fever, in a private terror she couldn’t touch.
‘Get Mrs O’Malley! Quick as yer can,’ she said to Ellie. ‘Run! Say ’e’s delirious.’
He had pneumonia, of course, as Nell knew without being told, and even though Mrs O’Malley came back with Ellie as quickly as she could, there was nothing she could do to help. ‘This is the crisis, Nell dear,’ she said, ‘an’ there’s no medicine on earth can help him through the crisis. You know that, don’t you? We must wait and pray. That’s all we can do. Poor little man.’
‘’E’ll be all right, won’t ’e?’ Ellie asked anxiously, feeling ashamed of the way she’d blamed the poor kid for dragging them back to London. It wasn’t his fault any more than it was hers, and she knew that now, and regretted her black thoughts.
‘If he turns the corner, he’ll get well again,’ Mrs O’Malley said. ‘If he doesn’t … It’s up to the good Lord now. You say your prayers for him. That’s the best thing you can do.’
But Ellie couldn’t pray. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow when her brother was so obviously fighting for his life. She and Nell sat beside him all through the evening and late into the night while he struggled for breath and the phlegm knocked and bubbled in his congested lungs and he threw off the blankets and muttered incomprehensibly. And his brother lay beside him in the tousled bed, coughing and choking and almost as hot. ‘Oh my dear good God,’ Nell said over and over again as the hours passed horribly. ‘What we gonna do?’
Soon after two o’clock Ellie fell asleep where she sat, her chin on her chest and her back propped against the side of the bed. When she woke, daylight was falling into the room in a dusty column and her mother was asleep on the floor and both the boys were quiet. I’ll sneak under the covers for a bit, she thought. Her neck was very stiff and it would be bliss to lie flat. As she climbed cautiously over Tessie’s sleeping body, Paddy stirred and groaned, but he didn’t wake and Seamus made no sound at all. He was lying on his back with his mouth open and looked really quite peaceful. It wasn’t possible to stretch out her full length in the bed after all, because there were so many people in it and she had to avoid at least two patches of wet but she curled herself into a relatively comfortable position and was asleep again immediately.
When she woke for the second time her mother was wailing, an odd, high-pitched, wordless noise, ‘Aaaaagh! Aaaaaaagh!’ more like a. cat than a woman. Ellie was very frightened and scrambled out of the bed at once to see what was the matter.
‘’E’s dead! ’E’s dead!’ Nell wailed. ‘My poor Seamus! My poor little boy! Aaaaagh! Aaaagh!’
‘He can’t be!’ Ellie said, looking across at the bed again to where Seamus was still lying on his back with his mouth open, exactly the same as he’d been during the night. ‘’E’s asleep, Ma, that’s all. Asleep.’ He couldn’t be dead.
‘’E’s cold!’ her mother said. She was sitting on the floor with her arms round her knees rocking with distress.
‘’E ain’t!’ Ellie said stoutly. She wouldn’t believe this death. It wasn’t real or true. ‘’E ain’t!’ She simply couldn’t endure it. She’d made a bargain about this measles, hadn’t she? Back in the country when she nicked that coat. It all seemed such a long time ago she could hardly remember it. What had God done with her bargain? ‘’E ain’t. I can’t bear it, Ma.’
But he was. And they all had to.
Paddy Murphy came home for the funeral and made a great deal of fuss about how much he loved his ‘darlin’ boy’, but he didn’t pay for it, and went off to the pub the minute it was over, as Ellie noticed with the new cold eyes of grief, and then came home late and roaring drunk just as if it were an ordinary day.
‘You’d ’a thought ’e could a’ stayed ’ome jest once in a while,’ Nell complained as they turned out his pockets and removed the boots from his drunken feet. ‘’Is own son’s funeral.’
‘I ’ate ’im,’ Ellie said, feeling she could risk the truth now. ‘’E don’t look after us or nothink. ’E drinks all the money. If you ask me, it’s ’is fault poor Seamus died. More’n anyone’s.’
‘You mussen say that,’ her mother reproached. But she didn’t sound cross. Only weary. ‘’E’s yer father.’
‘I know. I ’ate ’im.’
‘Don’t get married, gel,’ Nell advised, lugging her husband onto his back. ‘It’s a mug’s game.’
‘Don’t you worry, Ma,’ Ellie said, looking at her mother solemnly in the candlelight. ‘I never ever will!’
Chapter Eight
Mr Torrance, the headmaster of Deal Street Boys, was a very patient man and, as such, a rather unlikely leader for such a tough school in a very tough quarter. Everything about him was grey, but whether with age or chalk it was difficult to say.
When he first took office, back in the idealistic days of his early forties, he had considered himself a man with a mission. Somewhere in amongst those filthy hordes he felt sure there would be boys with hidden intelligence or special talents, boys who could be nurtured and rescued, sent on to secondary schools, turned into gentlemen. And he would be the one to do it. But the boys didn’t materialize, and as the years passed his dream gradually receded. He grew weary with disappointment and the daily grinding task of forcing the three Rs into unwilling minds. Four years ago, in 1893, the directors of the People’s Palace in the Mile End Road had opened a secondary school, right on his doorstep, so to speak. For a few quite heady months the dream had reasserted itself, but the quality of his pupils remained inexorably low. In all these years he’d found only four candidates to send up for the preliminary examinations, and all four had failed. It was very dispiriting.
Sighing, he stood beside the high window of his dusty study one afternoon in April, watching the boys in the playground below. Such a boisterous lot, he thought, and all so ordinary. He really ought to do something to lift the tone a little, especially now it was Jubilee year. A display of work perhaps, and a Jubilee party. After all, the dear Queen, God bless her, had provided them all with a splendid opportunity.
Rachel Cheifitz wasn’t the least bit interested in the Diamond Jubilee, although the newspapers were full of it and the Daily Graphic predicted that the nation was heading for a spectacular jamboree.
‘So she reign sixty year,’ she said shrugging her shoulders. ‘She ain’t got a place in the Buildin’s!’ It was later that afternoon, and for once school and work were both over for the day. She and her family were pushing a loaded handcart up Flower and Dean Street, greeting their neighbours as they went. They were moving house.
At long, long, joyful last her dream was coming true. Rivke and Raizel had got her a flat in Rothschild Buildings. A lovely two-roomed flat and right next door to Rivke’s own. At six shillings and thrupence a week it wasn’t exactly cheap, but it was there for the taking and it had its own scullery and its own W.C. and it was Jewish.
‘Vid our own kind!’ Rachel said happily, plunging forehead first through the triumphal arch of the entrance into the Jewish kingdom of the inner courtyard.
‘Ve find the rent somehow,’ Emmanuel said to David, as they pushed the cart after her. ‘Ve von’t vorry your mother, nu?’
‘No, Father,’ David agreed. ‘Two years an’ I work too, don’t forget. We manage.’
‘Ai yi!’ his father sighed. ‘Ve manage.’ But he didn’t sound at all sure about it.
The inner courtyard was bigger than David had imagined it, and it was full of people he knew. The buildings rose for six stern storeys on three sides of it, the fourth being blocked off by the blank walls of a seven-storey warehouse. Their brickwork had once been the usual London colour, soft buff sand with two courses of red brick between the windows and terracotta keystones to the window arches, but smoke and grime had long since blackened away most of the original colour and now they resembled nothing so much as three dark forbidding cliffs, pocked with busy windows and climbed by ironwork staircases, revealed behind their open galleries. But it was the life in the buildings that mattered, and the life in these buildings was familiar.
Clotheslines stretched from one side of the courtyard to the other, most of them sagging under the weight of heavy washing, like a line of ships labouring under full sail, and in between, eddying and swirling, the kids from school occupied every space with rough games and cheerful quarrels. There was Izzie Perlman picking sides with young Benny Lipschitz for ‘Jimmy Knacker’, and there were all the Levy boys, and Schneider and Raingold and Morry Schwartz. They called to David as he passed, bent over the cart, and he chirruped back happily. There’d be some sport playing here. And what a lot to draw, so many faces, everywhere you looked. Old men pondered at smoke-wreathed card tables close to the walls while their womenfolk called to each other from the windows in Yiddish or broken English, or gave singing commands to the children in the yard below them. The familiar smells of family life rose pungently from every open window, fish and fried onions, burning bones and over-ripe oranges. It was a marvellously lively, homely place and he felt at ease in it at once, and couldn’t wait to get the furniture upstairs so that he could come down again and join in the games.
A Time to Love Page 11