Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Gilda O’Neill
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
New Year’s Eve 1913
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
October 1927
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
1936
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
The Flanagans, the Tanners and the Lovells all live on the top floor of the Turnbury Buildings – a crumbling Victorian tenement in the heart of London’s East End. It’s 1936 and Britain is in the grip of the Depression.
Nell Flanagan is a decent, hardworking woman, married to Stephen, a tough, heavy-drinking brute of a man, who works as a casual in the docks – when there’s work available. Nell has hidden the abuse she has suffered at his hands from her young children, although most of the neighbours realise what’s going on.
The Tanners think she must be asking for it, but Martin Lovell has always admired Nell. When he sees Stephen actually attacking Nell, he can stand back no longer, but his actions have repercussions for all the families. . .
About the Author
Gilda O’Neill was born and brought up in the East End. She left school at fifteen but returned to education as a mature student. She wrote full-time and continued to live in the East End with her husband and family. Sadly she died on 24 September 2010 after a short illness.
Also by Gilda O’Neill
FICTION
The Cockney Girl
Whitechapel Girl
The Bells of Bow
Just Around the Corner
Cissie Flowers
Dream On
The Lights of London
Playing Around
Getting There
The Sins of Their Fathers
Make Us Traitors
Of Woman Born
Secrets of the Heart
NON-FICTION
A Night Out With The Girls:
Women Having a Good Time
My East End:
Memories of Life in Cockney London
Our Street:
East End Life in the Second World War
The Good Old Days:
Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian
London
Lost Voices:
Memories of a Vanished Way of Life
Rough Justice
Gilda O’Neill
For everyone at Random House, people who have been kinder to me this year than they will ever realise
Prologue
The woman, so weak and so very tired, sat on the almost completely flattened ticking-covered mattress, with a tiny scrap of a child huddled beside her to keep warm. There was no bedstead – that had been sold long ago, well before the poor creature would ever have believed that one day she and her husband and daughter would be living somewhere so sordid.
Apart from the mattress, with its one thin blanket, and the ragged coat used in place of a counterpane, there was no other furniture in the room save for a rickety kitchen chair, with the just visible remains of pale green paint on one of its legs, and a rough, splintered orange box – discarded by a market trader as too damaged to be of any further use – that had been set on its side to serve as a cupboard.
The meagre light that barely illuminated the room came from an oil lamp hanging off a nail banged into a rotting rafter above their heads. The lamp swung back and forth in the wind moaning in from around the ill-fitting door that was just about held in place by its rusting hinges, and through the ragged hopsacking that had been nailed over what remained of the glass in the single window.
‘Never forget, my little angel,’ the woman said, her voice as frail as her bony body. ‘This is going to be yours one day.’
She was showing the child a pearl and gold brooch fashioned in the shape of a curling capital letter N. She twisted it in the light so the little one could see it better, its prettiness incongruous in the squalid surroundings. She smiled and stroked the child’s cheek, and then struggled to her feet and stumbled over to the window, where she took her time concealing and pinning the brooch in the folds of the hessian sacking.
‘And no one must ever take it from you. Always remember that, my little angel. It’s yours. My gift to you, something to remember me by when you’re all grown up.’
She smiled again at the child before going over to the makeshift orange-box cupboard. She took out a chipped thick china bowl half-filled with stale bread that had been steeped in cold tea, and gave it to the little girl.
‘Now you eat that up and make yourself big and strong. You don’t want to grow up and be all scraggy like your daft old mum, now do you eh?’
She put her lips to her child’s soft fair curls and then sighed loudly. ‘Mummy won’t be long; I’ve just got to go and see some friends to get us some money.’
The child put down the bowl, reached out to her mother and whimpered.
‘Ssshh, don’t fret, this is our home now, so you stay here, all nice and safe, and don’t you open that door to anyone.’
She paused, and then went over to the window again, adjusting the sacking one more time.
‘We don’t want to risk losing that pretty brooch, now do we, little one? There are bad people out there, bad people who’d take it off you, just like that. So we’ll have to keep it nice and safe, because it’s going to be yours, and it’ll be our secret where we keep it, you remember that, my little angel, our special secret.’
New Year’s Eve
1913
Chapter 1
Tears ran down the creases of Henry Tolliver’s weather-beaten face, leaving salty white rivulets on his filth-ingrained cheeks. His body was shaking as violently as the battered oil lamp hanging above his head. It was rattling and swinging around after he had crashed into it during the brutal struggle that had just reached its horrific climax in the sordid little Thames-side shack. The wild swaying of the lantern threw hellish shadows up against the walls of the stinking lean-to,
making it seem even more forbidding and ugly than it really was.
Henry gnawed on his dry, cracked lips. ‘How could this have happened to us, Lottie?’ he cried. ‘How?’
His wailing sounded more animal than human, like the moans that came from the damaged creatures who somehow managed to survive in the unseen depths of the surrounding riverside slums, as they keened over the tragedy of their unspeakable lives.
‘Why did you have to make me do this to you? Why?’ He smacked the flimsy door frame with the flat of his hand, not even noticing as one whole side of the jamb dislodged.
‘How could you? My beautiful Lottie, nothing better than a whore, going with men for money. Shaming me.’ He swiped roughly at the snot dripping from his nose. ‘Making me do this to you. How could you? How could you?’
Henry threw back his head and howled, wondering at the injustice of it all, and the why of it all, but deep in his heart he knew the answer only too well.
He’d come to the East End of London from the depths of the Essex marshes, a proud and fit young man, with his heart full of hope and his head full of ideas. Anything had seemed possible in those days. But gradually, like too many others who had come to depend on the vagaries of the docks and the river for their daily bread, when times had grown hard he had been seduced – at first, only now and then – by the lure of the taverns and the alehouses. He soon discovered that he liked the drink, it made him forget the futility of all those hopes and dreams he had once had, and the fact that he’d condemned his wife and child to living in nothing more than beast-like squalor. But as he became ever more inclined to spend his time – and what little money he had in his pocket – in the pubs and gin palaces on cheap booze, rather than in queuing on the stones at the dock gate waiting to be called for a day’s casual labour, things began to go very wrong for Henry Tolliver. Now, on the increasingly rare occasions when he actually bothered to turn up to look for work, he found himself less and less likely to be picked. His place on the stones had been taken by healthier, younger, more sober men, just as surely as his place in his wife’s arms had been taken by the sailors she had demeaned herself with by picking them up at the dock gates.
He dropped his chin to his chest. He felt sick at the very thought of what she had been doing, just as he felt sick at himself for having let down the beautiful girl he had once sworn to love for ever, because he knew she was only doing what she had to.
Slowly, Henry raised his red-rimmed eyes from the rotten, bare floorboards, let out a whiskey-fuelled belch, and swallowed back the bile that rose in his throat. He forced himself to stare into the gloomy corner of the foul-smelling hovel that had been their so-called home for these past six months. Eventually he managed to focus on the pile of ragged bedding and on the lifeless body of what had once been his beloved wife, but was now a broken, tarnished, grotesque puppet.
He unhooked the oil lamp from the nail jutting from the low beam above his head, and, scrubbing the back of his hand across his nose again, he turned his back on the desolation, knowing himself to be the cause of the misery he was about to leave behind him.
And knowing himself to be a murderer.
He hadn’t meant to strike her. But when she had told him she was carrying another child, the thought that it might not belong to him was more than Henry could bear. He had known for months – since they had come to this place – what she’d been doing, and that she had only done it to put food on their table and to give him, Henry Tolliver, money to throw away on drink. Up until tonight he had put away that knowledge somewhere in the back of his mind, and had chosen to ignore the taunts and rumours and the gossip he heard about her in the pubs. He would do anything to buy the drink to make him forget the horror of their lives. But then when he’d come into the room just now and she had been waiting there bold as brass to tell him about the child she was carrying, all sense and reason had abandoned him, and in a moment of madness he had snapped.
It had taken no more than a few minutes, a few vile, unthinking moments, and she was dead. With a self-pitying sob, Henry stood in the doorway with his back turned on the room, and on the wife who was no longer his.
He was about to dash the lantern to the floor, to burn the wretched place to the ground – and the evidence of his terrible shame along with it – when he remembered the brooch. It would surely fetch enough for at least a couple of nights’ cheap lodgings somewhere, a bit of food to fill his empty belly, and, most importantly, leave something over for enough drink to numb the pain of what he had done. Of what he, Henry Tolliver, had become. He would never have sold it when she was alive, but what did it matter now?
He rubbed the heel of his hand into his temple, trying to clear his aching, drink-fuddled head. The brooch. Would she be wearing it? Would it be pinned somewhere amongst her layers of musty old skirts and petticoats?
No, she was far too wary for that; she’d said she’d only just come home, and she’d have been too scared of being robbed while she’d been out ‘working’ that night to have it with her. It had to be hidden somewhere in the room.
It didn’t take him long to search the few places where Lottie might have secreted the little gold and pearl brooch – the whole room, their family home, was not as big as the ramshackle sculleries tacked onto the back of the meanest of terraced, jerry-built houses – before coming to the conclusion that she must have pawned it.
But how could she have done that? When he had given it to Lottie on their wedding day, and he had told her that the brooch had belonged to his mother, his lovely young bride had taken an oath with him that she would never ever pledge it for cash. They had both sworn they would never do that, no matter what, even when times got hard; it was the bond between them, their only treasure. And, up until now, she had kept her word. Not even when they had nothing save for a few crusts of stale bread for the child. Not even when she had been reduced to going to the dock gates to pick up lonely seamen and had given them her once plump and beautiful body for money.
He had dragged them down to this: to her parting with the only token he had ever given her, the token that had signified their once pure, but now forever corrupted love, and – how had it happened? – to him beating the very life out of her.
With a roar, coming now from frustrated resignation rather than despair, Henry dashed the lamp to the floor, where it smashed onto the bare boards, spilling sparks, oil and its cleansing force of destruction.
As the flames took hold, eating their way greedily into the rotten wood, he was out of the door and was on the brink of making his escape along the dark alley, when a terrified whimpering froze him to the spot.
It couldn’t be. Lottie was dead.
But there it was again.
He hesitated in the doorway, considering, for a long, reprehensible moment, what do to, before diving back into the room with his arm shielding his face from the heat.
Grabbing at his wife’s shabby clothing, he pulled and tugged her from the tangle of bedding.
As her cold, clammy body flopped forward, what Henry saw made him start back in horror. What had he nearly done, God help him? How much worse could this nightmare become?
There, on the flattened, straw-filled mattress was the cowering form of a skinny, snivelling child.
He had nearly burned his own daughter to death.
But what was she doing here? When he’d come home, his lying trollop of a wife had sworn she’d sent the child over to the Old Dog with the other street urchins, to scrounge ha’pennies from the seamen made sentimental by the booze. She’d sent her out, she said, so she could tell him about the baby in her belly without their daughter hearing. But she’d been taking him for a fool; she had had the brat hidden away in the bedding all along.
If Lottie hadn’t already been dead, Henry would have killed her there and then. He knew exactly what she’d been thinking when she’d lied to him about the child being over the road: she’d been protecting her from him, Henry Tolliver – her own father. And he knew why. She
would have been scared, quite rightly, about how he would react when she told him about the thing she was carrying inside her.
The scrawny scrap of a girl stared up at him. Her pale grey eyes – made huge by terror and the thinness of her pinched little face – prickled and stung with unspilled tears. But, young as she was, she knew she mustn’t cry. Her mother had taught her that crying made him angry, even angrier than usual, especially when there was that stink about him, the stink that meant he had been in the pub. And she had to be careful to keep her mouth closed tight like Mummy had told her, when she had warned her how upset he was going to be tonight.
Despite the heat, Henry did nothing at first, but then, with a self-admonishing I don’t know why the hell I should care what happens to that whore’s bastard, he snatched the child from the mattress and dragged her from the room. She couldn’t help it, she whimpered again in fear, partly of the flames that were now licking their way up the hopsacking nailed to the broken windowpanes, but mostly because of her dread of her father, the man she had just seen batter her mother to death with the leg of the only chair they possessed.
Henry Tolliver dumped the child down on the icy slush in the alley, apparently oblivious of the fire that was taking hold behind them.
‘What did you see back there? Tell me. What?’
The child said nothing; she just kept her mouth shut and stared up at him.
‘Wait there, damn you,’ he hissed through his teeth. ‘Don’t you dare move.’ Then, taking a big gulp of air, he scrambled back through the now smoke-filled room to the lifeless form of Lottie Tolliver.
With his lungs almost bursting, he grabbed his dead wife’s hand and wrenched the narrow wedding band from her emaciated finger.
Like the finger, the ring was thin and worn, but it was made of gold, so it had to be worth something. Why hadn’t she pawned that instead of his mother’s brooch?
Because she was a spiteful bitch, that’s why.
Chapter 2
Rough Justice Page 1