‘In circumstances like these, undiagnosed twins, a transverse lie, premature separation of the placenta and haemorrhage could spell certain death. You have done really well, old chap.’
‘Thanks,’ said the doctor wearily. He seemed to be in a state of exhaustion. ‘We do our best.’
‘You done yer best!’ shouted Meg. ‘You wants lockin’ up, I say. If you’d done like what I said an’ put ’er on a birfin’ stool in ve first place, vis would never ’ave ’appened.’
The consultant looked at Meg in astonishment.
‘Take no notice, we’ve had this the whole time,’ whispered the doctor. ‘Nothing will convince her.’
The nurse took the baby from Sister Bernadette and placed the child in the incubator, warmed to 95 degrees F, and humidified to avoid drying of the respiratory mucous membranes. The baby was breathing, but her breaths were shallow. Her muscle tone was flaccid, and her skin tone bluish. Her heartbeat was regular, but faint. The paediatrician, after examining the baby, injected 1 cc of Lobeline into the umbilical vein in the cord and milked it towards the abdomen. Oxygen was attached to the incubator, and the oxygen input adjusted to 30 per cent.
The paediatrician advised immediate transfer to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Paradoxically, Meg, who had so violently opposed hospital for Mavis, did not object. The baby was kept in Great Ormond Street for six weeks until her weight was over five pounds, and then she returned home. Both babies thrived. They grew up to be strong, healthy girls, brought up entirely by their mother and aunt. They were a regular sight in Chrisp Street market, helping on the fruit and veg stall, and they became great favourites with the locals.
Thirty years later I was visiting Trixie, who had recently moved to Basildon in Essex. We went shopping, and she insisted we call at the market. It was a large and lively market, with open stalls and old-fashioned costers crying out their wares. I heard the strident voice of a woman calling out, ‘Best apples, only thirty pence a pound. You won’t find cheaper anywhere. Best bananas. Melons. Grapefruits.’
We approached the stall.
‘Well? Wha’choo want?’ demanded the female.
I gasped, staring at two identical women in drab brown dresses, leather belts at the waist, men’s boots, and tight headscarves pulled down low over the forehead. I could not speak.
‘If you don’t know wha’choo want, I can’t hang about. Next.’
The years rolled back. ‘Megan’mave,’ I exclaimed.
‘What?’ The two women drew together. Black eyes flashed a challenge.
‘Megan’mave! But you can’t be – it’s not possible!’
‘Mave’s our mum, an’ Meg’s our aunt. D’you wanna make somefink of it?’
No, I didn’t. Trixie grinned at me, and we slipped quietly away, chuckling.
MADONNA OF THE PAVEMENT
I saw them in High Holborn. They stood out from the tense, jostling crowd because they seemed to have no object in life, nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were aimless, lost. They stood out also because they were so poor. Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope. They were such obvious failures at this game of getting and keeping called success. If they had suddenly shouted in pain above the thunder of the passing wheels they could hardly have been more spectacular in their misery, this man, this woman, this child.
He slouched along a few yards in advance of the woman. He looked as though Life had been knocking him down for a long time, then waiting for him to get up so that it might knock him down again. His bent body was clothed in greenish rags and his naked feet were exposed in gashed boots. He was not entirely pathetic. He was the kind of man to whom you would gladly give half a crown to salve your conscience; but you would never allow him out of sight with your suit-case!
She carried her baby against her breast in a ragged old brown cloth knotted round her shoulders. Perhaps she was twenty-five, but she looked fifty because no one had ever taken care of her, or had given her that pride in herself which is necessary to a woman’s existence. She had not even the happiness of being wanted or necessary – a condition in which the altruistic soul of woman thrives. This man of hers would obviously be better off without her. She had once been pretty.
The shame of it! To parade her woman’s body draped in rags through streets full of other women in their neat clothes, to meet the pitying eyes of other wives and mothers, and to drag on, tied like a slave, behind this shambling, shifty man. Is there a crucifixion for a woman worse than this?
He walked ahead so that she had plenty of time to wonder why she married him. Now and then he would turn and jerk his head, trying to make her quicken her pace. She took no notice, just plodded on in who knows what merciful dullness?
Then the sleeping child in her old brown shawl awakened and moved with the curious boneless writhing of a young baby. The mother’s arms tightened on it and held its small body closer to hers. She stopped, went over to a shop window, and lent her knee on a ledge of stone. She placed one finger so gently in the fold of cloth and looked down into it ...
I tell you that for one second you ceased to pity and you reverenced. Over that tired face of chiselled alabaster, smoothed and softened in a smile, came the only spiritual thing left in these two lives: the beatitude of a Madonna. This same unchanging smile has melted men’s hearts for countless generations. The first time a man sees a woman look at his child in exactly that way something trembles inside him. Men have seen it from piled pillows in rooms smelling faintly of perfume, in night nurseries, in many a comfortable nest which they have fought to build to shield their own. No different! The same smile in all its rich, swift beauty was here in the mud and the bleakness of a London street.
They went on into the crowd and were forgotten. I went on with the knowledge that out of rags and misery had come, full and splendid, the spirit that, for good or ill, holds the world to its course.
Two beggars in a London crowd, but at the breast of one – the Future. Poor, beautiful Madonna of the Pavement ...
H. V. Morton, first published in the Daily Express, 1923.
Human memory is the strangest thing. Apparently we have millions, perhaps billions of interconnecting fibres in our brains, triggered by electrical impulses, which can record our experiences. But sometimes these stores lie dormant for years, and the memories seem to be completely lost. But they are still there, waiting for some spark to ignite them.
A book of essays by H. V. Morton was the spark for me. I took them with me on holiday and after a strenuous day of swimming and cycling I was sitting in the last long rays of the evening sun, reading. As I read this beautiful and tragic story of a bully of a man and a downtrodden woman, it all came back to me. I had completely forgotten the Laceys. I read the first page of the essay – the description of the shiftless couple in the streets of London – without much thought, but then came the heart-rending but uplifting paragraphs about the baby and the woman’s love. The spark of memory had been ignited and the memory of the Laceys was there, in a flash, as they say. It only remained to be written down.
John Lacey was the landlord of the Holly Bush, just off Poplar High Street. As I came to know him better, I found it incredible that Trueman’s (the brewers) had ever granted him a licence and continued to pay his wages, but stranger things have happened in the world of employment, and he enjoyed the role that fate had generously offered him.
John Lacey had been diagnosed as having late-onset diabetes. It was not very severe at the time of diagnosis, and the doctor had advised that it could be controlled by a diet of reduced sugar and carbohydrate. But John Lacey refused to cooperate, and his blood-sugar level rose higher. Insulin injections were prescribed, and the doctor – judging that if the patient would not control his diet, he would not inject himself regularly and accurately – asked the Sisters to give the injections twice daily. This was very time-consuming. Soluble insulin was used in those days, and each
injection only lasted twelve hours in the body. We received a lot of requests to attend diabetics because back then it was very difficult to assess and maintain the correct dose of insulin and to inject it hypodermically.
Sister Evangelina and I went to assess Mr Lacey. The pub was in a side street and was in no way attractive. The street was narrow and dingy, several houses had been bombed, and many walls were held up with scaffolding. The pub itself was hardly noticeable, the frontage resembling any of the houses around it: dark brown paint flaking off, windows caked with dirt, a narrow front door, always shut. The only thing that might at one time have distinguished the pub from its neighbours was its sign; but it was so old that it hung from only one hinge, and most of the paint had worn off.
Sister Evangelina and I entered by the pub door, which was the only entry to the landlord’s living accommodation upstairs. The public bar was about twenty feet square, high-ceilinged with a wooden floor. A few cheap wooden tables and chairs stood around the place, with the bar itself to one side. An unshaded electric light bulb, around which flies buzzed continuously, hung from the centre of the ceiling. The walls and ceiling were a dirty yellowish brown and were spotted all over with fly-stains. A single picture hung on a wall, but it was so dingy and faded that one would have been hard pressed to say whether it was a seascape or a hunting scene.
It was 12.30 p.m. when we arrived – opening time – and the pub, which at that time of day should have been humming with life, had only one customer: a solitary man of indeterminate age staring at the wall and sieving a pint of beer through his moustaches. The silence was oppressive.
A woman stood behind the bar, half-heartedly wiping a few glasses with a grimy cloth. She was old, far too old to be a barmaid. Her grey hair was scooped into an untidy bun at the back of her head, and wisps hung across her face, which was lined and grey. Her eyes seemed dull and lifeless, and her lips lacked any colour. She was small and thin and had no teeth. She looked up as we entered.
‘You wants ’a see Mr Lacey, I s’pose? I’ll take you to ’im.’
She turned towards the man with the moustaches.
‘Look to ve bar a bit, will yer, Mr ’arris? If anyone comes in, call me, will yer?’
She had an apologetic, deferential air about her, and her voice echoed bleakly in the bare room. The man grunted and continued sieving his beer, as he watched us over the rim of his glass.
We followed the woman up a dark, uncarpeted stairway. ‘Vere’s no light,’ she said. ‘Watch yer step.’
We entered the rooms above the bar, and she led us to the bedroom. A large, fat, pink man lay on a bed in a fair-sized room also swarming with flies. A bar-table covered in fag-ends and a rough wooden cupboard were the only other furniture. It was summer time, and a thin army blanket was thrown over the man’s stomach, apart from which he was naked. The light was dim, because the sunlight struggled to penetrate the dirt on the windows.
‘Is that my beer, Annie?’
‘No, John, it’s ve Sister’s.’
‘You idle, useless, woman, I told you ’a get me a beer. I don’t want no bloody Sisters.’
Sister Evangelina strode across the room.
‘Don’t you call me a “bloody Sister”, and I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. What are you doing in bed at this time of day? Sit up.’
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m the “bloody Sister”, now sit up. Go on.’
The man looked at her in astonishment and struggled to a sitting position, keeping the grey blanket carefully over his middle. The woman crept into a corner and stood there, meekly fingering her apron.
‘That’s better. Now what’s wrong with you that a good dose of salts wouldn’t clear?’
‘I’m ill.’ He groaned and raised his eyes to Heaven.
‘Rubbish. You’re fat. That’s what’s wrong with you. When did you last open your bowels? What you need is a good clear-out. ’
‘No, I’m ill. I’m in agony.’ He groaned again and rubbed his hands over his chest and stomach. ‘It’s no use. You’re too late. I’m dying.’ He leaned back on the pillows and sighed weakly.
‘Good riddance, if you ask me.’
The man jerked his eyes open. ‘What?’
‘You old fraud. You’re no more dying than this young nurse here. Now what’s wrong with you?’
‘I got die-betes.’
‘Is that all? Millions of people have cancer.’
‘I’m dying, I tells ya.’
‘Rubbish. Now get up. I want some of your pee to test for sugar.’
‘I can’t get up. I tells ya, I got DIE-betes. I’m dying yer see?’
‘You’ll do as you’re told, and no arguments. Is there a lavatory in the flat? Right, go and fill a pot of pee. I don’t want the stinking stuff, but I have to test it for sugar. Now off you go, quick. I haven’t got all day.’
More from astonishment than compliance the man struggled to his feet, pulled the blanket across his middle and shuffled out of the room, his bare buttocks wobbling with every step. When he had gone Sister turned to the woman.
‘Is he always like this?’
‘Not never no different.’
‘Never gets up?’
‘No.’
‘Humph. A good dose of salts and an enema up the arse is what he needs.’
‘’e wont like vat, ’e wont.’
‘Clear his system, it would. He’s all clogged up, that’s the trouble with him. I don’t hold with all this new-fangled medical clap-trap. Staphluses and coccuses and viruses and what have you. A good strong dose of salts and a good hot soap and water enema is all he needs to clear his system. Then there wouldn’t be any more of this nonsense about being ill and dying.’
The man shuffled back into the room, groaning and rolling his eyes in a touching affectation of exhaustion. He put the chamber pot on the table and flopped into the bed.
Sister took the blood-sugar-testing equipment from her bag. With a pipette she counted ten drops of water and five drops of urine into a test tube and dropped a tablet into it. The tablet fizzed and bubbled, and the liquid turned bright orange.
‘It’s high in sugar, not surprising. You’ll have to stop the beer and have an injection every day, twice a day.’
The man gave a howl of anguish.
‘Not ve needle, oh no! I couldn’t stand no needle. Never could stomach needles. I shall faint. Faint, I tells yer.’
‘Well, you faint, then. Every day if you like.’
‘You’re ’ard,’ he murmured, weakly.
Sister drew up a syringe and came towards him. The man screamed, leaped out of bed with the agility of a mountain goat and stood stark naked in the corner, whimpering. Sister advanced on him, and as he could not retreat any further, she plunged the needle into his leg and the injection was over in a second.
I heard a stifled sound from the other corner and turned. For the first time the woman’s features relaxed and she giggled. I caught her eye and winked.
The man was whingeing and rubbing his leg.
‘You’re ’ard, I tells yer, ’ard. No pity on a man wha’s never done you no ’arm.’
Sister Evangelina was unmoved.
‘Cover up your balls and bits, get dressed and get on with your work in the pub.’
‘I can’t. I’m ill. Annie, get me a beer. I’ve ’ad a nasty shock.’
‘Oh no, you don’t. You’ve got to cut out the beer.’
He gave her a sly, shifty look.
‘If I cuts out ve beer, will you cut out ve needle?’
‘Perhaps, in time, when your blood sugar is lower.’
‘Then p’raps, in time, I’ll cut out ve beer.’
‘You old weasle. You may be lazy, but you’re not daft. Have it your own way. Kill yourself, if you want to, but don’t expect any pity from me.’
With that, Sister stomped out of the room. At the door, she said, ‘Expect the nurse, every morning and evening, for the needle.’
Daily visits to the pub enabled me to get to know Mrs Lacey. Whatever time of day I called, she was always working. She did everything necessary to keep the pub running. She received the barrels of beer on delivery days, when they were rolled down the hatch into the cellar, then single-handed she rolled them across the floor and fixed them to the pumps going up to the bar. She carried crates of bottles up and down the narrow stone stairs from cellar to bar, and the crates of empties into the street for collection. She cleaned the bar room, scrubbed the tables, washed the glasses. She emptied the spitoons and cleaned the outside lavatory. She served behind the bar during opening hours when a few men sat sullenly, drinking beer. She did it all with a slow, methodical dullness as though she expected nothing else. She always looked tired, she always looked spiritless, she seldom spoke. She just carried on working, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
The only time Mrs Lacey left the pub was to go shopping. Then she would cook a meal and take it up to her husband in bed. I had seen her cooking and told her that he must have no sweet things.
‘I daren’t cross ’im,’ she whimpered. ‘’e must ’ave ’is puddings. Won’t do wivout ’em.’
It was pointless trying to reason with her. The poor woman clearly lived in fear of her husband.
The same applied to his beer consumption. Visiting twice a day enabled me to see just what went on. He would thump on the floor and scream out, ‘Fetch us a beer and look lively,’ and she would run upstairs with a pint. The doctor, Sister Evangelina and I all told him it was making him worse, but he sneered. ‘If I gets worse it’s all your fault. You’re supposed to get me better.’ I tested his urine twice daily and kept a careful chart of his blood-sugar levels, but they were always high, and sometimes dangerously high.
Farewell To The East End Page 12