A Plague on Both Your Houses
Page 11
Nash had reached the Whitechapel High Road when he realised that the latest victim of this war appeared to be his sanity. He was now explaining himself to a horse. He shook his head wearily.
“Christ, let’s get home for Gawd’s sake.”
He was unsure whether he was talking to himself or the horse. Either way, it did not improve his mood.
******
Nash did not own his horse. He rented it from George Lansbury. The ex-MP’s family business was a wood yard which had started to replace its horses with motor vehicles. Lansbury’s daughters, Daisy and Minnie, both of whom were friends of Ruby’s from their Suffragette years together, looked after the horses now that their stable lad had gone off to war. They were reluctant to sell off their equine friends, as they were concerned the poor things might end up in the horsemeat trade, so when Nash had mentioned that he would find a horse & cart useful but didn’t have anywhere to keep it, they were quick to rent one to him. The women offered him free usage, and would continue to stable and look after the horse gratis, on the understanding that he paid for its feed. Lansbury had not been entirely happy with the arrangement, but if there was anyone more than Nash whom it was advisable to keep in the good books of, it was his feisty young daughters. He ceded and the deal had been done.
Nash dropped the horse & cart off with Daisy at the wood yard and trudged the short distance home.
The Nashes lived in part of a house in Selwyn Road, only a few minutes’ walk from the nursery. And it was even closer to the restaurant and toy factory. It was, what had once been, a fine white plastered terraced cottage complete with bow windowed frontage, built a century earlier when the Industrial Revolution had arrived in Bow. It would have originally housed a skilled worker, his family, their servant and perhaps an aged parent or two. The couple now shared it with a recently widowed young woman, Maud Kemp, and her eighteen month old daughter, Rose. Ruby and Nash had the downstairs, the family the upstairs, and they shared the kitchen, scullery and outside toilet.
The Nashes had never met Maud’s husband, Herbert. When he had joined up voluntarily the previous year, he had been accepted into the army even though he was below the minimum height requirement. The army was so desperate for men that they set up ‘bantam’ battalions. The slight man, stunted from the genes of descendants who had lived too long in poverty, had been one of the 20th Service Battalion (Shoreditch) Middlesex Regiment. On his departure, the government had been slow to pay his wife her separation allowance, so rather than live on ‘air pie’, she had moved to Selwyn Road because it was close to Sylvia’s highly regarded nursery and within walking distance of munitions factories where she knew she would be able to find decently paid work.
Maud’s parents were dead. She had sisters living nearby, but not all families were as close and supportive as the government’s war propaganda would have everyone believe. Maud was on her own. It was Ruby who comforted her when the dreaded telegram arrived to inform her that her husband had been killed in action. The two women had always got on well, but now there was an intimate bond between them.
These sorts of events left Ruby with pangs of guilt over her and Nashey’s stance on the war. Should they be assisting in the war effort, even though they didn’t believe in it, just out of basic human decency? But when Maud’s widow’s pension failed to materialise, which meant that she had to continue to put herself at risk working with TNT in the munitions factory, the guilt was replaced by anger and contempt for a government that treated its people this way.
Not that working in such danger afforded her very much in the way of creature comforts. The Rents Restrictions Act, brought in by the government earlier in the war in reaction to rent strikes and protests against profiteering landlords, had capped rents at pre-war levels. But even before the war, the law of supply and demand assured that rents in the overcrowded East End were too high in relation to local wage levels. And with no additional funds arriving in their coffers at a time of galloping inflation, landlords had no desire to spend any money on their properties. Dwellings were thus returning to the slum condition of a bygone era.
The Nash & Kemp home had certainly seen better days. Lighting was of the wax variety; the outside plaster was flaking off and any part of the outside walls that could not easily be reached was caked in grime and soot; doors were warped and window seals failed to do their job so the place was rather too well aired in winter; and there was rising damp throughout. And the only reason there were no bugs in the walls, was that Nash, who had lived through the horrors of Victorian slums, spent much of his spare time scraping and wallpapering both his and Maud’s section of the house.
The Nash half of this near-slum could only be afforded because Sylvia insisted Ruby draw a decent living wage from her charity’s coffers and the man of the house had a part time job in George Lansbury’s wood yard. The job was partly for the sake of appearances, so nobody would ever wonder what Nash got up to all hours of the day and night. Lansbury’s son, Willie, under whom Nash worked, knew the score. If anyone asked, Nash was a full time employee. But in reality he spent half of his waking hours on his work protecting objectors.
These wages enabled the Nashes to pay their rent and keep a little aside for a rainy day. And if they didn’t want to pay their landlord his prices, there were plenty of reasonably well paid munitions workers flooding into the area who would.
Nash found Ruby had only just got in herself, having spent the afternoon with a friend in South London. Once Nash had reassured his wife that his latest objector venture had passed off without incident, they ate a none-too romantic candlelit supper which was testament to them having already blown their rations cards for the week. The larder was bare, save for a few grain products. But Nash would not eat bread now that the government had changed it from white to brown, so the couple devoured maize semolina and, thanks to rationing and the warmer weather meaning coal was now much easier to come by, the kettle kept them supplied with copious amounts of tea.
The couple spent the evening swapping shocking stories they had heard from a woman police officer and a man recently returned from the trenches.
Chapter 16
“There will be work of all kinds that will want doing, and women will have to do it…But…there must be an absolute determination not to go back after the war to the old position of subordination. The new spirit of women inculcated during the last decade must strike through all their labours and illuminate all their actions.”
Votes for Women newspaper 1914
The chatting and cosy snuggling up together of the previous evening had been replaced by a little early morning tension in the Nash household.
Nash never was at his best first thing in the morning, so Ruby’s usual routine was to leave him in bed with a cup of tea, for which she might receive a grunt of gratitude if she was lucky. She would then pop out to the nursery to open up ready for the arrival of the nurses. By the time she returned to her husband, he would have risen, had a ‘sloosh’ from a bucket of water out the back; dressed and ceased to be a miserable old devil.
But this morning they were awoken by an unexpected knock on the door. In the line of work Nash was in, this was no mundane event. It could be men in uniform carrying a rifle or two, coming to pay him a visit. Nash jumped up from their creaking, drooping old bedstead and grabbed weaponry, trousers and boots in that order, while his wife shouted the obvious question. Nash was half way through donning his trousers, doing the one-legged hop that men do when attempting to complete the normally slow but sure exercise quicker than physics allows, when a man’s voice boomed back an answer through the door.
“Taxi!”
“Hang about, we’ll be out in a minute!” shouted Ruby, stepping into her clothes with far more speed not to mention grace than her husband.
Their bedroom being on the ground floor, they didn’t need to be awoken by the local knocker-up’s pea-shooter, but Ruby had paid G
ranny Brown her usual fee to wrap on their door before any self-respecting cockerel was awake. They appeared to have slept through it.
The cabbie guessed the situation correctly. He carried on the conversation through the door.
“Paid old Granny Brown a penny to give you a knock did you?” he shouted with joviality both the Nashes considered thoroughly inappropriate at this time of the morning. “She probably didn’t turn up. I heard she’s nursing some of her family. Her son and his wife have both gone down with the flu, so she’s looking after them, a niece and the grandchildren.”
“What’s all this in aid of?” demanded Nash of his wife.
“You’ve forgotten haven’t you?” retorted Ruby. “I’m off to the West End. I’ve got meetings lined up with Selfridge’s, Marshall & Snelgrove, Liberty’s and Gamages. You’re supposed to be coming with me.”
Nash had forgotten. He had no objector work on, and the wood factory didn’t need him, so he had been looking forward to spending the day with his wife, while she attempted to get orders for the toy factory from leading West End shops.
The factory not only provided well paid jobs for local women and had an in-house nursery for their children, it manufactured products that were in short supply once relations had been severed with Britain’s main foreign supplier of toys. Ruby was thus confident of getting some sales and was taking several large boxes of samples with her, so had dropped a hint that she needed a big strong fellow along.
Nash had offered his services as delivery man for the trip and his further offer of paying for tea at the Lyons Corner House in the Strand had been most cordially accepted. The café had a romantic element to it, having been where the couple had enjoyed tea together on their way to a Suffragette protest outside Buckingham Palace six years earlier. It had been quite a day, starting with Ruby kissing Nash for the first time, much to his surprise. And although it had ended with Ruby battered and bruised, and Nash being carted off to court for showing several policemen the error of their ways, the Strand retained fond memories for the couple.
But Nash was still getting over the shock of being rousted from his bed, so his mood was inclined rather more towards the early morning grump than the love struck romantic.
“What we got a taxi for?” he moaned. “Waste of money if you ask me, when we’ve got a perfectly good horse & cart in the wood yard.”
“Well first of all, no one is asking you, are they darling?” He had walked straight into that one. “And you know that taxis are Sylvia’s one little luxury. She’s given up everything for the likes of us down here in Bow, and the one thing she likes to treat herself to, is a taxi. The toy factory can afford it. If I get an order from Selfridge’s for some stuffed animals that’ll pay for a hundred taxis.”
“What’s Sylvia got to do it with the price of fish?”
“Darling, we are dropping her off on the way, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She is hoping to persuade them to have an exhibition of our British, Japanese and African baby dolls. They are unique. Our moulded china heads are the first to include life-like foreign ones. Even German toymakers before the war never managed that.”
“Horse taxi is it? Least that’ll be cheaper.”
Ruby was about to add a third darling to the conversation and some censure about her husband being such a grumpy old sod, when she remembered why he was so opposed to motor cars. Nash had only been in a motorised vehicle twice in his life. The first time was when, suffering from frostbite, an ambulance had transported him off the Titanic survivors’ rescue ship to a New York hospital. The second was when a Black Maria had taken him to the cells of Bow Street magistrates’ court and from there on to Brixton prison. Needless to say he did not have particularly fond memories of a horseless carriage.
She put her arms around her husband and kissed him before softening her tone.
“Oi grump. It’s going to be a long day. We can’t afford to hang about. I’m sorry but I’ve had to order a motor taxi. But once we’ve got to the first shop, we’ll pay the cabbie off and get a horse-drawn for the rest of my rounds. I’ll have given all my stock away to the shops as samples so we won’t have anything to carry home, so we can get a horse-tram home from Lyons’. How’s that?”
Nash’s mood transformed in an instant. He nodded and smiled lovingly at his wife before producing a mock sneer.
“Since when were black and yellow china bonces art?”
Ruby pulled a face and poked her tongue out at him before changing into a warm smile.
“Never mind bonces, you’ve got work to do. Carry my crates out to the taxi for me and be quick about it my good man.”
Nash pretended to be a shuffling lackey, touching his forelock as he scampered to pick up the crates.
******
The cab stopped outside Selfridge’s. All other large London department stores had grown from smaller shops over time. Selfridge’s was the first to be built from scratch as a large enterprise. It had been possible because the land and existing premises in the area had been cheap to buy up. This was the poor end of Oxford Street, with many tenements built for the needy opposite the store but hidden away discreetly behind Bond Street underground station.
And the great entrepreneur, showman, loyal Anglophile and war supporter that was Harry Gordon Selfridge, had huge war information sheets pasted up on his front windows, telling the populace everything the government and newspapers were willing to tell them about the war.
It was therefore not unusual for the area around the entrance to be crowded, and for many of the crowd to be members of the local poor. And today was no different.
On seeing the crowds, Ruby asked the cabbie to pull in fifty yards up from the entrance at the corner of the store, where it was less busy. It would be easier to alight and to unload her samples. When the cab came to a halt, Nash stepped out onto the pavement and started to pull the crate marked Selfridge’s out onto the pavement. Ruby stayed in the cab and helped push out the crate. Out of the corner of his eye Nash spotted a group of four ragged teenage lads hanging about on the corner, doing what such young men did; hands in pockets, spitting on the ground, swearing and looking morosely at the cove who had just got out of a taxi cab. Had he been in the East End, Nash would have kept an eye on them but here in the West End, he didn’t pay them any attention.
But he should have. Within seconds of the crate touching the pavement, they were on him. Two grabbed Nash while the other two made to pick up the crate. It was a mistake. All four of the thugs should have attempted to neutralise their victim before worrying about their prize. Nash grabbed an arm, twisted it behind its owner’s shoulder blades and kicked the assailant to the ground, before stamping down hard on the foot of his other attacker. This had the youth hopping straight into an elbow to the throat. The lad collapsed to the ground as his Adam’s apple turned to cider. His two mates dropped the package, and made for Nash. But they had no idea what they were getting into. They had been in many a fight before, but these had been fights between teenagers. Lots of posturing, swearing, throwing out of arms and legs like demented puppets, but few real solid blows struck, at least until someone was on the ground, and then they would wade in. But now they were taking on a man who was reaching inside his coat for something that was going to introduce a whole new level of violence to the proceedings.
It was at this point that Ruby stepped in.
“Leave ‘em alone Nashey, they’re only lads!” she said, throwing herself between her husband and his attackers.
Meanwhile one of the young men whom Nash had deposited on the pavement, had got back on his feet and joined his two friends. The three of them struck out at Nash around and over Ruby, while calling Nash every name under the sun.
Nash managed to multi task landing further blows on his attackers while answering his wife.
“They’re old enough to get a bleedin’ good hiding that’s what they are!”
“Oi! Oi! Oi! All of you! Stop it. Now! Stop it I say!!!”
And much to her amazement, they did. At least, the physical side of the combat. The young men backed off a couple of yards. One of them went to attend his gurgling mate laying on the pavement, while the other two continued to hurl abuse at the man in front of them. Nash replied with East End violence of the tongue, much of which had been out of common circulation since the 1880’s. Ruby continued to act as peacemaker, and eventually the abuse turned from threats of what each side were going to do to each other, to childish jibes. It was when the lads were telling the opposition to “fuck off and go and pick up your old age pension,” while Nash retaliated by telling them they were nothing but “little titty babies who should go home to mummy,” that Ruby knew she had control of the situation.
The young men eventually turned and disappeared round the corner, and the oasis of space which had appeared when Oxford Street onlookers had drawn back from the confrontation like a receding wave on the beach, was now absorbed as the tide came back in again.
******
Normally Ruby would have chosen her moment with more care. But here they were, she and her beloved, in their favourite café, with her glowing from the excitement of her success. She had got orders for baby dolls, some with wax heads, some with moulded china ones. And not just the British white dolls, but the much more difficult to sell oriental Japanese and black African ones too. She also had orders for various stuffed animals, and also wooden boy-scout and girl-guide toys. Nash was on good form too, as he was enjoying some reflected glory because as well as hiding objectors, he had once hidden a German toymaker friend of his, who had made the originals of all the toys, which were now copied by the women in the toy factory. And for the wooden toys, it was the wood yard in which Nash worked, that supplied the raw material.