by Bob Biderman
CHAPTER 5
IT WAS A strange and curious meeting. She knew him slightly; he didn’t know her at all – at least he didn’t think he did. But that didn’t matter as they had been fated to connect – or at least it seemed that way when they thought about it some time later.
Mordecai was the one who made the match, unwittingly, of course. It was he who said it would be good for their dealings with the Jewish Board of Guardians. And, really, it was a simple request. A journalist wished to write an article on the arrival of refugees at the London docks and needed the services of an interpreter. The journalist had contacted the Board and the Board had contacted him. There would be no payment involved – it was one of those gestures deemed necessary in maintaining good relations with the news media which the Guardians understood to be vital to their continued success in keeping the lid on the boiling cauldron of what had come to be known as ‘the immigrant question.’
For his part, Z had no real objection as long as he had the time. He was astute enough to realise that journalistic careers were built around the currency of the ‘quid pro quo.’ But what he didn’t know, because Mordecai hadn’t told him (since Mordecai, himself, didn’t know), was that the journalist he was slated to escort was a woman. And that was all because of a splotchy ink job which blurred the ‘iss’ in ‘Miss’ and made it gender free – just an ‘M’ and a blotch. Z, however, wasn’t the sort to take offence at a female member of the writing class. Indeed, he had no objection to women doing anything and in later life found himself in the front ranks of those brave men who campaigned forcefully for gender equality. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t surprised to see a womanly figure awaiting him at the appointed spot, notebook and pencil in hand, wearing a very determined expression.
They waited some hours for a boat to arrive. Boats came and went according to the tide and the weather conditions at sea where the currents and winds and the waters’ swell played havoc with any pretence of accurate landing times. You could never tell exactly when one would dock. For those who waited at the jetty there was always a strange silence of expectation – that curious calm before a tumultuous event. The few friends and relatives, dressed in their second-hand finery, stood poised to greet the lucky ones, helping to ease their entry into the rough and tumble East End birth canal, braving the harbour chill and shuffling their feet to keep their near-to-ragged bodies warm while up above, at the gin depot, the loungers, the roughs, the casuals who drank away their earnings as soon as a penny hit their calloused hand, pointed their battered fingers and laughed a drink-soddened cackle at the thought of more destitute ‘greeners’ emerging, hungry and bemused, from their watery tomb and climbing, legless, onto shore, looking as ridiculous as so many others had before them.
There was another group Z pointed out to her, a nasty lot, waiting like wolves for their prey to be delivered. They were, he said, the most repulsive of East London parasites – but, like all God’s creatures, parasites or not, they needed sustenance; for it was fear of starvation that brought them to this sorry state where they would feed on their brethren like shipwrecked sailors on a windswept isle who eat their mates out of desperation, because they’re too frightened or hungry or stupid to realise that the sea, itself, is full of nourishment if they only knew how to harvest it.
Nearby a squat little man with a sweaty brow wearing a badge that Z told her identified him as the representative of the Hebrew Ladies’ Protective Society, looked nervously at the wolves already starting to lick their chops in anticipation of fresh meat soon on its way. But he was slow and clumsy, while they were quick and lean. Perhaps he would rescue a young woman that day before she was swept up by a smarmy landsman who knew her language and even the town she came from and would help her find her way through the treacherous London jungle which was no place for a young woman like her to be travelling through alone. What happened then? Perhaps she would be bundled off in his carriage and taken back to Tilbury, bound for the promised land – or so she was told. And that would be the last anyone would see of her until she reached the brothels of Argentina. If the squat little man wearing the badge of the Protective Society got to her first, he might save her from that particular misery. But, then again, who knew what adventures lay along the mysterious path of life? From a single bleak and dismal moment in time one would be hard put to predict the next. The hapless woman bound for the Argentine brothel might end up marrying a displaced Sephardic aristocrat who had carved out a cattle empire in the Pampas while the young girl saved by the squat little man could find herself making match boxes at six pennies a gross and living in a dingy cellar with twenty starving children. Life, said Z, held out infinite possibilities and we, as mere mortals, could only sit back and occasionally wonder at the many and multifarious facets of the unknowable universe.
Maggie was truly horrified to hear him speak like that. Suffering was a sin and a terrible crime against humanity. It was up to the knowledgeable people of the world, those of strong, abiding moral fibre, to stop this abomination. How would this be done? Through exposure, education and organisation, of course: exposure though the written word which could win the hearts and minds of those who hold the reins of power; education of all about the evils that persist and organisation of resources to put an end to crime and suffering.
And what, asked Z, if it were in the interests of people who hold the reins of power that suffering exists? For is it not true that power is built on wealth and wealth is built on the suffering of others?
If that be the case, Maggie responded, then the reins must be removed from those unworthy hands and placed in the grip of others who have accepted the moral obligation to uphold natural justice.
And Z said to himself – for he didn’t dare say it to her – ‘If it were only that simple…’ But a moment later his thought burst like a bubble pricked by the arrow of time as the first boat of the afternoon arrived through the narrow entrance of the landing stage, disgorging the voyagers from another planet, those glassy-eyed refugees from the firestorm in the East which scattered them like terrified animals escaping the annihilation of their ancestral forest, destitute (40% came with less than 10 shillings in their pocket) and homeless. As they emerged, tired, hungry but aching to breathe freedom’s pure and wholesome air, they were besieged by the parasites who pushed forward seizing hold of the bundles and baskets of those hapless newcomers who had no one on shore to meet, and carting them off to parts unknown with promises of work and lodging and something hot to put in their shrunken stomachs. The diminutive man from the Hebrew Ladies’ Protective Society struggled through the crowd looking for unescorted females and handing out cards to others instructing them how to find the Poor Jew’s Temporary Shelter in Leman Street. But it was a hopeless task with all the shouts and cries, the chaos and confusion of the emerging masses, accompanied by the callous laughter of the unemployed dockers who watched in coarse amusement, happy to see these miserable unfortunates who were even worse off than themselves and happier still to shout in a language the others could scarcely understand that they should get back on the boat and leave because nobody in England wanted them.
Maggie watched in horror and tried to write up the scene even though she felt it indescribable. It happened in a blink of an eye and was over in an instant as some were carted off by the touts and the rest melted away into the teeming roads right behind the docks that led into the slums of Whitechapel – all except for one slight girl, not more than sixteen years of age, with mousy hair and a look of sublime wonder who was led away by the squat little man who wore an official badge on his jacket.
Afterward, she questioned Z more about those people, those phantoms from another world who passed like docile cattle from boat to shore and then disappearing into the East End abattoir. He told her that most immigrants travelled across Germany by train for the ports of Bremen, Hamburg or Rotterdam. There was fierce competition between the shipping companies for the refugee traffic, since s
hips which made the eastward journey across the Atlantic found them the easiest and most economic cargo for their holds, as they were self loading and the profit per pound was better than that for a sack of potatoes. The British lines competed with the continental companies – it was cheaper to travel from Europe to England and then from Liverpool to America than from Europe direct to the United States – where most of them really wanted to go. Fares to England were low – Hamburg to London was as little as 15s – kept cheap by agents who leased part of a ship’s hold and then sold individual tickets to migrants, filling up the allotted space as far as it would go (and often further), and, in the process, netting themselves a tidy profit. There were at least four steamers a week from Hamburg, three from Rotterdam and three from Bremen.
Most of the refugees arrived with little or no money, Z said. Some of them – linguistically confused and misdirected by unscrupulous agents – didn’t even know where they were headed. Was it London, Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow or some port in America? It wasn’t till they actually disembarked that they found out where it was they had landed. Until then they sat in the hold or crushed up on deck, looking bewildered, dressed in their unkempt Eastern European clothes, and praying to their God to lead them somewhere safer than the place they had so sorrowfully left: that place they had loved as their homeland, not the nation but the village or the shtetl where they were born as were their parents and their grandparents – reaching back into the hollowness of time, some many hundreds of years ago when the Jews were first invited to settle in what was then the Polish Kingdom.
At first, Z told her, the immigrants who arrived without resources of their own were left to starve or, at the most, given a stipend to travel on, hoping that this harsh treatment would serve as a warning to others who might have also thought of entering this unwelcome land that somehow persisted in myth as having streets paved with gold. But nothing could quell the human tide which had no time for logic or for reason and when, in 1884, the realisation finally hit home that little could be done to stop the endless flow, a baker, himself a former refugee, set up the Jews’ Temporary Shelter – much against the wishes of the all powerful Guardians.
It was only later, horrified by stories of young Jewesses being forced into prostitution, that the wealthy daughter of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, aided by Claude Montefiore, founded a Jewish Ladies Society for Protection and Rescue Work. And it was this organisation that employed an agent to wait at the docks for boats likely to be carrying single girls without friends or family to meet them. But even so, for every one approached and ‘saved,’ ten others disappeared into the teeming crowds, many of whom were then lost to the parasites who knew how valuable a commodity young womanhood was, regardless of class, race or the dire state of their wardrobe.
CHAPTER 6
THEY STROLLED BACK together from the mouldering docks, following the well-trod route into Whitechapel oblivious to the buzz and the splatter, the mud, the groaning stink of horseflesh as it strained to carry more than its share of stuff and provisions to the stores and shops that supplied the multifarious beehive of activity sweating away in that labyrinth of streets and lanes which all held secret dreams and passions, stories and fantasies that both Z and Maggie had struggled to encapsulate. Z sometimes saw that route as an uphill tributary of the Thames, a never ending stream that led from the city wharves to the dens of the East End; a special one that flowed not with water but with people – his people – and that reached back to Tilbury, back to the icy waters of the Channel, back to the ports of Hamburg or Bremen, back, back, back into the European heartlands which had vomited up a tidal wave of bodies; a vast, relentless, unstoppable torrent sweeping an endless supply of battered humanity along the path they walked that day.
And one after another, the streets, the lanes, the houses, the rooms, each with a density of animal matter which made them the most tightly packed bit of real estate in Europe – all these streets and lanes and houses and rooms had bodies that needed to be fed and souls that needed sustaining. Yet what intrigued him was not how many but how few actually starved there. How did it happen that more people weren’t picked up from the street with bellies swollen from the fatal gasses generated through the last and bitterly ironic stage of starvation? As they packed themselves together, out of fear, poverty and protection, into rookeries, dank and demonic, how did they escape the plague of endemic diseases that often came with environmental hazard?
Maggie asked that question as they walked. Z avoided giving her a straightforward response as he had a deep and abiding suspicion of social reformers who came out of the so-called ‘educated middle-classes’, and thus he purposely constructed enigmatic replies that (he hoped) forced them to follow their reasoning into a paradoxical realm outside their boxed-in universe. So he told her, simply, that what’s important is not what isn’t but what is. Maggie being someone who prided herself on clear-cut thought found that sort of answer quite unacceptable (even if she bothered to consider what it meant, which she didn’t) and said, in response to what she thought they were talking about – namely why a major plague had yet to occur in the East End – that a tinder box needs only a spark to set it off even if it sits quite harmlessly for a month, a year or even a decade. Which, she continued, is what liberal education brings to the service of civilisation – the ability to see the overriding nature of cause and effect. But, she admitted, it was quite astonishing how the Jewish people could survive so well in such dire poverty. Which brought Z to explain to her his theory of the Farthing Shop. For without the Farthing Shop, he said, many more would have perished from hunger and malnutrition.
If one had a shilling, he explained, one could buy a decent piece of meat in any shop in London and have enough left over to purchase some bread and ale. But if one were living on pennies, there was a problem of what to purchase because most grocers were unwilling to service the poor (whose trade they neither needed nor desired). Whereas in Whitechapel the poor were the mainstay of the grocer’s trade and so, in order to cater for them, a system was devised whereby this moneyless clientele could purchase anything for a farthing – though the quantity might be infinitesimally small. So if you came in with a penny you might purchase, when divided into farthings, not one thing but four. A penny’s worth of herring might be the fish, but a farthing’s worth might be the head or tail. Another farthing might buy you a half of a carrot, a slice of onion for another, and for the last one you might even have a thimble full of ale. So in the East End, a penny could buy you, in the miniature of course, an entire meal whereas in other parts of London you found yourself quite hard pressed to dine at all.
As Maggie had been living in the East End for several months herself, she realised that it was possible to survive on the cheap if one knew where to go, but it was just as possible to be gouged quite mercilessly if one didn’t. And for the recent immigrants who were unfamiliar with the language and the lay of the land, the chances of being taken for a soaking and left hanging high and dry, were very good – except, of course, as the major language of trade in parts of Whitechapel was Yiddish, Maggie was as much the immigrant as those fresh off the boat from Poland. For, indeed, parts of the East End were like another country mysteriously transposed onto England. So who was really the foreigner there? It was a question that Z thought about most earnestly and Maggie thought about very little.
They walked up Commercial Road till they came to the corner of Flower and Dean Street, stopping before a warehouse with dull brick walls darkened with soot. Maggie pointed to the frontage door which led inside to a restaurant and told Z that this was the place Dickens had written about twenty-five years before when he had ventured within, attracted by a handbill telling of a cooking depôt for the workers in the district. He was a supporter of the co-operative movement, she said, but was well aware that it could be used as a mask to pay workers a pittance for their labour. In fact, before he gave his support, he asked to see their business accounts, and onc
e satisfied they were fair, he was quite enthusiastic in recommending the place – writing in glowing terms of the well ventilated, clean and brightly painted dining rooms, the cheerful young waitresses and the nourishing, wholesome food which easily rivalled the rubbish served in the City’s posh and pricey clubs. But what impressed him most was the dignity and spirit of those who ran this enterprise – which had only been up and running a week or so before he arrived.
They went inside and purchased some penny tickets at the kiosk in the vestibule before making their way to the main dining room and seating themselves at a table. The room still had an open feel, though the walls were no longer clean and bright as they were when Dickens had first come. Twenty-five years had given them a patina of age, the product of ten thousand days of boiled beef and mutton. The waitresses, too, were no longer young and cheerful. The smile had faded with their bloom and in its place a look similar, perhaps, to the walls where layers of time had been harshly embedded.
Maggie told him that she came on occasion as it felt comfortable to eat here alone. And for a few pennies she could have some nourishing soup and bread, though, of course, one couldn’t linger too long over meals as the restaurant was always full during dinnertime and then seats were at a premium.
They ordered coffees and biscuits. Z liked the look of the place – it was a people’s emporium without pomp or pretence. There were all sorts of characters scattered about the spacious room – artisans, elderly couples, unescorted women, a man dressed in rags whose hair stood up in spiky tufts and who kept reading the menu over and over again apparently without comprehension, another in a stiff white collar (a bank clerk perhaps?) played nervously with a teaspoon as his eyes focused on a charming red-head across the room who, herself, was glancing coyly at a sailor whose rolled-up sleeve displayed a tattoo of a naked dancer doing the koochy-koo every time he pumped his bicep.