‘I can’t fathom it out,’ said Swann, when he’d finished reading their instruction. ‘If the books are purchased and studied by women, why paint out the short and curlies? What are they hoping to hide from the reader that can’t be found in a bedroom mirror?’
‘I suppose the sight of their own short and curlies must make ’em feel faint,’ cackled Cromwell Marsh. ‘Women is very fastidious creatures.’
‘Why don’t they leave them in their drawers?’
‘You can’t perform nude gymnastics in drawers!’ protested Marsh.
‘But it’s not healthy,’ insisted Swann. ‘It gives a false impression. It makes grown women look like monstrous babies.’
‘A woman is lewd until she’s shorn and then she becomes a nude,’ said Marsh.
‘So much commotion over women’s whiskers,’ sighed Kingdom Swann. ‘It’s a wonder that women haven’t taken to shaving.’
‘What shall we do,’ said Cromwell Marsh, ‘when life imitates art?’
They chose little Ethel Spooner for The Fresh Air and Sun-Bath System. She was small and bright and built like a dancer. She had also been blessed with a very dainty set of whiskers which she trimmed to a feather with a pair of scissors, to save Cromwell Marsh the strain to his eyes when it came to retouching the plates.
The authoress had provided a full set of pencil diagrams to guide them through the photographs. The Handstand. The Crab. The Vertical Swing. None of it looked difficult and the only equipment they needed to find was a metal climbing frame. It seemed like easy money.
For the first few chapters Ethel performed like an acrobat. She stretched and strutted and positively glowed with health. She walked on her hands and stood on her head. But towards the sixth chapter she was finding it hard to play the part of the laughing sunbeam. She grew sullen and clumsy and lost concentration. On the morning of the seventh set of exercises she arrived for work in great distress, pulled off her clothes and burst into tears.
It was several minutes before she found the breath to speak. Swann made her blow her nose. Marsh gave her sips of sweet brown sherry and a slice of sultana cake. Snuffling, choking, spitting crumbs, with her eyes burnt by mascara and her nose as raw as a radish, she managed, at last, to tell them her troubles.
She had been evicted from her room in Heaven’s Yard. There had been no warning. The landlord had arrived and given her notice to make some other arrangements. She was frightened and confused. She didn’t know where to turn for help.
‘Why does he want you to leave?’ asked Swann gently.
‘It’s the room, sir,’ sobbed Ethel. ‘He says it’s terrible overcrowded.’
‘How’s that?’ said Swann. He helped her wipe her nose with an end of the sodden handkerchief.
‘I share it with my family, sir, and there’s seven of us all together,’ she sniffed.
‘Seven in a room?’ laughed Swann.
‘None of us is very big,’ scowled Ethel, ‘and we takes it in turns to use the bed.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ said Swann. He stopped laughing. He turned to Cromwell Marsh for support. The story was preposterous. But Marsh, who was better informed of Ethel’s unhappy circumstance, drained the last of the sherry and maintained a guilty silence.
‘Perhaps you could stay with your elder sister,’ Swann suggested kindly, taking her by the hand.
‘No,’ sobbed Ethel miserably. ‘She doesn’t want me.’
‘Gloria has a room in Old Compton Street,’ whispered Marsh, as if that explained everything.
‘I’m sure she could manage until Ethel is settled again,’ said Swann, failing to understand the problem.
‘Her sister entertains gentlemen,’ said Marsh confidentially. ‘It wouldn’t be decent for little Ethel to share the room. It’s a dangerous predicament. The gentlemen is most particular …’ He was about to say more but fell silent and picked at the hairs in his nostrils.
‘Do you have no other connections?’
‘None,’ said Ethel.
‘You could sleep here,’ said Swann in desperation. He looked doubtfully around the studio.
‘A lady needs her comforts,’ objected Marsh. ‘It’s cold at night. It wouldn’t suit.’ He didn’t want a woman getting under his feet or trying to fiddle with the dark-room plumbing.
Swann nodded and frowned and searched his pockets for aniseed balls. ‘I’ll take her home!’ he said at last. It was an excellent idea. The house was huge. There were four empty bedrooms. It was a crime to let them go to waste.
‘What would Violet say about that?’ said Marsh darkly.
‘She’ll be delighted,’ said Swann. ‘Violet? She’ll be thrilled to help a woman in distress. She’s always talking about the plight of women. She’s always quoting the sisterhood.’
‘Does she work for a charity?’ asked Ethel who feared, for a moment, that she might be sent to the workhouse.
‘Bless you,’ said Swann. ‘You couldn’t call it a charity.’
‘Perhaps she works for the church,’ said Ethel. She had a friend who lived in a Christian mission. They sang for their supper and slept with bibles under their beds. It wasn’t much of a life but the food was hot and wholesome and the lodgings were secure.
Swann shook his head. ‘She’s not what you’d call a God-fearing woman,’ he said.
‘God was a man!’ roared Cromwell Marsh. He laughed loudly and pulled on his nose.
Ethel was looking confused. She felt the tears start to swell in her eyes and buried her face in the handkerchief.
‘She’s a suffragette,’ confessed Swann. ‘My housekeeper joined with the suffragettes.’
‘She’s a Millie!’ chortled Cromwell Marsh.
Ethel was very impressed. ‘I’ve seen them marching,’ she said. ‘Shouting at people and singing songs.’
‘That’s them,’ said Marsh.
‘Has she been to prison with Mrs Pankhurst?’
‘No!’ said Swann indignantly.
‘It’s her chief ambition,’ said Marsh. ‘Every time she meets a policeman she offers herself to the handcuffs. There’s no promotion in the suffragettes until you’ve been under arrest. It’s the only qualification. They want to attract the criminal classes to make their petticoat parliament.’
Swann ignored him. ‘You’ll like Violet,’ he said. ‘She’ll do everything she knows to help. You’ll have your own room, regular meals and all the comforts of home.’
Ethel wiped her eyes and smiled. Sitting, naked, on the edge of the stage she looked like a Fletcher-Whitby fairy. She was so slight you could see her bones. Her skin was very white, her hair as fine as eiderdown, her fingers and toes remarkably long and slender. But for the bumptious breasts she might have been taken for some pixilated child.
‘Is it settled?’
‘Yes,’ said Ethel. ‘Yes.’ She was so excited she jumped from the stage and threw her arms around Swann’s neck. The old man laughed and puffed out his beard.
Marsh wagged his head. ‘There’ll be trouble,’ he muttered, clacking his teeth.
21
Swann left Marsh in the studio and followed Ethel to Poland Street where she took his hand and led him through the narrow lanes towards the room in Heaven’s Yard. These cobbled tracks, cut deep as canals among the tenement buttresses, were denied any light from the sun. They were chilled and dark and running with gravy from broken drains. The buildings pressed down from every side, leaning together for support, their black walls bulging and covered with twisted flights of stairs that hung from the rooftops like cobwebs. Here and there a building had nearly been eaten away by the countless years of neglect and decay and, trapped by its neighbours with nowhere to collapse, had rotted into a skeleton. Swann was lost in this wasteland. He stumbled and tried to turn back but Ethel would not release him.
‘Is it far?’ he whispered, afraid that his voice would disturb the shadows.
‘A little further down, sir,’ she said.
The lane opened into a courty
ard filled with smoke from a smouldering fire. A large man lay, facedown, in the ashes guarded by an idiot child. The child was tied to its owner’s wrist by a length of rusty chain. Its face was badly bruised and one of its boots was missing. When Ethel and Swann tried to cross its path, the child grew alarmed, scampered around on its hands and knees, bared its teeth and barked.
‘Is it far?’ he whispered.
She squeezed the old man’s hand and led him deeper into the lanes.
‘A little further down, sir.’
The path grew darker, the ground beneath his feet erupting into pools of poisonous mud that splashed his legs and stank. He had never strayed so far into hell nor believed that such hell existed. He would die here, lost in the maze, drowned in the filth that surrounded him.
At last, when he thought that all hope was lost, Ethel steered him through a small brick porch and up a flight of stairs. These stairs, broken and buckled on their foundations, were full of cats and squatting children. A stew of smells assaulted him. Sour mutton, urine, cabbage, beer, sweat and unwashed rags. Behind locked doors there were babies bawling. Somewhere beneath them a woman was screaming.
They continued to climb through the darkness until Swann groaned aloud and felt his knees bending under him. The effort had proved too much for his heart. His legs were soft as rubber and he couldn’t organise his feet. Is this how it must end, dropping dead in a den of thieves, gold watch stolen, corpse carried off for the student surgeons? He was seized with such fear that he burst his collar. His head was wobbling in its socket.
‘It’s no good,’ he wheezed, falling down in a heap and clutching at his pounding heart. ‘I’m finished!’
‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said Ethel, standing beside an open door. ‘This one, here, is my address. We’ve arrived.’
Swann, feeling foolish, nervously picked himself up and hobbled quickly into the room.
There was a metal bed, a table and chair and a cupboard that served as a wardrobe. An old blanket had been hung against the window, reducing the room to a dismal twilight. A paraffin lamp cast its glow on the table and, at the table, sat an old woman and five, small, silent children. They were making dolls from clothes-pegs. Some of the children painted the pegs while others cut skirts from paper scraps. The mother added the faces with a tiny hogs’-hair brush. The eyes and the mouth: two dots and a dash. They didn’t stop work for Kingdom Swann but gave him a glance and ignored him. Once the faces were finished and the paper skirts fitted with a dab of glue, the dolls were pegged on lines to dry. The lines stretched beneath the ceiling like a jumble of telegraph wires.
Ethel approached the old woman and tenderly kissed her cheek. Then she kissed each child, in turn, and introduced Kingdom Swann as a gentleman philanthropist.
The woman, who seemed to be out of her wits, laughed at this news and offered to sell him her children. ‘Have this one!’ she said, cuffing the nearest boy and knocking the scissors from his hand. ‘There’s more fat on him. Some of the others are skin and bone!’ Then she fell silent and continued working with the brush as if nothing at all had happened. Two dots and a dash. Two dots and a dash.
Swann retreated into a corner and waited for Ethel to collect her belongings. Two dots and a dash. No one spoke again. He looked at the five tiny children working, tongues stuck out in concentration, snot hanging down from button noses, and the scene began to fill him with horror. It wasn’t the work that shocked him, nor even the squalor of their surroundings, but the meaningless drudgery of their labour! They had been reduced to primitive automatons, dead to the world, triggered into mechanical movement. How could they live to such little purpose, deprived of fresh air and sunlight? How did they manage to survive in this morbid state of stupefaction? He wanted to shout at them, run forward, shake them awake and lead them into the daylight world. But he was a stranger in a foreign land and could do no more than stand and stare.
After a few minutes he became aware of someone watching him through a crack in the door. He stepped forward and pulled the door open. A neat little man with a shaved head swaggered slowly into the room. He wore a velvet suit, drenched in the scent of frangipani and in one small, immaculate hand he carried a bunch of iron keys.
The man cocked an eyebrow at Swann and studied him for another full minute, paying great attention to the old man’s nose, as if he were viewing a circus attraction.
‘Do I suppose, sir, that you’re acquainted with this young baggage?’ he said at last, smiling at Swann and waving the bunch of keys at Ethel.
‘Well acquainted, sir!’ growled Swann, puffing out his beard.
‘And do I suppose that you’ve come to take the said baggage away?’
‘Yes!’ snapped Swann, ‘since you leave me no choice in the matter.’
The landlord beamed with pleasure and shook Swann by the hand, as if it were reason for jolliment. ‘My warmest congratulations! No hard feelings, I trust. I wouldn’t want her to walk the street but it’s all a matter of hygiene. Old women cause me no trouble and no more do God’s little children. Widows and orphans, sir. Widows and orphans. It’s the young women cause the heartache.’ He looked at Ethel and shuddered. ‘To tell the truth I can’t abide ’em. When they’re not fighting they’re stealing and when they’re not stealing they’re spawning. They give clean lodgings a most unsavoury reputation.’
This seemed remarkably squeamish for a man who let rooms in such a hovel but Swann was in no mood to argue with him. Ethel had already packed and said goodbye to the half-witted clothes-peg family. Her luggage did not amount to more than a bag of clothes, two pairs of boots, a coronation mug, a little mirror in a seashell frame and a very tattered vulture-quill hat.
‘You’re a rum old dog,’ grinned the landlord as he followed them into the passage. ‘But I’ve no doubt a fresh young baggage can teach you a few new tricks. And once you’ve had your fun and frolics she’ll earn you a pretty penny.’
Swann glared at the landlord. His face was black with rage and a rush of blood inflated his nose. He turned upon the unfortunate man and let out a roar that burst in the air like a thunderstorm. ‘May you burn in the fires of hell, sir!’ he bellowed. Despite his great age and his tremulous bulk he could still strike fear into men with a shout. When he let it rip he could shatter coal and knock a child dead at twenty paces. It was a deep and penetrating bark that punched the stuffing from his opponents and shocked the world into silence.
The landlord flung himself at the wall and tried to stifle a whimper.
‘Are you ready?’ said Swann, turning to Ethel.
‘I’m ready,’ she whispered.
He bundled her thankfully down the stairs and hurried her home towards Golden Square. She would have the big bedroom with the Chinese curtains, a good hot bath every morning and four square meals a day. She would have new frocks, silk drawers, the best of everything.
22
Violet Askey received the refugee in the drawing room and, while she served sweet tea and toast, Swann talked about their adventures.
‘You could never imagine such hell!’ he said. ‘How can anything but disease be expected to flourish in those conditions? It’s a national disgrace. We saw infants so pale they must never have seen God’s light of day. Dozens of ’em in a bed that they share with the lice and the vermin. People so wretched and poor they’d cut your throat for a sixpence. We saw such sights that would curdle your blood and give you nightmares for the rest of your life.’
Ethel sat on the edge of her chair, desperately clutching a bone china cup. She didn’t have the courage to drink. She sat before Violet, frozen with fright, and studied a distant dangle of grapes in the brilliance of the stained glass windows.
‘A disgrace!’ concluded Swann. He was flushed with indignation. He couldn’t convey the smell, the noise, the horror of it.
The housekeeper listened in silence. She was staring at Ethel with hard, unblinking eyes. A blue vein twitched in her temple. When Swann had finished his address he told V
iolet to take their guest to the room with the Chinese curtains.
‘Provide her with every comfort,’ he shouted after them. ‘She’s been the victim of constant neglect. We must see that she wants for nothing.’
‘I hope you’ll make yourself at home,’ Violet said crisply, as she led the unfortunate girl upstairs. ‘We shall dine at eight o’clock tonight. I trust you find that convenient. We are, naturally, at your beck and call.’
Ethel dropped a curtsey. She was so intimidated she spent the rest of the day in her room, perched on a chair in her vulture-quill hat.
At dinner she could not touch the food. She seemed alarmed by the starched linen and the sparkling silver, the glow of electric candlesticks, the tiny, hand-written menu cards, the elaborate etiquette employed to spoon a pudding. Violet had spared no pains in the kitchen to create a long and difficult supper.
‘You poor child, I was told you were starving,’ she murmured as she served her guest with a large, boiled trout.
The fish stared blindly at Ethel with an eye cooked into a milky blister and dared her to disturb its bones. Ethel looked to Swann for help but the old man was falling asleep, his hands loose, his face sinking into his pillow of beard. It had been a long day and he’d lost all his appetite for food. His nose was still haunted by the stink of the rooms in Heaven’s Yard. So she sat at the table, embarrassed and silent, with Violet standing at her shoulder, until Swann woke up with a snuffle and grunt.
‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What?’ He swept the napkin from his lap and stared in surprise at his plate. ‘It’s a damn fish!’
‘They’re very wholesome,’ said Violet. ‘I thought you’d welcome the nourishment.’
Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer Page 8