Harry returned from the dock at lunchtime with a barrowload of white uniforms from the Aquitania. ‘It’s the talk of the docks,’ he said. ‘There are lads up there who live on streets where the bombs fell. Spoke to one fella and he said he was woken by a big bang, looked out of the window and there was a line of fire along the centre of the street. Flames the height of houses, he reckoned. Bomb had landed in the road. Another bloke said he walked past a bombed house on the way to work, the front completely collapsed, all the floors caved in. Could see upstairs fireplaces, wallpaper flapping in the wind, pictures still hanging on walls. At the back of a room was a piano, not a scratch on it, he said.’
‘They can’t let this happen,’ said Nell. ‘They’ll have it stopped. Somehow, somewhere, someone will have it stopped. Dropping bombs on people’s houses, it’s … evil, it’s just … evil.’
‘Gave me a turn hearing what some of them fellas were saying, I can tell you, doll,’ said Harry. He paused for a moment before adding, ‘Think I might just pop down Cundy’s for one.’
Nell inclined her head as if to say, OK, just this once.
She watched him go, then looked up and down the street. Where normally a sunny day would bring the women out, the older ones sitting out on stools, and chatting back and forth across the dusty street, today was different. There was just the odd pair of women talking quietly together, shaking their heads and occasionally glancing nervously upwards, but otherwise the street was almost free of activity.
Nell looked up at the sky. It was blue and for once not lined with smoke trails, a northerly breeze taking the carbon cloud outpourings of the factories across the Thames to the south. Nell had always been drawn to the sky. There was something benign about it, especially among the dirt and smoke and grime of the east end of London. She liked to look up, and had always noticed she was unusual in that. In Silvertown, like everywhere else, people’s heads stayed down, but Nell’s would turn to the sun, or follow a bird into the sky until it became a speck and was gone. There was comfort in the sky, above the chimneys and cranes; in the sky was the knowledge there was more to the world than factories, docks and the constant battle to keep going, to pay the rent and clothe the children. As a mother of many who was running a business, those moments when she could stop for a moment and lift her face to the sky were fleeting yet invaluable. There was rare peace there. At least there had been until last night. Now the sky was as dangerous as the rest of it. She sighed, turned and went back inside.
Harry returned a couple of hours later, when Cundy’s had closed for the afternoon. Normally when this occurred he’d be buoyant and boisterous, sometimes waltzing in and lifting Nell off the ground and twirling her around, planting kisses on her cheek. Fortunately Harry was always a happy drunk, but that day he walked through the shop door looking thoughtful and with a furrowed brow.
‘You all right, love?’ asked Nell.
‘I don’t like it, doll,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Don’t like what?’
‘I don’t like this atmosphere,’ he said. ‘There’s something … sinister in the air and I can’t put my finger on it. We were talking about the bombings last night and everyone had heard something different, something bad, whether it was finding pieces of people lying around on the ground or shifty-looking blokes doing furtive things beforehand, as if there were Huns among us. Everyone in there was brooding, as if something was simmering just below the surface. The only thing I can think of to compare it to is a gas leak. It’s as if it’s just going to take a little spark to set something off, something big. It’s like everyone’s powerless but powerful at the same time but the power doesn’t have an outlet yet.’
As the afternoon became evening the atmosphere became thicker, until Nell felt she was almost breathing liquid. She felt relieved to close up for the day, relieved that all the girls were in, that Harry was in, and Charlie was sleeping in his cot. Then the evening grew darker and the night sky began to menace the little world of Constance Street.
Yet when menace visited the streets of Silvertown that night, it didn’t come from the sky. Indeed, it came from the community itself. Anti-German acts had been taking place ever since war had been declared. After news of the Lusitania sinking broke, a 500-strong mob had attacked shops and businesses with German-sounding names in Canning Town and Poplar. After the air raid a group of women from a local factory had spent the day at work growing angrier and angrier about the bombs, and the name of a bakery run by a man of German descent came up. When the hooter sounded for the end of their shift the women left the factory with a purposeful stride, making straight for the shop in question. They stood outside, brimming with impotent anger but not sure how or where to direct it. They shouted obscenities at the empty shelves in the window and the dark interior. The shop was closed and the baker and his family had barricaded themselves into a back room upstairs as soon as the mob gathered outside. They edged closer, shouting and pointing, until they were close enough to hammer on the door and the window. From there it was only a short step to the sound of smashing glass and women running amok inside, breaking what they could and taking the rest. Word went around that the police were on their way and the group immediately dispersed among the streets and into the gloaming.
The commotion brought more out onto the streets, and businesses owned by people who’d been part of the community for years became targets and were ransacked. Reidmuller the butcher and the Sauerland bakery had their windows smashed despite being located almost directly opposite North Woolwich police station. The violence spread west: a house belonging to a German man on Tate Road, halfway between North Woolwich and Silvertown, was broken into and furniture stolen.
Later in the evening a group gathered outside Cundy’s. There were pub regulars, there were local factory workers, there were people nobody had seen before. There were children. They were a couple of dozen people strong and some of them carried sticks. There appeared to be no given signal but suddenly the group set off up Constance Street, the children running ahead, picking up stones from the kerb, their eyes flashing with excitement. Harry watched them pass from the bedroom window as Nell sat on the bed feeding the baby. Win and Annie were also in the room.
‘I don’t like the look of this, Nell,’ he said.
From further up the street there was a bang and a tinkle of glass. Harry looked back at Nell.
‘Eid’s,’ he said. Annie began to cry.
There was the sound of more glass breaking and ominous bangs and crashes, accompanied by cheers and the roaring of the crowd as it egged itself on. Nell, holding the baby, screwed up her eyes as if that might keep out the terrible noise.
‘Kids,’ said Harry, ‘bloody kids in there smashing the place up. And adults who should bloody know better.’
Nell put Charlie back in his crib and put her arms around her tearful daughters.
‘Mr Eid’s a nice man,’ sniffed Annie. ‘Who would want to hurt him?’
‘I don’t know, love,’ said Nell, helplessly, ‘I just don’t know.’
Barricaded into a back room above the bakery, the Eid family sat together and listened to the family business being smashed to pieces beneath them. All eight of their children were there, from the eldest, Jacob Daniel, who was in his early twenties, to four-year-old Margaret, all of them born either in these rooms or, in the case of the two eldest, in their first shop, one street away in Andrew Street. The Eids were more Silvertown than any of the people targeting their shop. None of them spoke and their breath came in short, frightened gasps. Jacob winced at every sound until he closed his eyes and tried to shut out the noise. In his mind he took himself back to Staudernheim, close to the Rhine, concentrating on the green hills and their medieval castles that had provided the backdrop to his childhood, walking to the synagogue with his parents, then just a small room over a cattle shed accessed by a steep, narrow wooden staircase. He recalled how his father had told him that opportunity lay beyond the hills, not in Stauder
nheim, that there was nothing for him there. ‘But, the bakery, father,’ he’d say, and his father would close his eyes and shake his head sadly. ‘The town is dying, my son. You must not stay here.’
He was still in his teens when his father arranged for him to go to England and stay with an old family friend and fellow baker Adam Reuss (anglicised to ‘Ross’) as servant to his family and an apprentice baker. He’d lie in his makeshift bed under the eaves in the draughty attic and dream of having his own shop, putting in long hours of hard work until here he was, married with a family and his own business, a naturalised British citizen for more than a decade, well-liked, successful, with many friends. But now, to the people a few feet beneath him, he was just another dirty Hun. He was no longer a human being to them, no longer Jacob Eid, the long-established baker of Silvertown, he was just a gross caricature of a German like in the cartoons that appeared in some of the newspapers: a baby-eater, a fanatic. He kept his eyes closed and just prayed for the ordeal to be over as soon as possible and that the damage and devastation would be confined to the shop. While all of them heard the thumps and smashes, it was the sound of footsteps on the stairs that they truly dreaded.
There was a moment of stillness. Was it over? Had they gone? Then the silence was punctuated by the sound of breaking glass and the vicious laughter of a small boy.
A few yards away, across Constance Street at No. 15, Nell opened her eyes. ‘I’m not having this,’ she said, stood up and went to the parlour.
‘All right, doll?’ said Harry from the window.
She emerged wordlessly from the parlour in her overcoat and descended the stairs. Harry scrambled for his shoes as the front door opened and closed. Win and Annie looked at each other and went to the window. They watched their mother stride off up the street towards the knot of people stepping in and out of the smashed front of the bakery. A boy of about 12 walked away from the shop with what appeared to be a large cutting pie in a tin, hugging it close to his chest. He had a spring in his step, the girls noted, until he saw Nellie Greenwood making determined progress in his direction.
The boy had grinned at Nellie as she approached. It didn’t last long.
‘Where the bloody hell do you think you’re going with that?’ she demanded.
‘It’s a Hun pie,’ he said. ‘I’m taking it home.’
‘Oh no, no you’re not,’ said Nellie, drawing herself up to her full height. ‘You’re taking it right back to where it came from.’
‘But it’s a filthy German shop,’ he protested, ‘and he’s a filthy German who runs it.’
‘Who is he?’
‘What, missus?’
‘What’s his name, this filthy German?’
‘I dunno, but he’s fair game, isn’t he? ’Specially after last night. They all are, rotten stinking Huns.’
‘And what about rotten stinking thieves?’
‘How d’you mean, missus?’
‘What about rotten stinking thieves, like you, and the rest of them?’
‘I ain’t no thief – don’t call me that.’
‘How much did you pay for that pie?’
He looked down at it.
‘That’s not the same thing, missus. I took it from a German.’
‘And did you pay the German for it?’
‘’Course not.’
‘Well you’re a rotten stinking thief then, aren’t you?’
‘No, it’s different.’
‘It’s not different. You’ve taken something from a shop without paying for it, and now you’re going to take it back.’
She grabbed his jacket collar and led him, protesting, to where the mob was ransacking the Eid bakery. She stood outside the broken shop window and could hardly believe what she was seeing. Grown men, even a few women, ransacking drawers behind the counter, breaking mirrors, smashing glass-fronted cabinets, and, most extraordinary of all, throwing handfuls of flour at each other.
‘What the bloody hell is the matter with you lot?’ she roared.
A few of the heads turned. She let go of the boy’s jacket.
‘You can put that pie down, now,’ she told him. He did so, his cheeks red, his eyes not leaving the ground.
‘Get out of it, missus. This doesn’t concern you,’ came a male voice from the gloom.
‘When you’re in my street vandalising a business run by a good and decent family trying like the rest of us to make a living, believe me, it concerns me.’
‘They’re filthy Huns!’ said the voice. ‘They deserve everything that’s coming to them.’
‘You know the Eid family, do you?’ she demanded. There was no response.
‘Well I do. And you can take it from me that they are not filthy, they are decent people, a good family, who are a valuable and important part of this community. They’ve lived on this street since before some of you were born! They go out of their way to help people on this street and this is what happens? All of that means nothing because of the name over the door?’
Nell had all their attention now. Harry arrived at her shoulder.
‘And let me tell you another thing,’ she continued, jabbing her finger at them. ‘Most of the people who work here, who have the same name as the one over this door, who are probably upstairs now in fear of their bloody lives, most of them were born right here. In Silvertown. Constance Street. Right in this bloody building here.’
Doors along the street were opening and people were emerging, until there were as many people facing into the shop as there were looking out.
‘So what on earth makes you think you have the right to march up our street and start smashing up a shop that’s a vital part of this community, and having young boys like him thinking it’s all right to break windows and steal other people’s property? You might think you’re stealing from the Eids, that you’re smashing up their property. Well you’re not. You’re smashing up our property and you’re stealing from us, from me and these people here. All of us. You might as well have come into our houses and taken our flour, or yeast, or bread, or pies, because that’s where all this stuff was going.
‘There are men from this street – and your street wherever the bloody hell it might be – in France fighting this bloody war. Facing bullets and bombs and gawd knows what else. What do you think they would say, eh? Those brave lads, what would they say if they heard that you lot were doing your bit by smashing up shops and terrorising defenceless families in their own homes? Hmm?’
She paused for breath.
‘You ought to be bloody ashamed of yourselves, the lot of you.’
She stood, hands on hips, all five feet four inches of her, glaring into the gloom. It had worked. She’d shamed them. To a man, to a woman, to a child, they put down everything they’d picked up to steal and crunched over the broken glass to the doorway and passed the gathered neighbours. The men eyed each other angrily. One man spat near Nellie’s feet as he passed. Another looked at Harry and said, ‘You want to keep your missus under control, mate.’ Harry had to fight to suppress a grin because his heart was swelling with pride.
Early the next morning Nell went over to the Eids, taking Win, Annie and Ivy with her. The couple were surveying the damage to their property in the morning light.
‘He sat up all night in the shop with a big stick in his hand in case anyone came back,’ said Laura quietly, indicating her husband who was standing with one hand on his hip, the other rubbing the back of his head surveying the damage.
‘Thank you, Nell,’ said Laura. ‘Thank you so much for what you did last night.’
‘Nonsense,’ Nell replied. ‘On the first day we arrived here you told me the street looks after its own. That’s all I was doing.’
Jacob crunched over towards them through the broken glass and took Nell’s hand in his. He looked at her through eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot.
‘You did far more than that, Mrs Greenwood,’ he said, quietly, his voice cracking slightly. ‘Much, much more. I can’t thank you enough, on
behalf of my whole family.’
‘Ah now, Mr Eid, please, don’t be like that,’ said Nell. ‘We’d all do it for each other. Now, I’ve brought three of my girls here to lend a hand with the clearing up. I’d stay myself, only the Aquitania goes out tomorrow and I’ve the last of their linen to see to.’
Chapter Nineteen
The next day when Harry walked off whistling, with his handcart heavily laden with clean linen, he was under strict instructions not to be late back.
‘No stopping for a drink, Harry,’ Nell had said as he loaded the cart. ‘I don’t want you rolling in late tonight having been put off at Tilbury again.’
Harry had been caught out by the combination of drink and a ship’s departure more times than was plausible and was now on as good terms with the pilot boat captains of Tilbury as he was with the men he met while to-ing and fro-ing with the laundry. He enjoyed the company of the men below decks; they were unfailingly hospitable, and they had amazing stories of faraway places Harry could only dream of. His travel horizons extended no further than the Royal Victoria Gardens at North Woolwich and the occasional excursion to the beach at Southend with Nell and the girls. These lads would tell him tales of New Zealand, the Sargasso Sea, of rounding Cape Horn, of Pacific islands where the rum was served in coconut shells by beautiful women. They’d produce bottles of rum with which they’d returned from these exotic voyages, the taste of which was as exotic as its kick was powerful.
He promised Nell he wouldn’t stay long, but the Aquitania was leaving today and he would be saying farewell to another group of friends. The transient nature of the docks meant these farewells were regular events for Harry, but he was determined this one wouldn’t become messy and he’d be back in Constance Street before the ship had even sailed.
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