Chapter Twenty-Five
Constance Street celebrated the Armistice like everywhere else – with an outpouring of joy, a wave of relief and, eventually, quiet reflection about those who weren’t coming home. At 11a.m. on 11 November 1918 the bells of St Mark’s rang for the first time in nearly four years, every factory siren and hooter sounded and the ships in the docks sounded their horns in an earsplitting display of aural celebration. It was a horrendous racket, but for the people of the island it was the most joyous thing they’d heard in years. People streamed out of the factories and industrial works and men ran home to strip off their work clothes and don their best suit and linen collar. Work stopped in the docks and barrels of brandy were breached. The pubs of Silvertown threw open their doors and Constance Street filled with its people, embracing, cheering, laughing, barely able to believe that a war which seemed to have carried on for ever had finally come to an end. A union flag unfurled from the upper window of David Jones’s newsagent at No. 4, and the man himself appeared at the door and distributed little paper flags to the children. Happy though everyone was, there was a slight daze to the proceedings, as if nobody could quite believe the war was truly over.
Although many Silvertown men were in the restricted professions and hadn’t gone to fight, there was still a distinct tinge of tragedy. Jane McLeod, for example, at No. 34 had lost her husband Fred, killed in France at the end of October 1916, leaving her to bring up two small children, while her eldest son Freddie took over as the new head of the household while still in his teens. Fred had gone off to war before the Greenwoods had arrived in Constance Street, so Nell and Harry never knew him, but Nell liked Jane; they were of similar age and both East End girls. Jane was quiet, kept herself largely to herself, but Nell would sometimes watch over the kids while Jane did shifts in the engineering department at the rubber works. Nell had actually seen the post boy arrive with the telegram that day in 1916, seen Jane tear it open and her hand fly to her mouth, seen her crumple against the door frame and sink to the ground. Nell had dropped what she was doing and shot across the road, wrapping her arms around her and just letting her cry for as long as she needed.
When news of the Armistice came through and people emerged from their homes as word spread along the street, Nell’s first thought was Jane. On the pretext of seeing whether the kids wanted to come over and play with her girls, Nell called at No. 34 and brought Jane and her children over to the laundry. As the girls played, Nell just listened as Jane talked about Fred, the loneliness, the fact that she’d probably never get the opportunity to visit his grave in France, and how she still desperately, desperately wanted to look up and see him walking through the door. Not a day went by, she said, when she didn’t feel a dark chasm open up beneath her soul.
‘Now it’s over,’ she said to Nell, ‘now it’s all finished, I’m already thinking, what was it for? And I know when they start coming back from France I’m going to be looking at them and thinking, Why couldn’t it be you? Why did it have to be Fred? And that’s awful, Nell, I know it’s awful, because it’s not their fault. But I miss him, I miss him so much.’
Somehow the party that developed in the street gravitated to upstairs at the Greenwoods’, and there was singing and dancing until the early hours that shook the downstairs ceiling below and covered the stacks of freshly folded sheets and table linen with plaster dust.
Nell never left Jane’s side and eventually, late into the night, even got a smile and a song out of her, as the children played and the adults sang, and their cheeks were red and their eyes flashed with happiness and Constance Street itself seemed to breathe out a sigh of relief.
But as Europe broke out into joyous rapture there was a new threat afoot all over the continent, and not one that could be bombed, shot, gassed or bayoneted – a silent, invisible enemy that in the space of a few months would kill more people than the entire four years of war. Even by the time of the Armistice what became known as the ‘Spanish flu’ was already rampaging across the continent. As many as 70,000 cases were reported in Odessa in October 1918, while theatres, restaurants and other places where people mixed together in large numbers, even schools, were closed across Europe.
In London in the late summer of 1918 there were nearly 300 new cases of the Spanish flu every week. In Silvertown, where people were hemmed in together on the damp, marshy east London island and worked at close quarters in factories, docks and industrial plants, there was palpable nervous tension whenever anyone so much as coughed.
It was an infection that took hold quickly, beginning with feelings of listlessness, headache and aching limbs, sometimes with a sore throat and a cough, and could knock a previously healthy person flat out in the space of a few hours. In London in the late summer and autumn of 1918, people were collapsing in the street. In October two employees of a business in the St Paul’s area of London who’d fallen victim to the outbreak were buried together on the day they should have been getting married. Three days earlier, both had been perfectly fine. It was a bizarre epidemic in many ways, not least in its virulence, the way the infection raged for three or four days and then was gone in the lucky ones. Unusually, it was the young and the healthy who seemed to be the most susceptible.
The Greenwood women were a hardy bunch, thought Nell, but she was taking no chances. The girls – and Harry – had to wash the inside of their noses with soapy water every morning and last thing at night, and gargle with diluted Jeyes fluid in an attempt to head off any potential infection. Fly posters from an antiseptic company had gone up outside the station, stating: ‘One case today means a hundred tomorrow and thousands within a week. The symptoms are readily recognisable, consisting of extreme lassitude, aching of the limbs and headache.’ Nell monitored all of the girls, especially Rose and Ruby, the youngest, for any of these signs, but, three days after the Armistice party, it was Lil who began to complain of feeling tired, and Nell’s blood ran cold.
When Lil also began sniffling and complaining of a sore throat, Nell put her straight to bed and sent Kit for the doctor. She returned saying the doctor was out on calls but would come as soon as possible. Nell sat at Lil’s bedside and draped a cold flannel over her forehead.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said to Nell. ‘It’s just a little cold.’ As Lil looked up at her, though, Nell could see the fear in her eyes and she hoped it wasn’t reflecting back. She smiled down at Lil.
‘I know, love, but we’ll get the doctor in to have a look at you just in case.’
Nell sat up with Lil all night, as she tossed and turned restlessly. When the sun rose and the light fell on her face, Lil winced and screwed up her eyes. As the day grew lighter Nell thought she noticed something. She looked carefully and saw that Lil’s skin was turning a strange lavender colour by her ear. An hour passed and the colour had spread to her cheek. She was very weak now, her breathing raspy and shallow, when finally the doctor arrived full of apologies. He’d been attending cases all night. He knelt next to the child.
‘How old is she?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘Normally healthy?’
‘Normally very healthy, yes.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Lilian. Lil.’
He took her head in his hands and looked closely at her face.
‘How long has she been like this?’
‘She first complained of feeling tired around this time yesterday.’
‘It is the Spanish influenza, I’m afraid. The discoloration in the face confirms it. But she’s young, and healthy. Have you given her anything?’
‘A few doses of quinine, yes.’
‘Good. Keep that up, maybe mix it with some cinnamon and I think she’ll be all right in a day or so.’
Nell breathed out and she saw Lil’s eyes flash.
‘Thank you, doctor. I wouldn’t have called you out unless I thought it was very serious.’
‘You did exactly the right thing, Mrs Greenwood. Good morning.’
&n
bsp; Chapter Twenty-Six
Kit had never been up to London before and held her mother’s hand tightly in the crowds. This was something very special, Nell had told her, something Kit should remember for a very long time indeed. They walked along The Strand and crossed the road outside Charing Cross Station. They came up alongside St Martin-in-the-Fields and Nell bent down and said, ‘There you are, Kit, Trafalgar Square. And that,’ she said, indicating the square’s centrepiece, ‘is Nelson’s Column. The square is named after Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar more than a hundred years ago.’
The ten-year-old looked up, squinting in the early evening sunshine, gauging its height.
‘It’s not as big as the chimney at Tate’s,’ she announced.
They walked along the front of the church to where Sir George Frampton’s brand new statue of Edith Cavell stood.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Kit, shielding her eyes against the brightness of the light reflecting off the stone.
Nell bent down to her ear.
‘That’s a lady called Edith Cavell, love. A very brave and very special nurse who was killed by the Germans for helping lots of our soldiers escape during the war.’
She looked up at the Coliseum and saw that crowds were already gathering outside the door. The queue for returns stretched up St Martin’s Lane: Nell was glad she’d planned ahead and travelled up a couple of weeks earlier to buy tickets. The date, 5 June 1920, had been inked on the calendar for weeks and there was no way she was going to miss this.
It had been years since she’d been inside a music hall, but when she heard that Vesta Tilley was giving her farewell performance at the Coliseum on 5 June she knew she would have done anything to be there. On the day the tickets went on sale she was outside the theatre in the morning sunshine waiting with a couple of hundred other people long before the box office opened. She’d bought two tickets in the stalls, row E, near the front. Quite central, the man behind the grille had said. Good seats, he’d assured her.
She gave everyone at home plenty of notice that she was going.
‘Don’t forget,’ she’d say, ‘the fifth of June, you’ll have to manage without me. I’m taking my first day off in about ten years.’
She felt a girlish excitement as they walked up to the theatre that she’d not felt in years, causing her to squeeze Kit’s hand so hard the child winced. Bringing Kit along had made the whole thing seem less self-indulgent, somehow, as if the excursion was for her daughter’s benefit rather than her own. Kit was the only one of the Greenwood girls who showed any interest in music and singing, and at school she would pick out tunes on the old piano in the corner of the assembly hall. Nell had taught her a couple of songs and the wisp of a girl proved to have a sweet, high singing voice, so to bring her to see the farewell performance by one of the greatest of all the music hall stars seemed to be a philanthropic and enriching thing for a mother to do. But she was fooling nobody. Annie loved reading, but she’d never brought her up to Foyle’s bookshop, for example. No, this was Nell’s treat, for Nell. She’d always put others first, but this show represented the end of something. It was certainly the end of something for Vesta Tilley, of course, the end of her performing career – she was leaving the stage for ever to become Lady de Frece, her husband having been elected a Member of Parliament and raised to the peerage, but for Nell it was also the end of a chapter whose pages had every now and then over the years blown open at the same page: her own youthful performing aspirations. Ever since she burned Walter de Frece’s business card on the fire that night, there had always been that sense of ‘what if?’ It was as though, through everything – through building up the laundry business, through marrying Harry and having her lovely girls, through all the good things and bad things about Silvertown – there had been another Nellie, who’d been to see Mr de Frece, auditioned for him and started on the bottom of a bill somewhere in the provinces, worked her way up to closing the first half, then progressed up the post-interval bills until she was the star attraction, performing for royalty and swanning to and from the theatres in the back of a big car wearing expensive fur coats …
At her age she shouldn’t be daydreaming, she’d tell herself, but she’d think back to the excitement of her girlhood visits to the halls, the expectation that filled the air before the show, the lights, the colour, the music, the happy shine in the eyes of the crowd, even the carved plaster details around the proscenium that made the stage seem a magical place and turned those on it into magical people.
No, tonight would be the end of it. Once Vesta Tilley had taken her last bow, that would be the end of the daydream. No more parallel life: that opportunity had gone the moment the card fell onto the fire. Her lot was her lot, she had her business, her girls and Harry, and that was more than enough. She was lucky, she reminded herself.
She held on to Kit tightly as they joined the throng outside the theatre. The doors had just opened and the crowd moved inside. Nell picked up a programme from a kiosk and guided Kit to a door on the right marked ‘Stalls’, showed a girl in a burgundy uniform their tickets and led the way inside. As soon as they were through the door Kit stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes wide, looking up and up towards the domed ceiling.
‘It goes on for ever,’ she said, pointing at the sculptures of lions drawing chariots high up on either side of the stage, the scallop-topped boxes and the enormous proscenium arch, trying to burn into her memory every part of it, down to the last vein in the marble columns lining the upper circle.
Nell was speechless too – this was in a different league to some of the tatty East End dives she’d been to as a girl. She jokingly chided Kit to ‘close your mouth, you’ll catch flies’, but her daughter’s reaction matched hers almost exactly.
The audience were in their seats long before the scheduled curtain-up, well over 2,000 of them, in their best suits and dresses and hats even though it was a hot summer night. The stalls were a sea of waving programmes as people fanned themselves in an effort to keep cool.
The early part of the show featured a range of singers and comedians, a bill put together purely to fill out the programme. It meant that those acts could say they were on the bill the night of Vesta Tilley’s farewell, but in truth nobody took much notice of them, nor did they expect much of a reception. They went through their professional motions, passing the time until the main event, gave a cursory bow to acknowledge cursory applause and then made a bolt for the wings.
There was an interval – during which hardly anyone left their seats for fear of missing the main attraction by still being in the queue for ice creams – before the house lights went down and the footlights went up. The hubbub of the audience stilled almost instantly. Nell held her breath. At the front of the orchestra pit the conductor tapped his baton, raised his arms, gave a count of ‘three, four’ and the trumpets played the introduction to ‘When the Right Girl Comes Along’.
Nell leaned forward in her seat. There was a movement at the edge of the stage and then she appeared, stepping lightly onto the boards in time with the music, in full men’s morning dress, one hand in a trouser pocket, the other waggling a top hat, a broad smile on her face, walking in perfect imitation of a young swell about town. The audience erupted, people leapt to their feet and applauded for ages, but somehow Tilley managed to keep up appearances until it died down. The conductor raised his baton and the band replayed the jaunty intro.
‘There’s a young man we all know,’ she began, strutting with her chest puffed out, ‘he’s just a little bashful, just a trifle shy …’
Nell looked down at Kit, who was spellbound, her mouth hanging open, and then looked back at the stage. It was a song she knew well, about a young lad, a mummy’s boy, who looks for maternal advice until, as the title of the song says, a sweet girl comes along.
‘When the right girl comes along,’ ran the chorus, with Nell, like everyone else in the audience, singing along quietly to herself. ‘When the right girl comes along. Whether
she’s a girl from Anglesey, gay Paree or Zuiderzee …’
Suddenly Nell was no longer a raw-handed laundress in her early forties. In her mind she was Vesta Tilley, immaculately dressed as a young man-about-town, riding the rhythm and dynamics of the band, moving perfectly in time to the music, monocle affixed, waistcoat neatly buttoned, hair oiled down, top hat twirling in her hand, singing in that clear, strong voice that Nell hadn’t heard in years.
The song finished with a trombone echo of the final line, Vesta gave a kick at the last cadence and disappeared into the wings. The Coliseum erupted.
A few seconds later the band struck up again and Tilley bounded onto the stage in a red-and-white striped blazer, white flannel trousers and a straw boater. She drew in her breath, struck a pose with the hat held high and began.
‘Ohh, what’s the big attraction for the fellas by the sea? Is it the ozone? Oh no!’
This was a typical Vesta Tilley song, thought Nell. It was witty, and it was sung straight, as if it were a man singing. There was no double entendre or knowing looks, nothing saucy like Marie Lloyd would have done, just a classic song, performed straight by a woman dressed as a man in the knowledge that the audience knew this was a woman dressed as a man and it simply wasn’t an issue. Fifty-six years old and Vesta Tilley was giving a masterclass in performance, Nell realised, and was as sprightly around the stage as the first time she’d seen her perform in Stratford thirty-something years earlier.
The next song was ‘Following in Father’s Footsteps’, performed in the costume of an Eton scholar and describing a young man literally following in his father’s footsteps to places where his father shouldn’t necessarily be, and then it was time for the grand finale.
During the war Vesta Tilley had been at the forefront of the national recruitment drive and the song ‘Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier’ had become her best known. As the brass played the stomping military-style theme of the song, out she came from the wings, marching perfectly in time to the music, dressed from head to foot in khaki. She reached the centre of the stage and marched on the spot as the audience rose to their feet again.
Constance Street Page 13