‘Oh, get away,’ laughed Nell.
Once the royal yacht had completed a circuit of the new dock it pulled in to a pontoon where a pavilion had been set up; a gangplank went down and the royal party disappeared inside.
‘That’s it then,’ said Harry. ‘Nosebag time for the toffs.’
The crowd began to disperse and the party from Constance Street started to make their way home.
‘It’s very impressive,’ said Jacob Eid, looking around the dock and back at the gates. ‘And look, here comes the first ship.’
They all stopped and looked around. A huge liner was moving into the lock with grace and elegance that bordered on the stealthy. Her hull was dark green, her funnel a deep yellow and, from the angle they watched, she seemed to nose into the lock with a lofty insouciance.
Harry took a few steps forward and had a good look.
‘I know that ship,’ he said. ‘That’s the Demosthenes. Aberdeen Line. Normally does the South Africa and Australia run. I’ve seen her at Tilbury. Blimey, she’s a good 11,000 tons. If that kind of ship is going to start coming here instead of Tilbury, well …’
He looked at Nell, his bright blue eyes glittering.
She smiled at him. ‘As long as you don’t start hitching any rides on her to Tilbury …’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
In late January 1923, two weeks after her 45th birthday, Nell realised she was pregnant again. Including miscarriages, she calculated that this would be her fifteenth pregnancy. Her health was fine but, goodness knew, at her age there could be complications.
After Rose, she thought that would be it. After Ruby, she thought that would definitely be it. But now, five years after Ruby and nearly twenty-seven years after she first fell pregnant with Cissie, another child was on the way.
Harry of course was delighted. He doted on the kids and loved them all to pieces. Rose had become a favourite. He knew there weren’t supposed to be favourites, but Rose would look up at him with her big, wide, blue eyes, exactly like his, and he’d melt instantly. She toddled around everywhere after him; sometimes he’d take her up to the docks with him and point out all the big ships and the cranes and explain what the warehouses were for and what the men were doing, and she’d sit on top of a big pile of linen on his cart and just take it all in, staring around with her big eyes.
He was the biggest softie of the lot. The previous summer, for example, he’d come back from the docks with a live goose in a sack on his back.
‘Got it off the docks,’ he said. ‘A load of them had escaped and they were running round the quayside at the Albert. So I nabbed one, bunged him in a sack. Thought he’d be great for Christmas.’
He built a pen out in the yard and kept the goose fattened up, talking excitedly about what a great Christmas dinner they would have that year. The girls would feed him and he became quite docile for a goose. There’d be the odd hiss now and again, but otherwise he was no trouble and some of the girls even became quite attached to the old boy.
A few days before Christmas, Harry went out early one morning and wrung the goose’s neck. He didn’t tell the girls he was about to do it, and he made sure no one was around in case they got upset, especially the younger ones. Almost before anyone else knew it, the goose was dead, plucked and ready for the Christmas table.
On Christmas morning Harry noticed how the girls had become more subdued as lunchtime approached. There was a delicious aroma of cooked goose filling the building, and Harry was hungry. As he set up the big table downstairs in the laundry – there wasn’t enough room upstairs, so the Greenwood Christmas dinners were always held in the laundry – he was surprised at how quiet the girls were, and when Nell announced that lunch was ready they filed down the stairs to the big table slowly, almost reluctantly, instead of scrambling to get there first as he’d expected.
Once they were all seated, he went to the oven, took out the goose, basted it one last time, set it on a tray and carried it downstairs.
‘Ta-daa!’ he crowed as he approached the table and placed it right in the centre. Kit began to sniff. Then Ivy began to cry. Annie was also fighting back tears.
‘What’s the matter with you lot?’ Harry asked, carving knife and fork at the ready.
Even Win, the eldest of them all, was puffy-eyed, and Lil’s bottom lip was quivering.
‘It’s the goose,’ said Lil. ‘We liked that goose.’
And with that she began to cry.
Harry’s mouth hung open, the carvers still poised over the steaming bird.
‘But we all knew he was for Christmas,’ he said.
‘We can’t eat it, Dad,’ said Norah, her voice quivering. ‘It would be like eating a pet.’
By this time the two youngest, Rose and Ruby, picking up on the mood of the rest of the room, had also burst into tears. Harry looked at each of them in turn, and then at Nellie, who was watching him with a mixture of coolness and amusement.
He looked down at the bird again, plucked, trussed and steaming, and suddenly in his mind he saw its quizzical face whenever he was in the yard, and the way it would look all hopeful and excited when he went out to feed it. He remembered its funny little waddle and the way it was so gentle when Rose and Ruby toddled out there to stroke it.
He put down the carvers, looked around at his girls, and before he knew it he was in tears as well.
‘I can’t do it, Nell,’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t eat that bloody goose either now.’
She looked at him, his cheeks wet with tears and those blue eyes shining, and called him a daft sod. The goose was taken round to St Mark’s and donated to their Christmas table for the poor.
Yep, he was a big softie all right, thought Nell.
Business had been so good lately that Harry now had a van. It was quite an expense, and not many people on Constance Street had any kind of vehicle, but it saved time and carried more than his old cart could manage. Nell also thought it might stop him drinking so much with the sailors, but no, he was still regularly making inadvertent trips to Tilbury, so much so that he was now on first name terms with most of the harbour master’s office.
She did wish he wouldn’t drink so much. At least he wasn’t going into Cundy’s any more, not since the incident with the marked note. Old Simeon Cundy had died on the eve of the First World War, and his son, also Simeon, had taken over the running of it. His old man had been gruff, but he was at least straight with you. Harry would start his rounds of the local pubs in Cundy’s and usually end up back there when he’d finished his perambulations. Most of the time he’d be well alight by that stage of the evening.
‘Old Cundy knows when I’ve had a few,’ he told her one day. ‘The number of times now I’ve given him a pound and he’s given me change from ten shillings.’
One night the previous year Harry had gone prepared, writing his initials and the date in the corner of his pound note. He went in, ordered a pint, handed over his pound note and Cundy came back with change from ten shillings.
‘Aye, aye, Cundy,’ said Harry. ‘I gave you a pound.’
As expected, Cundy swore blind Harry had given him a ten shilling note. Harry walked outside, found a policeman by the station, explained the situation and said that there would be a pound note in the till with his initials and the date in the top right-hand corner. The policeman accompanied Harry back into the pub, found the note in question, and from that day forward he hadn’t been back to Cundy’s.
It didn’t lead to him drinking any less, though, and she’d noticed his hands shaking in the mornings from the DTs. They’d calm down after a while and, the odd late night excursion to Tilbury aside, it didn’t affect his work. He was popular at the docks, popular in the pubs and popular in the street with everyone, especially the kids, with whom he’d play along as if he was the biggest kid among them.
When he’d come back from his Dardanelles odyssey he’d not had a drink for two months. Coming back to find that baby Charlie was gravely ill, and then going straigh
t to the hospital to be there as he died, well, it sent him back to the drink and he’d not been off it since. Fortunately, thought Nell, he’s an amiable, happy drunk, he’s never any trouble and there’s no question of him getting into fights or anything like that, and she understood up to a point why he drank. While she’d scold him for it, she never tried to stop him outright. He never talked about his Gallipoli adventure, but she knew he’d seen some terrible things there, and while walking up through France with Ted Jarrett, and she knew he’d never tell anyone about them. Add that to losing baby Charlie as soon as he got home, and it’s no surprise he drank. He’d missed, as it turned out, most of Charlie’s brief life – he’d been four months old when Harry had shanghai’d himself, and was four days short of his first birthday when he died. Losing their other babies had hit them hard, both of them, but that one was different somehow. He covered it well; she was probably the only one to see beneath the surface and even suspect anything, but she knew it was there. She was pretty sure he knew that she knew it was there, too.
Thank goodness for the girls. He lived for those girls. Hopefully, she thought, she was carrying another girl. The Greenwood girls were tough, right from the womb, and this one would need to be just as strong. She didn’t know what it was, why it happened, but the boys never seemed to make it. Not one of them. She knew one thing, though: at 45 and pregnant again, with a family and a business to run – this wee one needed to be extra strong. And so did she.
When she told Harry, his eyes lit up, but his expression quickly turned to one of concern.
‘Bloody hell, gel,’ he said. ‘We’re a bit old for this lark now, ain’t we?’
‘I know. I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘It’s always been the way, though, hasn’t it? You’ve only had to throw your trousers on the bed and I’m pregnant again.’
He sat down next to her.
‘Yeah, but it’s been, what, four years since Ruby now.’ His eyes twinkled and a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘I’ll let you choose the name for this one, though, eh?’
She smiled, and he put his arm around her.
‘It’ll be all right, doll,’ he said. ‘It always is, innit? With me and you?’
It wasn’t always all right, by any means, there were too many grave markers proving that, but she took comfort from Harry’s reassurance anyway.
Chapter Thirty
The new baby arrived on 11 September 1923, another girl. Nellie was firm about choosing the name: Joan. When it became clear that mother and baby were both fine, the Greenwood brood allowed themselves to get very excited indeed. A few days later there was an enormous party in the rooms above the laundry to which nearly the whole street came. There was singing and dancing, and again the younger girls watched the ceiling vibrating from downstairs.
Two months later there was another knees-up on the occasion of 15 Constance Street’s first wedding. Harry and Nell had noticed that Lil had been spending a lot of time with Charlie Smale, the barber from three doors down, and there was no surprise in the household when Lil revealed they were courting. He was 19, the same age as Lil, but she was a mature girl and Charlie Smale was a kind man who understood what had happened to Lil that cold January night six years earlier. On a Friday night they’d go to ‘the Ritz’, as the Albert Cinema was known – where on rainy nights, thanks to its tin roof, the piano player was drowned out by a meteorological percussion section – and afterwards Charlie would always walk her to her door.
He even asked Harry’s permission before he proposed. Both he and Nell were delighted. When the big day came, a month after Joan was born, Harry walked her up the aisle of St Mark’s and gave her away and was as proud as if she had been his own flesh and blood. There was a small reception in St Mark’s hall afterwards, then the party really started and went on until the sun started to come up the next morning. Nell even sang, dressing up in Harry’s suit and performing ‘Following in Father’s Footsteps’ as Silvertown’s very own Vesta Tilley.
As she sang the final couplet, ‘I’m following in father’s footsteps, I’m following the dear old dad,’ she suddenly thought of her own father, and felt very, very happy indeed.
Her audience demanded more, so she sang ‘Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Soldier’, changing ‘soldier’ to ‘barber’ and bringing the house down.
From that day on, no Greenwood party would be complete without the ‘turns’.
Chapter Thirty-One
There had been a great deal of prosperity as a result of the opening of the King George V dock, but not much of it filtered down to Silvertown. A combination of post-war recession and the increased mechanisation of the docks meant that levels of employment there actually fell rather than increased during the early and mid twenties. It was the same story in the riverside industries. The war had provided a boon to industry, one that had generally made the area war-proof: most of the factories and the docks were protected industries, and busy ones at that, meeting the needs of the war. The docks had been so busy then that they had to send for more workers from Southampton. Now prospects were bleak.
On a political level, meanwhile, the people had become more powerful: the Representation of the People Act of 1918 extended the franchise to women over 30 and abolished property qualifications for men over the age of 21. The 1918 general election was disappointing from a Labour point of view – although they polled more than 20 per cent of the votes cast they only secured 57 seats, less than 10 per cent of the total – but the people of Silvertown returned the Tipperary-born former Gasworkers’ Union representative Jack Jones, who stood against the official Labour candidate for the National Socialist Party, but took the Labour whip the following year. He would hold the seat as a passionate advocate for the people of Silvertown until 1940, earning himself the sobriquet from Time magazine of ‘the wittiest man in the House of Commons’.
Silvertown had always had a strong workers’ bond, right back to when Eleanor Marx had addressed meetings in the room over Cundy’s in 1889. Indeed, the pub itself had become the headquarters of the Amalgamated Protection Union of Mechanics and General Labourers.
The post-war decline hit Silvertown harder than most areas, and unemployment rose steadily. While the tonnage of goods passing through the Royal Docks was going up, mechanisation was seeing employment levels go down. The startling industrial growth in the area, commenced by Stephen Winckworth Silver in the 1850s, was at an end by the mid twenties and it would never recover. One in five men in the West Ham district would be out of work by 1927; within five years that would be one in four. Five of the six poorest London boroughs were in east London.
The Greenwoods didn’t feel the pinch too badly at first. The mechanisation and drop in employment at the docks had no detrimental effect on the number of ships coming in, and they all still needed their laundry cleaned when they arrived, but it was easy to see the change in the nature of the locality. Where previously the street during the day was the preserve of the women and young children, as the years went by more and more men were to be found sitting on their doorsteps looking listless and strained. Barely a day went by without someone walking into the laundry, frayed sleeves on his suit, mashing his cap in his hands and asking if there was any work going. The Greenwoods, however, were largely self-sufficient on the employment front: Nell had been producing her own laundresses for several years and there were others waiting to rise through the ranks. It still broke her heart to turn some of these men away.
Being at the heart of the locality, the businesses of Constance Street largely managed to hold off the more intense ravages of recession, but it was hard going. As 1926 dawned, the street still supported a laundry, two bakeries (including what was now the Eid Brothers’ bakery following Jacob’s retirement in favour of his sons), a boot maker, a boot repairer, newsagent, oil dealer, fish and chip shop, two groceries, the dining room, Frank Levitt’s butchery, Charlie Smale’s hairdressers which he ran with Lil, and of course Cundy’s on the corner, now under
the stewardship of William Saddington, which meant Harry could go in there again. A post office on the opposite corner and the railway station facing the end of the road meant that you could still pretty much find all you needed in Constance Street.
On a wider level, though, things came to a head in the spring of 1926. There had been a coal strike since February, something that affected the factories as much as the people, and when the mine owners refused to budge on their demands for miners to take a pay cut while at the same time working longer shifts, on 4 May simmering industrial discontent across the country culminated in the Trades Union Congress calling a general strike, the first of its kind in Britain.
Not a single facet of society was unaffected. The trains stopped, the underground, the iron and steel industries, the buses, the print works, the chemical industries, everything. Silvertown was as quiet as it had been at any time since the day of the explosion.
‘Listen, Nell,’ said Harry, standing at the front door of the shop. ‘There’s nothing, no noise. And no chimneys smoking.’
It was a warm spring day and the mood in Constance Street was happily busy. The shops opened and everyone was out on the street. Nell supervised the laundry work, but with nothing new coming in from the docks things soon wound down.
‘Leave it, girls,’ she said eventually as the Greenwood daughters ironed and re-ironed, folded and re-folded. ‘There’s only so much of the same thing you can do.’
She set a chair outside the door and sat there, with Joan on her lap, making the most of what was turning into a day off. For Silvertown people the silence was a novelty.
‘Isn’t it lovely and quiet, Nell?’ said old John Parker, who had the shop next door.
‘It is, John,’ she replied, ‘but let’s hope it doesn’t go on for too long, eh?’
‘I don’t fancy going into winter with no coal, that’s for sure.’
‘Ha,’ said Nell, ‘I’m pretty sure it won’t come to that. Things must be bad, though, if the whole country’s out. You don’t see the big picture here.’
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