Hopping. Melanie McGrath
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taking the invalid to the vardoes for a Gypsy cure, and having no better idea herself except to pray, Mrs Shaunessy bundled the little girl into her hop cart and, with Daisy and Old Nell helping to push, trundled along Vicarage Lane towards Poppington Bungalow, where, scattered among the trees, were a dozen or more gaily painted caravans.
Franny was too ill to protest about the intrusions of the Gypsy women as they ruffled through her hair, pulled up her eyelids to inspect the eyes and prodded the tiny ribcage, and too ill to notice the taint of their herbs in the spoonfuls of treacle Mrs Shaunessy doled out to her. But whatever the Gypsies gave Franny it worked. By the following morning her fever had gone and she was no longer coughing up phlegm. By the end of the week she had never looked so healthy, and though she continued to complain about almost everything, she never again repeated her flight to Selling station, nor spoke much of going home.
As September drew to a close, the annual hop wound down. There was a party with jugs of beer and three whole roasted pigs. Bit by bit, women and children drifted back to the city, but the Shaunessy party stayed on to pick plums, apples and pears. The leaves began to turn, and each morning in the hop huts seemed a little colder than the last. In the first week of October Lilly left, and not long after that, a telegram arrived for Mrs Shaunessy. They were at the hop huts preparing breakfast when the man on the chestnut horse rode up. On hearing there was a telegram for Mrs Shaunessy, Old Nell and Joan came bustling over, with grave looks on their faces. Mrs Shaunessy took the telegram, read it and fell over. After Joan had picked her up, the man took Mrs Shaunessy back to the farmhouse on his horse. Nell looked after the two Crommelin girls and Billy Shaunessy for the remainder of the day, and burned the onion pud. The next day they heard that Patrick Shaunessy had lost both his legs and was being discharged, as a consequence of which Mrs Shaunessy would be returning to Poplar the following afternoon, taking her son and the Crommelin girls with her.
Though Daisy longed to see her father, she didn’t want to leave. She spent her last evening saying goodbye to Big Marmalade and Smuts and Ship’s Cat, to the hop gardens and to Ghost Hole Pond. At the pond she noticed something red lying in the water and, poking at it with a stick, saw that it was a Union Jack flag on a stick. She thought she could guess whose it was. That night, her last in hop hut number 21, she lay awake listening to the screech owls and the barks of the foxes, wondering how she could ever have found them strange or frightening. The next morning she woke early with a feeling of dread. The rabbits were out, and old Nell was fixing breakfast. In the six weeks she had been away, she realised that she hadn’t once thought about the Sandeman in The Deep, but now that she remembered them, she had no doubt that they were both still there, and that she was about to go back to them.
Henry Baker began his working life in the West India Docks the year after the Great Dock Strike in 1890, at the age of twelve. He started by fetching and carrying ropes, winches, dockers’ hooks and whatever else the breaking gang he worked for needed shifting. Once the gang had broken up and cleared the cargo, young Henry would be lowered into the ship’s hold to sweep and clean, an experience that left him with an abiding horror of dark, enclosed spaces. At the age of fourteen he graduated to breaking, becoming one of a small team within the gang responsible for dividing the cargo, attaching rope strops to it and seeing it out of the hold. It was dangerous work. Cargo routinely loosened and shifted at sea, and even the most experienced breaker couldn’t tell exactly what he was dealing with until he was standing beside it in the hold, as a result of which barely a month went by without someone being crushed by a bale of rubber or a cord of timber. In common with most of the gangs working around the docks, Henry’s gang had set up a funeral savings club to which everyone contributed tuppence a week. Nothing shamed a docker more than the thought of a cheap funeral.
At the age of twenty-one Henry married May and took her out of domestic service. In short order they had a son, Jack, then, three years later, another, Harold. Jack was handsome and reckless and got himself into trouble from an early age for petty theft and dipping. Harold was his opposite, born small with an odd, enlarged head which stayed that way as he grew. Poverty added rickets, the disease of dark, sunless places which Jack had somehow been spared. The disease gave Harold bowed legs, knocked his knees and made half his teeth fall out. Yet despite these afflictions, young Harold was a remarkably upbeat, optimistic and stoical boy, with no trace of self-pity, so unlike the noisy, blustering, self-centred Jack that it was almost as though they had come from two different broods.
Growing up, the two boys saw very little of their father. Henry left the Baker family house in Gaselee Street at six thirty every morning in order to be at the docks in time for the seven o’clock bomp-on, when he would learn whether there was work for him that day. The Great Dock Strike had been in part a response to the casual cruelty of the bomp-on system, where men would have to compete – and sometimes even physically fight – one another for an hour or two’s work. Since dock work was both unpredictable and highly seasonal, some dockers would find themselves unemployed for months with no means of keeping their families from starvation. Henry’s father had been among these, and this had made Henry a staunch union man. After the strike, the bomp-on had been modified. Dockers were now required to register, it was no longer possible for shipowners to hire a man for less than four hours, and those dockers who were attached to gangs, like Henry, had at least some protection from the ravages of a casualised labour market.
When there was no work at the docks, Henry would offer his labour on the cheap to the nearby goods station, hydraulic works, timber store or knacker’s yard. If that failed, he’d spend the day in one of the dockers’ clubs. One way or another, he was rarely back until seven in the evening, when he’d bolt down the tea May Baker had prepared for him before going out to the pub or to the bare-knuckle fights at Wonderland in Whitechapel that were his weakness.
Despite the fact that he rarely saw them, or perhaps because of it, Henry remained the most powerful presence in his sons’ lives; more powerful certainly than May, who was a bitter, silent woman; more powerful too than the railway, which thumped and ticked all night beside the house in Gaselee Street where the Baker family lived; and more powerful even than the docks themselves, which stretched out broad and filthy not a minute’s walk away, their cranes so close that Harold would lie in the bed he shared with Jack and imagine them reaching through the window and plucking him up.
From the moment they were born, it was assumed that Henry’s sons would follow him to the docks. It was a matter of familial pride that they did so. In the East End, as elsewhere, docking ran in families. It wasn’t something you did, it was something you were. In 1914, at the age of fourteen, Jack followed convention and went into the West India with his father, but by then it was already clear that Harold would never join them. Four years before, in 1910, when he was seven, Harold had suffered an accident, and ever after he walked with a pronounced swagger brought on by one leg being much longer than the other and the shorter one being calipered.
While Harold and Jack were still at school together in Union Street, Jack protected his younger brother from the worst of the teasing from his schoolmates. Jack grew up tall and well built and with a reputation for toughness and recklessness. No one wanted to mess with him. Once Jack left for the docks, at the beginning of the Great War, Harold was considered fair game. By then, most of his schoolfellows had grown used to his limp and, knowing him to be a kind and decent boy, counted themselves as among his friends, but the arrival of Albie Bluston at the school changed all that. Albie’s father had been killed during the earliest days of the war, and an elder brother returned home burned the colour of a plum. Albie had been sent to live with his aunt while his mother nursed her older son back to some semblance of a life. To Albie, a boy who had come about his injury without having to fight was nothing short of a coward, and he immediately set on Harold with the specific intention of making his life a misery. All of a sudden, boys Harold had grown up with and considered friends began to trip him up or kick him down for the pleasure of watching him struggle to right himself. When that became a bore, they set wires to trip him up or rolled marbles under his feet, stumbling alongside him in exaggerated imitation of his gait, hurling highfalutin insults, with toffee-nosed expressions on their faces.
I say, look at that blundering