Hopping. Melanie McGrath
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to him that Spicer’s sold everything, so much and in so many varieties that he couldn’t put names to them all, but he thought he could remember green tins of black treacle sitting beside the sugar loaves wrapped in blue paper.
Good, said Jack, ’cause we got consignments of them both. He dived into the shed and reappeared with a large basket which he attached to the front of the bicycle with rope. Into the basket they loaded half a dozen tins of treacle and six mats.
You tell that Spicer, this is for free, but he takes you on there’ll be more: black treacle, coconut mats, rum, the lot. He’ll have to pay, mind, but not half what he’d pay the wholesaler.
Harold stood beside the bicycle, committing this message to memory. Then, for no particular reason, he heard himself say:
Mr Spicer’s got a mynah what sings ‘Laddie Boy’. He’d heard Jack and Henry singing the song. He don’t know all the words, but he can sing the chorus.
Jack looked interested. Oh, our man likes birds, do he? Well, I’ll give him birds. Wait here, then, Crip. He went into the pub by the back door and emerged a few moments later holding a crude wooden birdcage inside which sat a startlingly large white cockatiel with a bristling yellow crest.
Some tyke give me this for a card game. Spotless, this bird. Lovely singer. Tell Spicer if he gives you the job, it’s his for six shillings.
Jack tousled his brother’s hair.
Listen, Crip. All this cargo what you see here. This is a family matter, all right? Just a little bit of duck and dive. Your dad and me, we like to keep it private, so only tell that Spicer fellow what I said you could.
Harold reassured his brother and went to mount the bicycle. With the mats and the treacle in the basket and a large birdcage hanging from the bars, the bicycle was a good deal trickier to manage than it had been, but Harold set himself to the task and he was soon pedalling north again and hearing his brother calling after him:
And don’t forget to tell him your dad’s a bleedin’ war hero and all.
He made his way back to Spicer’s feeling upbeat. His brother’s words had settled him. Jack was right. Everyone in the East End made a big play out of being neighbourly, and they were. If you were in some kind of crisis, your neighbours would always do what they could to help you out. That was how the East End was. But no one confused that with family. Family was the core, the essence. Family was what you were, and if that meant doing whatever it took to get a job, knowing there were one-eyed men and limbless veterans who might need the job even more than you did, then that’s what you had to do. Ultimately, it was family that counted.
Presented with the treacle, mats and cockatiel, and persuaded that Harold’s father was indeed a war hero, Mr Spicer decided he was running a business, not a charity, and hired Harold Baker on the spot for a weekly wage of five shillings and a direct line to his brother’s unorthodox grocery wholesalers. Harold’s duties included sweeping and dusting, stocktaking, the afternoon deliveries and occasionally helping Mrs Spicer with her books.
The Spicers proved themselves to be kind and reasonable employers and Harold quickly and happily made himself indispensable. In the mornings he mopped and swept the pavement in front of the shop, then dusted the shelves and washed and polished the floor, before feeding and cleaning out the mynah bird. In the afternoon, he hitched up the delivery trailer to Spicer’s bicycle and took off along the streets of Poplar, delivering packages here and there. From time to time he would cycle down to the pub beside the West India to pick up consignments of molasses and black treacle, bananas and spiced rum from Jack and Henry’s store.
After some months, Spicer sold the bristling cockatiel and bought a breeding pair of Cumberland fancy canaries, and it became Harold’s responsibility to put out their white grit and seed every morning and to change their water, wipe their cuttlebone free of droppings, and lay new paper on the cage floor. There was no more talk of war heroes, nor of crippled boys. May never called her younger son fishlips again, and even his father seemed to treat him with a new respect. The Spicers, who had no children of their own, developed an affection for their errand boy and were touched by the care he took with everything, and in particular with the birds. Spring came round and Spicer made a breeding box and offered Harold a cut of the sale price of every canary chick he could bring to adulthood. Pretty soon the hen laid eggs, each of which Harold carefully removed with a spoon and replaced with a clay dummy. Once the clutch was complete, he put all the eggs back in the nest together and waited for the hen to settle on them. Of the first brood, he lost three chicks and managed to bring up two, but he was picking up tips at the bird market in Sclater Street now and he knew where he had gone wrong. With the money he made on the two he sold, he bought another breeding pair and successfully raised six chicks. He sold the males, which were the only singers, and kept the females for breeding on.
Summer passed into autumn and on 11 November, the Armistice was signed and, despite the ravages not only of the war, but of the influenza which came in on its coat-tails, the whole of the East End devolved into one giant street party. Young men not yet drafted laughed with relief, children boasted about their fathers, and wartime sweethearts schemed to extricate themselves from their promises.
The curtains opened, the lights came on and everyone remembered their lines. Life was on again.
There followed the briefest of booms as the economy picked itself up from the war and then a deep depression hit.
How’s about I pay yer next week, sonny boy? women would say when Harold turned up to deliver their groceries. Mr Spicer won’t mind a bit. Sunken-eyed mothers would come into the shop with their crying children carrying the most pitiful array of shabby goods – a baby’s rattle, a spinning top, a rabbit’s foot good-luck charm – to trade for food, and Spicer would have to take them to one side and remind them sternly that it was a business he was running and if they wanted charity they should apply to the Sally Army.
Them politicians have got a lot to answer for, Mrs Spicer said. Ain’t those poor women got enough on their plates? Half of them widows and all.
But that’s just it, Mrs Spicer, Spicer replied, shaking his head at the way of things. Most of ’em ain’t got nothing on their plates at all.
Things got so bad that on one day in 1921, four members of Poplar council were arrested for diverting the rates into a food voucher scheme designed to protect Poplar’s poorest residents from starvation. When news spread of the councillors’ arrest, men and women in the docks and factories began putting down their tools and taking to the streets. Spicer watched them moving slowly past the shop windows and tutted with disapproval. Things were bad, he knew, but there was no need to make a public scandal of it. Besides, the demonstrators were putting off his customers.
At lunchtime that day, Mrs Spicer put on her coat and brown cloche hat and announced she was going to the post office. Spicer tried his best to persuade her not to go, but she was insistent. By late afternoon, when the demonstrations and street protests had spread across Poplar and even the rookeries and turnings were jammed with aggrieved men and women, jostling for a view of their leaders, and Mrs Spicer had not returned, Spicer sent Harold out on the bicycle to look for her. For several hours, Harold slowly pedalled through the throng, along the Commercial Road, down the East India Dock Road into Poplar High Street and farther east to Blackwall and the oxbow of land at Bow Creek where the river Gypsies lived, weaving his way through the tides of people, but he saw no sign of Mrs Spicer until, making his way home, he was bicycling down Poplar High Street when he thought he spotted her brown cloche hat among a group outside the town hall. He clambered from his bicycle and, leaving it in the care of a boy in return for a farthing, he made his way through the throng of people until finally there, over on the other side of the street, next to the slipper baths, his suspicions were confirmed. Mrs Spicer was standing with the protesters. She had a banner in her hand and was shouting. He knew then she had never intended to visit the post office but needed an excuse to leave the shop. In her own quiet way Mrs Spicer was a rebel; most likely she’d been a rebel all her life. Harold found the idea