CHAPTER 4

      On their return from Kent and all through the war years, Daisy and Franny visited Elsie at her Wanstead Flats asylum once a month with Joe. Sometimes they’d take a rock bun or a piece of Mrs Anderson’s tea loaf, but after Mrs Anderson and Maisie left for alternative lodgings nearer to Mrs Anderson’s sister, there was rarely anything worth taking. Elsie didn’t seem to bother one way or another. Every so often her face would beam with recognition, but most times she seemed confused and mildly irritated, as though their presence interrupted her peace. No one had any real idea what was wrong with her. The diagnoses ranged from nervous exhaustion to hysterical grief and melancholic disorder. She was prescribed complete rest for an indefinite period. Whether she would recover or not was anyone’s guess. Still, the asylum was warm, the nurses seemed kind and the food was plentiful, and Daisy often thought her mother was happier in her walled prison, shorn of memories, than she had been on the outside, though she knew enough never to say this to her father.

      Without Elsie’s luxuriant moaning and numberless afflictions, life at number 7 Bloomsbury Street felt oddly amputated but it, too, was happier, especially for Daisy, who had always suffered the hard edge of her mother’s misery.

      While she remained at Bloomsbury Street, Mrs Anderson was drafted in to help out with the domestic chores and Mrs Shaunessy was taken on to do the cooking and watch Franny when there was no one in the house. The most immediate practical consequence of Elsie’s absence was that, with medical bills to pay, and Mrs Anderson and Mrs Shaunessy to compensate for their time, and with no income from laundry and flower-making, the Crommelin family found themselves very short of money. Joe took on extra shifts, leaving the house before the gas lamp man had snuffed out the street lights and returning long after the last lamp had been lit for the night. He no longer brought treats home on Fridays. Gone, too, were the Saturday afternoons in the park.

      In 1915, six months or so after her return from the hop fields, at the age of twelve, Daisy went out to work on the half-and-half, spending her mornings at school and her afternoons at an assortment of factories, sweeping floors and sorting cans. The arrangement brought in a few shillings but it put an end to her evenings with Lilly and to the possibility of another summer visit to Kent.

      Notwithstanding the downturn in their own fortunes, the Crommelins never ceased to count their luck. They had only to look next door to see what wreckage the war had left in its wake. Since his return from the front limbless and half blind, Pat Shaunessy had been reduced to selling kindling on the street and Mrs Shaunessy had started putting in long days washing and mending, ironing and darning, cooking and looking after children in order to try to make ends meet. Even so, they sometimes had to resort to the Relieving Officer, and Mrs Shaunessy would have to send Billy round to number 7, shamefaced, clutching bags of linen and tins of corned beef, for the officer would not issue food coupons to any family who had anything left to sell.

      The Shaunessys’ slide into poverty made Billy Shaunessy meaner and angrier than ever. Now he would lie in wait in a turning for Daisy and Franny as they walked to school every morning – from 1916 onwards Franny also attended Culloden Street School – and spring out, taking a pinch out of the both of them and shouting:

      Your ma’s as mad as a stick. Yes she is, yes she is. Me ma says so and me dad says so and all.

      Billy Shaunessy, you stop that! Daisy would cry, but to no effect. Billy relished the upset he caused and her protests seemed only to encourage him further. For weeks together, he carried on in this vein until, one day, deciding to take things into her own hands, Franny finally turned about and, marching up to him, stood on her tiptoes and flipped him so hard on the nose with her tiny fingers that he froze to the spot in sheer bewilderment, leaving Franny the space she needed to announce that Billy was a fine one to talk, whose so-called dad was a Patty-no-legs what begged in the street for his living.

      After that, Billy Shaunessy left the Crommelin girls alone and they saw him only when he slunk in, red-faced and arms full of corned beef tins, in advance of a visit from the Relieving Officer.

      The Crommelins’ luck – if you could call it that – ran out one morning in 1917, when Joe returned from a visit to the asylum with bad news. Though no one seemed to be able definitively to say what was wrong with Elsie, the doctors had agreed the longer her ‘turns’ went on, the less likely she would be to make a recovery. This meant that further cutbacks were necessary. Daisy would have to leave school and find paid work the moment she reached fourteen. In the meantime, Joe would have to tell Mrs Shaunessy that the Crommelins could no longer afford her services. He was loath to do it – the Shaunessys had been good neighbours and Mrs Shaunessy had helped out when Elsie had first been taken ill. For weeks he wrestled with himself, struggling to find some way to soften the blow. Until, one afternoon, Mrs Shaunessy did the hard work for him.

      She came round as usual at five, carrying a piece of brisket for the Crommelins’ tea. While Daisy put on the kettle, Mrs Shaunessy began carving paper-thin slices of meat to make into sandwiches, chattering inconsequentially as she worked. As instructed, she’d bought a sixpenny piece of brisket, which would usually be enough for tea and for Joe Crommelin’s sandwiches in the morning. While the girls were eating, Mrs Shaunessy fussed about at the sink for a while before making as if to leave. As she moved towards the door, she hesitated and, in a casual voice, said that brisket had been particularly dear that day and that Daisy was to tell her father that she hadn’t been able to buy enough for his morning sandwiches. For a moment she put down her basket and turned to put on her hat, and in that moment the cloth she’d used to cover the basket dislodged itself and both Daisy and Franny saw the unmistakable remains of the brisket wrapped in wax paper wedged beneath.

      Daisy didn’t want to tell her father that Mrs Shaunessy had stolen the meat, because it was hard enough for the Shaunessys what with Mr Shaunessy having no legs and Billy Shaunessy being the crybaby that he was. She figured that if they just repeated what Mrs Shaunessy had said it couldn’t really be called lying, since it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told the lie. But Franny, who was fast developing into a telltale, ignored her older sister and Joe was barely in the door, taking off his blue serge overcoat, before she was breathlessly relating Mrs Shaunessy’s crime.

      Wait up, wait up, girl, Joe said, while Daisy unwound the string strapping up the hessian he always tied around his shins to protect his trousers, your tongue’s got caught on the current, but when he saw there was no meat for his sandwiches the following morning, only a couple of pieces of stale bread, he was very angry and started grumbling about ‘interfering’. It was the excuse Joe needed. He told Mrs Shaunessy that very evening not to come any more and asked Mrs Anderson as far as possible to keep to her room, and from then on the Crommelin girls were left to bring themselves up more or less alone.

      Low though they might have sunk, though, even the Shaunessys hadn’t suffered the worst of it. By the end of the war the same could not be said of all the inhabitants of Bloomsbury Street. One of the Lumin boys at number 47 was killed in action, and Mrs Lumin’s young nephew was blown to bits when a bomb dropped on Upper North Street School in June 1917. A French polisher and his cousin, who shared