Hopping. Melanie McGrath
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bottom of the sea, or Joe would uncover a smugglers’ den or spot a mermaid stranded by the tide.
Saturday mornings were taken up with chores, but on Saturday afternoons Joe would take his girls to the Sally Army concerts in Tunnel Park and afterwards treat them to a piece of cold fried fish or a little waxed cone full of whelks and a jam jar of lemonade. On Sundays Elsie would boil up a sheep or pig head. On special occasions she would take a piece of gammon ham or a pork leg to the bakers to roast and follow it with a steamed syrup pudding or a spotted dick. Sunday nights were lived in dread of Elsie’s Monday feints and tantrums.
Today was no exception. If anything, Elsie had been even more grumpy than was usual on a Monday. The Friday before, Leitkov had given Elsie and Daisy twice the usual amount of silk and ribbon and finishings so they might complete enough flowers for the Christmas rush, and Daisy and her mother had worked late on Friday night, then again on Saturday and Sunday, but by Monday morning they had made barely a dent in the piles of scraps and pieces of ribbon in the willow basket, and Elsie decided to keep her eldest back from school in the afternoons so they could get the job done. Now she was ill with one of her innumerable, vague complaints, and Daisy was left trying to get through the task alone.
At five, Elsie rose from her bed in a fluster, glanced at the mantelpiece clock, started muttering to herself about the time and getting Joe’s tea, then, throwing on her coat, announced she was going to fetch a piece of pork belly or maybe a spot of jellied trotter, leaving Daisy with instructions to begin boxing up the flowers and to make sure Franny remained in her room until they were all safely packed away. In recognition of her daughter’s efforts she put a halfpenny in Daisy’s hand, telling her to spend it on muffins or a toffee apple from one of the vendors who paraded their wares around the streets on open trays, accumulating smuts and factory fumes.
Now you be careful while I’m gone. The Sandeman’s watching and don’t you forget it.
Daisy began gathering up the flowers and scraps of unused silk, but within minutes of her mother’s departure, she heard Franny crying and begging to be released from her room. For a while Daisy ignored her, but, eventually, her heart pricked, she climbed the flimsy staircase and opened the bedroom door, thinking she would set her little sister in the yard to play with the dog. When they reached the back door they saw that a greenish fog had come down and Franny shook her curls and screwed her delicate little face into a fist, and Daisy, who could never bring herself to do anything that made her sister unhappy, sat her at the table and told her to sit as still as the clock on the mantelshelf and touch nothing.
No harm might have come of this minor infraction of the rules had the toffee apple man not turned into Bloomsbury Street at precisely that moment, crying:
Apples and flats, apples and flats!
Flats, the discs of toffee that pooled from the toffee apples when they were left to set, were the two girls’ favourite treat, and it was so rare for them to have any money with which to buy anything, that Daisy could not resist the impulse to go out into the street and get some.
Don’t touch nothing. I’ll only be a minute.
Despite the weather, a line of wide-eyed children had already formed around the toffee apple man’s tray and it took Daisy a while to push through the crowd, claim her prize and hurry back to the house. When she did, she realised immediately the mistake she had made in leaving her little sister alone. The scullery looked as though a high wind had passed through it. Silk scraps lay scattered across the lino flooring and between the scraps broken flowers lay, their petals wrenched out or torn or bent at strange angles. There was ribbon strewn across the table, torn and knotted in places. The air was dense with fibres and silk dust and the sheets and pillowcases that had been hanging on string lines beside the fire were spotted all over with little pieces of silk, whose bright colours were already creeping their way across the whiteness of the cotton. And there was Franny sitting in the midst of it with her hands in the basket.
Oh, my knees and knuckles, Daisy said, Franny Crommelin, what have you done?
You said sit still as the clock, Franny cried in a voice ripe with indignation, but the clock moved! Daisy glanced towards the mantelpiece, where the clock was still in the place it had always been, its spot marked out on the mantel in dust and smuts from the fire. But ten minutes had passed and the hands of the clock had indeed moved.
I want the flowers! Franny screamed. You always have the flowers.
Suddenly, Daisy understood why her sister had done what she had. Franny had torn up the silk because she didn’t want Daisy to have anything she didn’t have, and because she knew she could. Already so sure of her power over the family, Franny knew that, whatever she did, her older sister would somehow always shoulder the blame. The thought of it was unbearable to Daisy, yet at the same time she knew it was true.
This time she had gone too far. Half lifting, half dragging, Daisy forced her sister through the scullery, and pushing her out into the yard. As she stumbled on to the flags, Franny uttered a low growl, the sound, Daisy remembered later, of a cornered cat, full of defiance and contempt. She shut the back door behind her, turned the key in the lock and leaned on it, trying to catch her breath. After all she’d been to her little sister, it hadn’t been enough. Franny resented her, hated her even, and wanted her to fail. She began scurrying about, picking up silk scraps, pressing them back into shape with her hands, scooping up the pieces of feather and red and green ribbon, trying to salvage what she could from the mess, but pretty soon Franny began a piteous wailing in the yard, and all the love and protectiveness Daisy felt for her little sister flooded back and she felt disabled and ashamed. Opening the door, she said:
All right, all right, there, there.
You said to stay still as the clock, Franny said sulkily. You said it, but the clock moved.
Daisy nodded. Franny was right. What had happened was her fault. It was all her fault. She returned to the clearing up. It very soon became clear that most of the flowers, the silk scraps and ribbon were ruined and the laundry was dotted about with blooms of transferred dye. Daisy dreaded her mother’s return.
When Elsie saw the mess she screamed so loudly that Mrs Shaunessy came rushing round, thinking she was being attacked, and after she left, Elsie pounded and thumped Daisy so hard that her breath came in rasps as if from an old kettle.
I wish the Sandeman would come and take yer. I wish he would, Elsie raged. ’Cause you ain’t no good to me, yer blue-arsed little weakling with yer elephant ears. I wish you’d never been born. I wish the Sandeman would take yer right now so that I wouldn’t ever have to trouble me eyes with you again.
As she swore and rampaged about, Franny sat at the table, perfectly still, with a little smile playing on her face.
What Daisy did not know and could not know then was how far and with what shocking speed this event would tumble into another, and another and another, until only the thinnest barrier, as fragile as eggshell, separated the Crommelin household from catastrophe. She did not know this because she did not consider her family to be poor – hadn’t Elsie always said they were respectable? – and because she had no notion yet of how vulnerable they were, and because she had not been alive long enough to understand the relentless cruelty of the East End tides, which daily washed in the hopeful and the desperate and daily dashed their hopes. She did not know, yet, what Joe Crommelin knew and had not thought to tell her, because she was not a boy, that to survive you had to steer your course mid-stream, where the water was deepest and ran fastest, that you had to paddle fast, as fast as you could, to stay there, to stay still in the rushing current, because the price of failure was to be washed up on the beach or be dashed to pieces on the wharves.
On Friday, Daisy walked alone to Leitkov’s, but instead of the usual boxes of jaunty irises and delicate roses, she carried the Kentish willow basket with what remained of the scraps. Listening to her story, the milliner sat impassively for a while, then reached for his account book and started totting up figures in his head. Eventually he said:
Tell your mother she owes me