Hopping. Melanie McGrath
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more work till she’s paid it. I’ll be sending my man around every Friday to collect two and six. Tell her that.
Daisy returned home with the news. She sensed that, from now on, Friday evenings would never be the same.
For a while, Elsie struggled to pay back the money she owed Leitkov. She took in more laundry and kept Daisy back from school to help her with it and for days together the scullery reeked of carbolic and borax and Mrs Anderson complained that the plashing sound of the dolly peg and the rhythmic scraping of the washboard disturbed her sleep, but they never seemed to be able to make enough to pay off the collector when he came on a Friday. The experience seemed at once both to harden Daisy’s mother and render her more fragile, as though she’d been fired in a kiln at the wrong temperature. Elsie began to look around for things to hock. The first thing to go was the mantelpiece clock, then after that the china Elsie had been given as a wedding present by the woman in whose house she had worked as a maid. Next was Elsie’s overcoat, then Daisy’s, followed by some bed blankets. On Monday mornings it was now Daisy’s job to fill the cart that had once contained silk flowers with blankets and coats and set off for the pawnbroker, and as she walked by Helen Reid with her half-caste son, past the Greenbergs, it seemed that all that lay between them and The Deep were a few front doors.
Not long into the New Year, Elsie stopped eating, and at the same time she took up cleaning and polishing and scrubbing and bleaching and sweeping with more vigour than ever, and often at the oddest times. It was nothing to find her whitening the step at six in the morning, or hunched over her scrubbing brush in the middle of the night. When he got home from work in the evenings, Joe tried to comfort her, but she beat him off with her fists, and told him he could bugger off and take his bloody children with him. He began to spend more and more time in the pub after that.
The spring of 1914 arrived and patriotic flags began to appear in the shops. In May 1914 Joe came home with the news that the dockers had refused to handle German cargo and Mrs Shaunessy reported that Burrelli’s paint factory, where Mr Shaunessy worked, had dismissed all its German workers. By early summer, the more usual advertisements for flu powders and meat tea pasted on to Poplar’s billboards began to be replaced by recruitment posters and men in uniform were seen outside the East End’s pubs and cafés. Billy Shaunessy started catapulting boys and girls in the street and shouting:
Halt, friend or foe?
By late summer, columns of men had begun marching up and down the East India Dock Road most days, and queues of men gathered at the recruiting station in Poplar High Street, waiting to volunteer for the standard six-month tour of duty which was how long everyone was saying it would take to defeat the Hun. It was said that one fifth of those signing up were of German descent, keen to prove their patriotism or maybe to save their skins, for German butchers were having their windows smashed and anyone with a German name was in danger not just of losing his job but of being set upon in the street. At Culloden Street School Old Pigswill introduced an air-raid drill and taught potted histories of the calumnies of the Boche. In early September a sign went up at the general store around the corner offering credit for volunteer families only. The following day a great oval-shaped cloud floated across Poplar and in class Old Pigswill explained that airships would help defeat the enemy. Later that week a policeman rode by on a bicycle shouting Take cover! and sirens sounded and Daisy returned home at lunchtime to find her mother locked in the understairs cupboard shouting Give me back my twinnies! with Mrs Anderson rapping on the cupboard door and threatening to fetch Joe and the police and the doctor all at once. That night Daisy heard Joe and Mrs Shaunessy talking about her mother in hushed tones, Mrs Shaunessy every now and then clicking her tongue against her teeth, as though she were measuring the march of the Sandeman, advancing toward them.
Later that week Daisy returned home from school to find Mrs Anderson cooking faggots in the scullery.
Your mother’s gone for a little rest, poor duck, said Mrs Anderson. But never you worry, Mrs Shaunessy’s going to be taking you and yer sister on a nice long trip to the countryside.
Mrs Shaunessy trudged forward in the gloom before dawn, trundling her hop box on a borrowed barrow. For the past three months she’d been stashing away the odd jar of Bovril, a sugar cube or two and a few packets of flour in the box that Paddy Shaunessy had fashioned from an old tea chest, and the night before she’d filled it with a bucket, a tea towel, a scrubbing brush and other domestic paraphernalia. Behind her Daisy pushed a pram containing Franny, who, at four, was far too big for the lacy bonnet Mrs Shaunessy had insisted that she wear as a kind of disguise (for what purpose she would discover later), and a half-dozen tins of corned beef. Billy Shaunessy trailed behind with a Union Jack sticking out of his pocket. Ever since Mr Shaunessy had signed up, Mrs Shaunessy considered it a matter of filial duty that Billy demonstrate the family’s patriotism at every opportunity, and the flag was intended for this purpose. Whenever men in uniform passed, heading towards the docks, Mrs Shaunessy would turn her head and say:
Wave that flag, Billy! And give our men a cheer!
And, scowling, Billy would jab the flag in the air and issue a half-hearted hoorah. As they neared London Bridge the number of soldiers increased, and by the time they reached the bridge itself poor Billy was jabbing and cheering like a mad thing. Mrs Shaunessy strode on ahead across the bridge, singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’
The tide was up and the wide black water tumbled beneath them, but they did not stop to admire the dark cords of lighters bobbing around on the tarry surface, nor the belching little tugs slicing through the currents, nor even the elegant tea clippers that sat outside the London Dock in the Lower Pool, their slender masts lit by the light of paraffin lamps on passing tugs. In all her eleven years, Daisy had never been so far from home. She tried to remind herself that Poplar was just there, just a mile or two downriver, and in a few hours’ time her father would be somewhere on this water, sculling between ship and shore, but she felt frightened and a little homesick and she missed her mother and could not help but feel that she was in some way responsible for everything that had happened.
They reached the end of the bridge and Mrs Shaunessy led the little party along Tooley Street, through a set of immense yellow columns and into London Bridge Station. Inside, they were greeted by a great hoot of noise, a bluster of men and women and a whorl of pearly smoke. Everywhere there were women and children dragging carts and boxes or standing beside towers of cheap cardboard suitcases, some singing, others shouting instructions to the porters, but everyone seemed good-spirited and happy and for now, at least, Daisy was reassured.
Mrs Shaunessy collected her charges together beside a large crudely painted sign, reading Hoppers’ Specials!, and with three fingers pointing to, respectively, the High, Central and Low Levels.
Now, she said, me and Billy is going to run along and get the tickets so you stay there. Don’t you move none and don’t speak to no strangers.
Daisy felt a sly, hard pinch on her arm. She moved over very slightly and stamped on Billy’s foot. The boy shot her an evil look and bit his lip, but said nothing and moved off with his mother, limping slightly.
Ever since she’d known them, which was all her life, Mrs Shaunessy’s family had gone hop picking in the late summer. Mrs Shaunessy said the fresh air and exercise were good for children, and the space and time apart were good for husbands and wives. There was nothing like the freedom that you felt on a long evening with the fires burning and someone striking up a song, she said, knowing that the next day there would be no step to whiten, no coal to heave, no blacking of the range, no boiling laundry or wiping smuts from windows that would be smutty again twenty minutes later.
Most of the Crommelins’ neighbours went to the hop. In fact, almost everyone Daisy knew, including Lilly, had at least one hopper in the family. Daisy didn’t know why the Crommelins had never been. Her mother had once said she thought it was common, so perhaps that was it. Perhaps it had something to do with her mother’s poor health.