Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly
Читать онлайн книгу.
fell silent and looked for a while at the western sky still burning bright orange as if the sun was clinging to the horizon and refusing to set. On the breeze rumbled the low, malicious thunder of distant flames. They all stood for a while, wordless, helpless, fearful, hands thrust into pockets and collars turned up against the cold, feeling occasional wafts of smoky warmth drifting across from the west.
And then they came. Out of the smoke, out of the glow, out of the darkness, among the billow of golden sparks: the people. A trickle at first, the advance party of the bewildered and the injured. A woman, wide-eyed in a torn coat, swivelling from side to side as she walked, shouting ‘Billy!’ at the buildings on one side of the street and then the other. A young man, deathly pale, his eyes dark and sunken, blood pouring down the left side of his face and neck, staining his jacket, glassy-eyed, looking ahead but looking at nothing, just walking, just getting away. A mother, hand in hand with two young children, all three of them blackened and shiny, repeated, at nobody in particular, ‘It’s gone. All of it. It’s all gone.’
Nellie watched them pass and saw more following behind, a shuffling stream of humanity, uncomprehending, mouths open, breath clouding in the chill evening, eyes seeing nothing, a parade of the shocked, a carnival of casualties. She leaned down to Norah and spoke directly into her ear.
‘Go home, Norah. I’ll be along in a minute.’
Once she’d watched her daughter run back along the street and turn into the doorway of the laundry, she looked back at those passing the end of Constance Street. It was like a parade of the damned. The wind changed, turned to the south and sent the clouds of smoke across the river, giving central Silvertown some relief from the oily smoke and brightening the streets a little, courtesy of the eerie orange glow.
Nell thought of baby Rose, a tiny pinprick of innocence among all this dread, while watching the shuffling procession pass by from a catastrophe whose scale those gathered at the corner of Constance Street could only guess at. She closed her eyes, and pictured bending her head to press her nose to Rose’s cap and breathing in a mixture of soap and baby. She became overwhelmed by a need to protect. The image of Rose, face down on the floor surrounded by glass and debris, came into her mind and made her shudder. These people, these wild-eyed, waxy-pale husks of humanity, they were all Rose to somebody. None of them deserved this. Whatever had happened over there, whatever horrors lay a few hundred yards to the west, had as far as she could deduce left these people with nothing. As well as their physical injuries they were all in a state of nervous shock, driven on by a base human instinct to get as far away from danger as possible. A wave of maternal compassion ran over her. These were her people, Silvertown people, yet they were suddenly otherworldly and vulnerable. She stepped into the street to a young man whose left arm was hanging at a sickening angle.
‘Here, boy,’ she said, and then, louder, ‘and anyone else, come with me,’ she called. ‘I’ve a laundry up this way. You can shelter there until …’ Until what? She wasn’t sure. ‘Tell you what, we’ll all have a nice cup of tea.’ She heard the words come out of her mouth and almost winced at the triteness of them, but this was the banality of disaster: normal was good, normal was what you needed at a time like this, and there’s nothing more normal than tea.
Thus Nellie Greenwood, businesswoman, wife and mother of ten, just embarked on her fortieth year, led a gaggle of the broken and bewildered along Constance Street to the battered and shattered business she ran with her husband with help from her daughters. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do with them when she got there, but she knew that right now they needed her more than anything in the world.
Nellie Greenwood was my great-grandmother and I never knew her. At least, I never knew her in the sense that she’d died before I was born. Such was her legacy, however, such the force of her personality and the mixture of affection and fear she’d instilled in those who grew up with and around her, that I’ve almost manufactured false memories of Nell of my own. So powerful was her character that photographs familiar from albums and mantelpieces move and talk in my mind.
Nell was ‘Gran’ to everyone, whatever their generation, the matriarch, the central node around whom all family business and life was conducted. A formidable working-class woman who’d forged a business from nothing, who’d worked hard all her life, asked for nothing and expected nothing, bore thirteen children of whom five didn’t survive to adulthood, while informally adopting at least one other, and who despite knowing hardship, frustration, tragedy and loss, and never being less than forthright, opinionated and frank, never lost the deep and innate kindness that underpinned her life.
It’s thanks to Nellie that Silvertown was, is, and will most likely continue to be, for another couple of generations at least, regarded as home by my mother’s family even though none of us has lived there for more than seventy-five years. Between the wars Nellie was the heart of the family and the heart of Constance Street, which in turn was the heart at the centre of Silvertown, a community in east London isolated between the docks and the river where Nellie and the rest of the Greenwoods allowed their roots to embed in the marshy earth. Silvertown is, as my grandmother would frequently remind me, an island – because of the docks you have to cross water to leave – and an island mentality developed there. A closeness of kin and a bond to a place that formed ties so tight it would take something spectacular to break them. The physical ties would indeed be broken in such a fashion, but the spiritual ones linger and show no sign of weakening any time soon. ‘You’ve got dock water in your veins, boy,’ my grandmother Rose would tell me, ‘and don’t you forget it.’
When I was young, the way my grandmother and great-aunts – the daughters of Nellie and Harry – would describe Silvertown made it seem like a magical place. Even the name made it sound wondrous, the stuff of fairy tales, and the way these old cockney ladies, quick to laugh and masterly storytellers all, would talk about Silvertown did nothing to disabuse me of the notion that it sat on clouds with the sun glinting off a forest of golden turrets.
My first sense that Silvertown was actually somewhere real came one Saturday when I was about 10 years old. My mother had been out all day and arrived home as darkness was falling. She had, she announced, just been to Silvertown. She’d taken Nan and a couple of my great-aunts across the water to revisit a few old haunts and, what’s more, hadn’t come back empty-handed. She placed a lump of rock on the table in front of me on top of the copy of Roy of the Rovers I was reading.
St Mark’s Church, where my mother’s family had been christened, married and eulogised for generations, had been deconsecrated and was derelict when they got there, the victim of first a serious fire and then vandals. Our posse of nostalgics had snuck in through a side door and found the place in dusty chaos. The pews, on which successive generations of Greenwoods and myriad Silvertonians had sat for reasons both joyful and tragic, were either gone altogether or reduced to a jumble of splintered planks. The vandals had enjoyed themselves immensely, not least when taking a sledgehammer to the font and reducing it to a mound of shapeless lumps on the floor. One of these lumps now sat in front of me on the dining table, retrieved by my mother who had been the last of the Greenwood babies to be christened in it. I ran my fingers over it: there was a beautiful shiny white side, blemished gently by a web of cracks so thin it was as if they’d been drawn on faintly in pencil. It was slightly curved with a champhered edge, all perfectly smooth to the touch. It was beautiful even out of its context and destroyed. The rest of this piece of pilfered font rubble, the sides visible where it had been broken away from the curved symmetry and craftsmanship of the whole, was rough and ugly, the raw material beneath the carefully constructed exterior, the bits you weren’t supposed to see. In this piece of font was Silvertown, all right.
It’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve come to question or even explore the received wisdom that Silvertown was this Greenwood utopia, a lost land of green and plenty. A cursory delve into the history of the place reveals that Silvertown was far from bucolic; it was mercilessly, relentlessly, unpleasantly industrial and life there was hard. Constance Street was topped by the docks at its north end and tailed by heavy industry at its south: the sugar refinery,