Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath
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Jane, the Great War had begun as an enigma and it stayed that way. On her way to the market she’d see women streaming from the munitions factories with faces yellow from picric acid, the local boys running after them shouting ‘Chinkie Chinkie Chinkie’. Policemen rode around the streets of Poplar on new bicycles with sandwich boards over their chests reading AIR RAID, TAKE COVER, but no one ever did because they were more interested in gawping at the bicycles. In the winter of 1917 she was woken by a dreadful thunder, throatier than any bomb and deeper than the sound of shelling. The sky went red, then green and the smell of burning flour came over. The Brunner Mond Munitions plant at Silvertown had blown itself to bits and taken half of Silvertown with it. Afterwards, she discovered that the blast had hurled metal across the Thames into East Greenwich, where it had ripped apart a gasholder and sent a blue flame jetting fifty feet into the sky. She recalled how odd it was that this news had left her cold and unmoved, with neither fear nor anticipation. Other memories had no particular feelings attached to them but remained with her all the same. She remembered a man slumped in the doorway of a pub, blood snaking down his chin. She remembered men returning from the front, their eyes and legs and arms bandaged and their faces closed. She recalled seeing an enemy aeroplane which had been at the People’s Palace in Mile End. But somehow these were abstract things.
The winter of 1915 is bitter cold, there never seems to be enough coal dust to keep dry and warm, and day after day the inhabitants of Poplar have to go about their lives in clammy undergarments with their socks half-frozen between their toes. Frenchie is working all hours at the boat yard. One particularly frosty day he is fitting out a barge with his docker’s neckerchief at his throat and his cap wedged down over his head and a cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips when a rattle starts up in his lungs. By seven o’clock his breath is as heavy as rock. All night Sarah simmers onions in milk and holds the warm halves to her husband’s chest but by morning he is worse, and his breath is like broken bellows and the children are afraid and begin to harbour a secret hope that by the time they come home from school he will have disappeared. Still, he insists on trudging to work, but just before midday a clerk’s assistant brings him back, staggering and incoherent. He ain’t no use, the clerk says. Had to carry ’im ’ere almost. Sarah makes sugared tea and puts her husband to bed, still wearing his neckerchief and protesting his fitness, but halfway through the night he wakes up afraid.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, not this, he cries. What’ll become?
Shh, says Sarah. You’ll be right as rain in a jiffy-jiff-jiff.
But Frenchie doesn’t get better in a jiffy-jiff, or anything like. When his foreman pays a visit to the house at Ullin Street three days later, Frenchie Fulcher is worse, the breath lathing off his lungs and his nightsweats so torrid that you can smell them from outside the room. His eyes are red bowls, his skin the colour of custard. When he coughs, greyish sputum veined with blood oozes from the corners of his lips.
He’s awful watery, says Sarah.
The foreman says it’s more like pneumonia and advises Sarah to call a doctor, though he already knows a doctor will not be called.
Never mind, Mrs F, he says, patting the soft wodge of Sarah’s arm. Don’t you worry ’bout nothing, there’ll be work in plenty waiting for Frenchie the moment he’s well enough to do it. We got a war on, after all, ain’t we?
A week drifts by, then another, and Frenchie’s nightsweats begin to lose their putrid smell and dry up, and instead of the bloody sputum, great green gobbets of mucus appear whenever Frenchie coughs. From then on he is a little better every day but it is a long recuperation, marked by downturns and surging fevers.
Ah, Frenchie, you’re a credit to us all, the foreman says when he next visits. Sure as eggs is eggs you’ll be up and at it in no time and there’ll be plenty of work ’cetra ’cetra.
Seeing the foreman to the door, Sarah braces herself and says, Listen, mister, we’ve had to do a spot of belt-tightening. I don’t suppose … ?
Ah yes, says the foreman, shaking his head. Belts tightening all over the East End. Can almost hear ’em creak. I’m sorry, Mrs F, I really am. But belts is a family’s business and none of mine.
For a week they live on the tuppences Sarah has put in a jam jar for Christmas. A cousin sends round soup and the odd half-loaf, a neighbour takes in the washing and Tarbun the grocer and Harwood the greengrocer are good enough to ease the Fulcher’s credit. But once a poor family in the East End is taken with illness or unemployment there is no backstop that can prevent their fall, no neighbour or relative who can do more than slow its pace a little. The Fulchers are reduced to soup and bread scraped with lard, until the soup and the lard run out and then it’s just bread. Hearing of their distress, the vicar’s wife brings round porridge and, hovering over the bed where Frenchie is heaving, says, So I’ll be seeing you in church, then? And Sarah replies, Right enough, Missus, but after the vicar’s wife has left there is nothing she can do to persuade her husband.
Sarah, old girl, I ain’t never been righteous and I ain’t gonna start pretending now. Mebbe I’d be moved to do a spot of praising if the vicar’s wife had turned up with pasties instead of porridge.
For a month the children go hungry every day. Their insides rumble through their lessons. In the evenings Sarah mops their tears and feeds them stale bread made soft in sugared water, but the sight and sound and smell and memory of food plague their waking moments and their dreams. The whole family is set to work. John junior brings in six shillings a week loading wagons at the coal yard, Frances Maud and Rosie find jobs in a munitions factory. The younger children run errands, mind horses and stand beside the queues for the music hall in Mile End Road fetching ices and beigels for those that want them. All the same, they live in a twilight of hunger. At night they hang around the dustbins at the back of Harwoods watching the pauper children rummaging for remains.
We’ll never be like that will we, Rosie? asks Jane.
Never.
Because we’re respectable, ain’t we?
Because we are.
Their mother, who knows nothing of their night-time excursions, says, We ain’t reduced just yet. Ee’ll be as right as rain in no time and the foreman says there’ll be more work for ’im than a man can do in a month of Sundays.
Six weeks after his first attack, Frenchie Fulcher wakes up one morning without a temperature. He feels his lungs, coughs experimentally and rises from the bed. Then he shaves, puts on his jacket and goes down to Orchard House. Calling for the foreman from the gate he shares a cup of tea with the guard there. He waits ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two. After four hours the guard takes him to one side and says, The foreman ain’t coming, sonny boy, now why don’t you go home?
For the next eight months Frenchie does whatever he can, shouldering sacks for coalmen, heaving barrels off the brewers’ drays, lugging carcasses at the abattoir, sorting cow bones for glue, but the work is lowly and piece-rate and Frenchie can’t go at it as he might have done before his illness. His lungs still feel rackety and sometimes it’s a terrible trouble just to catch a breath. At night they sit in the cold and dark, with no coals and no money for the gas lamp, their stomachs burning empty. In the space of a year their world fades to grey. Frenchie grows bitter. He misses his friends at Orchard House; he misses his small luxuries – his Daily Mirror and his smoke. Most of all he misses the life of a craftsman, a man with a skill to bring to the world. His heart boils and rages. He begins to spend more time in the company of a tuppeny pint at The Wellington Arms than with his family.
It ain’t your father’s fault, says Sarah. Ee’s from carriage people, but blow me if the carriage ain’t rolled clean away.
To keep her children warm when winter comes round again, Sarah smears their chests in goose grease and sews them into brown paper like jars of potted meat. The thought of losing another of her babies keeps her up nights and makes her hair go grey. They look so tired, now, and thin. At Christmas that year, 1916, the vicar’s wife brings round a jug of soup with a piece of pig belly in it but Frenchie sends it back saying, She ain’t buying us a place in heaven, we’ll get there on our own.