Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath
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din do the eyes, says Tom. They was done already.
There is a moment’s pause while all parties take this in.
Wanna look? asks Tom. At that moment the creature lifts its head and slowly begins to drag itself towards the deepness of the alley.
That’s disgusting, says the yellow-haired girl.
Gis a penny or we’ll stamp on it, says Matty.
Drop dead, says the yellow-haired girl. Matty Jorrocks raises his boot and grins.
The poor thing, says the yellow-haired girl and, reaching for a broken piece of brick on the pavement, she darts in front of the Jorrocks boys and brings the brick down hard on the creature’s head.
There, she says, brushing the brick dust from her hands as Tom and Matty tumble down the street. Jane and the yellow-haired girl find themselves alone above the body of the cat, each taking the measure of the other.
How’s about we play ginger? says the girl.
In ginger you tie the one doorknob to its neighbour, ring the doorbells and speed off to the nearest vantage.
My mum says ginger is common, says Jane, sensing a surge of bad feeling running through her belly.
Please yerself, says the girl, drawing herself up, the yellow hair falling across her face like sunlight. I don’t care anyway.
And that, over the years, is what Jane Fulcher finds most thrilling about her friend Dora Trelling. Dora Trelling really doesn’t care.
Jane begins meeting Dora after school. They walk together to Mrs Folkman’s emporium on Zetland Street and discuss the relative merits of sweets they have never tasted.
Cough candy, now, there’s a nice little tablet, says Jane.
They fall silent for a moment, imagining the crust of sugar on the outside, the damp, welcoming interior.
Dor, wha’s your all-time favourite sweet?
They scan the rainbow piles in the shop window.
I ain’t never had none of ’em. Wha’s yours?
Lemme see, says Jane, running her mind across imaginary tastes. Liquorice comfits or montelimar? Fruit gems or marshmallow? Tell the truth, Dor, I’m a little bit partial to the lot but all considered, I think montelimar gets it.
Liar, liar, says Dora. Liar, liar, pants on fire.
On a hot June day, just before the war, and sensing their lives are about to change, the Fulchers take a trip, their first, to the Royal Victoria Gardens on the riverbank between Silvertown and North Woolwich. Dressed in their Sunday best (which is also their Sunday worst and their Monday best), they make their way across the Lea Bridge where they stop for a while to admire Frenchie’s boats at Orchard Place. They are not technically Frenchie’s boats, of course, but it was Frenchie who laid their decks and Frenchie who panelled their cockpits and Frenchie has names for all of them.
There’s the Rosetta, nippers, ain’t she a beauty? And the Edie down there, a lovely slender little ship. Beyond it in the grey coat, the Maudie. Ah me boats, me boats.
Where’s the Janey, Da?
Oh the Janey. Frenchie rubs a hand over his hair and shakes his head. Well, I don’t know as there is a Janey yet, poppet. Not yet.
They wander over the bridge into Canning Town. The younger children, Artie and Edie, are joyful and pestering. Can they have an ice cream, a gobstopper, a penny bag of Indian toffee? The elder four, Rosie, Frances Maud, John and Jane, drag their heels a little, as if by walking more slowly they might keep the day going on for ever.
Opened in 1851 for those who could not afford the Great Exhibition, the Gardens are one of the few spots of green between the docks and the Thames and the only place to the east of the Lea, aside from Lyle Park, where there is an unimpeded view of the river water. Despite their reputation for being unsafe and swampy, the Gardens were generally crowded with women and children marking time while their men drank in the vast dockers’ pubs on the North Woolwich Road. Decades ago they had been famous for staging Monster Baby shows, where babies with swollen, scarlet heads, or three hands, or rows of nipples like pigs, were displayed for the edification of paying onlookers. The monster babies had long since gone when the Fulchers arrived, replaced by the fortune-tellers, jugglers and cardmen, but the Gardens still had a sinister reputation and there were rumours that they were haunted after dark by the souls of those who drowned nearby when the Princess Alice went down at Gallions Reach thirty years before.
Each spring and summer throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Princess Alice, a steam-driven pleasure boat, had ferried city-worn families to the pleasure gardens at Rosherville and Gravesend, stopping off at the Royal Victoria Gardens to pick up passengers on its journey eastwards. On a Tuesday in September 1878, at about teatime, the Alice left Sheerness as usual. Just after dusk the boat approached Tripcocks Point, at the northernmost crick of Gallions Reach. It was only as she turned the point that George Long, the Alice’s first mate, spotted the Bywell Castle, an 890-ton collier ship bound for Newcastle, heading towards them at speed and only 150 yards distant. There was nothing to be done but wait for the impact.
Within four minutes, seven hundred and fifty men, women and children were in the water just east of the Gardens’ jetty and almost directly on the spot where the Northern Outfall Sewer opened to discharge north London’s sewage into the Thames. It was only a few yards to shore but the Thames is fast at Gallions Reach and the sewage poisoned those desperately trying to reach land. Within twenty minutes, six hundred and fifty men, women and children had drowned, their soiled bodies drifting in at the Victoria Gardens. They were buried in Woolwich Old Cemetery but it was said that their ghosts still inhabited the waters at Gallions Reach and cast curses and spells on Silvertown and all those who had failed to save them.
The Fulchers aren’t thinking about the Alice on this day. They are too busy considering where they might eat the picnic they have brought and whether they will have ice creams or shrimps from one of the food stands afterwards. Finding an empty bench beside the rose garden (Sarah and Jane are especially fond of roses) the children settle themselves around their parents and fall on fish paste sandwiches made from yesterday’s bread and a bit of drip mixed in. They wash them down with cold, black, sweet tea from an old beer bottle with a ground glass top while Frenchie spins yarns about the baby monsters he remembers as a small child and how for months afterwards he would check himself on waking to make sure he hadn’t become one of them during the night. And when the business of eating is done, the girls skip off to inspect a crimson parrot tied to a post which bobs up and down and croaks ‘Daisy, Daisy’ in exchange for a penny, and the boys join the crowd gathering for a demonstration of a fire pump given by two smiling London firemen.
On their return Frenchie buys them all an ice cream from Delamura’s ice cart and they wander down to the river and wave at the pleasure boats passing by with the ice cream melting down their chins. Frenchie lifts the youngest two on to the Woolwich Free Ferry to gawp at the pauper children shouting ‘throw out your mouldies’ to the passengers on the steamers tied up at Woolwich Pier. They watch the scattering of coins from ship to shore, while Rosie, Frances Maud and Jane feed the pigeons on the pier.
The afternoon is hazy, the sun emerging every so often to flood the Gardens with its polished light. The youngest Fulcher children play hide and seek and grandmothers’ footsteps between the trees while their father smokes on a park bench by the river and reads his paper. Their mother dozes and the older children watch the passage of ships along the river, trying to guess their names. Then, much too soon, the sun begins to take cover behind the afternoon clouds and Frenchie Fulcher rises to signal it is time to start the long walk back home.
And that is the last really happy day any of them can remember. By the autumn the Great War has begun and by October the first German bomb has fallen on London.
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