Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath
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hiding behind a postbox on the East India Dock Road while several thousand men in uniform thump along the granite in the direction of the ships that will take them off to war. It is rather overwhelming, this column of marching men, and rather thrilling too, to two young girls who have never ventured from their birthplace and who cannot know what any war – let alone this one – will bring. All along the route, men and women are leaning from windows laced with bunting, waving and whistling. There’s a band playing rousing military tunes and everywhere people are fluttering little Union Jacks on sticks and clapping. A few, women mostly, are hurrying alongside the marchers, delaying the moment when their husband or brother or son will finally slip from sight. One or two are crying, but only one or two, because the papers say it will be the shortest of wars and how could anyone who has witnessed the ineluctable power of the great British Empire think otherwise.
Me dad says signing up is for the birds, says Dora.
The men continue to march by, their faces sombre and set in patterns suggestive of faraway thoughts.
D’you think they’ll be getting theirselfs killed, Dor? asks Jane.
Nah, no chance. It’s the Germs what’s getting theirselfs killed.
Dor, says Jane, you got some coinage on yer?
Dora shakes her head.
Nothing. Why?
Every week they go through the same routine. The answer is always the same. Jess thinkin ’bout sweets, is all.
They peer out from behind the postbox at the khaki-coloured column in the road.
When we win the war, do you think we’ll have more money, Dor?
Sure as eggs is eggs, Janey pet.
They make their way south then east to Bow Lane and find themselves in a small crowd outside number 278 – William Utz the butcher’s. This crowd is quite unlike the one waving on the soldiers. There is something ugly about it. One of them, a young man with a reddened face, has grabbed a brick and is looking as though he means to throw it at Utz’s shop window. Some of the crowd appear to be egging him on; others are standing back, shaking their heads.
What’s goin on, Dor? says Jane.
Don’t ask me, Janey girl.
I suppose he ain’t paid the tallyman.
I suppose that’s it, Janey.
The two girls pass through the crowd and out the other side, but the air has changed, as though a high wind had moved through the Poplar they knew and set everything at an unfamiliar angle.
Jane doesn’t mention the incident at home, partly because she doesn’t know what to say about it and partly – and this is the puzzling bit – because she feels somehow responsible. She hopes the thing – whatever it is – will go away, and for a few hours it does, until at tea that day when Sarah puts a glistening slab of headcheese on the table next to the customary bread and jam and marg.
I got it at Utz’s place, explains Sarah, settling herself on the bed next to her children. A chap was selling everythin’ off cheap right out at the front. He had a little trestle going there, with Utz’s meat piled up, bits of glass all over everything but nuffink you couldn’t pick out. I dunno where Utz was but when things is going off cheap you don’t ask questions.
The family stares at the headcheese sitting on the plate, glowing in pink loveliness, with its little jewels of brain, ear, cheek and snout meat. How long is it since they had meat of any kind? None of them can remember. Since the start of the war, everything has become so expensive.
I ain’t gonna eat no Hun meat, Frenchie says. Not now.
Silence falls. The children bite their lips and stare at their laps.
Me neither, says John eventually, sliding away from the table.
Nor me, says Frances Maud.
And that is when Jane notices Frenchie’s eyes on her. Now she is sure that the whole business at Utz’s is her fault.
Sarah gets up from the bed and moves the headcheese over to her side of the table.
Oh you are silly billies. Go on, Edie, you take some, pet.
Edie shoots her mother a look then shakes her head. Me and Artie are going out to play now, she says, dragging her little brother out of the room and down the stairs.
Frenchie gets up from the table, goes to his chair by the fire and lights a cigarette and now there are only two people left sitting beside the table with the slab. Silly billies, repeats Sarah, slicing the slab in two. Here you go, Janey.
Jane sits there for a moment, thinking about the boy with the brick and the ugly words spilling from the crowd, and every part of her is saying no except the part that counts, and suddenly she can hear the headcheese saying, I know how badly you want me, Janey, and then it’s too late and her tongue is lapping around the jellied crust and her teeth are sinking into the pillow of blushing flesh.
Later, when she and Sarah are down at the yard tap washing the jam jars, and the headcheese is making grunting noises in her stomach, Jane says, How big is the war, Mum?
It’s the size of the world, pet, her mother says, poking at some greasy mark.
Does that mean it’s going on in Aldgate and Whitechapel?
Course it do!
Is the war going on in the Empire then?
Sarah Fulcher shakes the water off her hands. The concrete of the back yard is thick with city heat. It is too hot to work, too hot to think much. Even Bobs has excused himself from his ratting duties and is lying in the coolest corner of the yard, panting.
I wouldn’t know nothing about that, Janey dear, sighs Sarah, rubbing her moonish face with the damp on her hands.
Mum? says Jane.
Her mother sighs and tightens her lips.
Oh, you’re a right little Miss Why this evening. What is it now?
Don’t the sun never set on the war then?
They make their way up the stairs, avoiding the gaps in the banisters where someone has broken pieces off for firewood. Their room still smells faintly of the headcheese.
Well now, I don’t suppose it ever do, says Sarah.
Jane rescues a few hairs escaping from her plait. The war is a puzzle to her. If Britain rules the waves, then what is there to fight about? Why is Mr Utz bad now? They’ve been buying tripe off him for years and he wasn’t bad then. Has the badness got something to do with the brawn or has it got more to do with Utz himself, with the very name Utz maybe?
Mum, we ain’t foreigners, are we?
Janey, how can we be foreigners? Sarah returns to her sewing for a moment but Jane’s brow is so furrowed and her face so perplexed that even her mother, the most unobservant of women, is driven to wonder what kind of storm is collecting in the girl’s mind.
Ah I see, Sarah says, her lips squeezed round pins. Yer thinking about how yer dad come to be known as Frenchie, ain’t yer? French ain’t foreign, love. It’s on the same side as us, innit? Ask yer father when he comes home from the pub and he’ll tell yer.
She glances at her daughter momentarily.
Probly give yer a good clumping, though, an all.
There were anti-German protests all over the East End that week. In some parts things got so bad that traders with German-sounding names put up boards outside their shops saying ‘Lewis Hermann is English’ and the like, but still it went on. Utz returned but was run out of his shop; in Silvertown boys threw bottles at the houses of German glass blowers and there was much discussion about whether the Lithuanians who lived in the same street were really only Germans by another name. And then, after a few days, the whole thing blew over, because when it came down to it there were a great many foreigners in the East End and you