HOPPING

The Hidden Lives of an East End

Hop Picking Family

Melanie McGrath

For Tai, who looked forward to this book.

‘Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops, and women.’

CHARLES DICKENS, The Pickwick Papers

PREFACE

A few years ago I wrote a memoir of the lives of my grandparents, Jenny Fulcher and Leonard Page. In the telling of my grandparents’ story I wanted to capture the essence of two ordinary lives and to tell the story of the East End of London during an extraordinary period which saw it transform from what Jack London called the ‘abyss’– a hive of poverty and deprivation whose dimmed population toiled in sweatshops, factories and in the docks – to the less impoverished but more socially fragmented place it is today; a place associated not so much with economic deprivation (though there is still far too much of that) as with a hip art scene, vibrant Banglatown, Canary Wharf city slickers and, most recently, with the massive regeneration programme in disguise that is the 2012 Olympics.

Having told that story in Silvertown, the most obvious next step would have been to have continued my family story into the present day. To have done that, though, would have been to ignore completely one of the greatest of the East End’s many great traditions: hopping. Every summer throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of East Enders made the trip to the hop gardens of Kent to pick hops. My own family were among the minority who didn’t regularly go on these trips. My grandmother, Jenny Fulcher, regarded hopping as common and, as concerned as she was with respectability, avoided it. My mother went once or twice, but the hop never became part of her life.

But it was at the centre of the lives of many, if not most, East Enders; so much so, in fact, that the annual hop was referred to, not without irony, as ‘The Londoners’ holiday’. It would hardly count as one today – the hoppers, mostly women and children, worked long hours in sometimes difficult conditions – but the annual hop constituted a break from the smoke and grime of the East End and as such it became the nearest thing to a holiday that most would ever see. Mothers, in particular, looked forward to bringing their children down to the countryside for their health, and for many East End children the annual hop was their only opportunity to run about unhampered by roads and vehicles and noise, to breathe air uncontaminated by factory waste and smoke, to watch the sun go down and look out across wide open spaces to the horizon beyond. The money East End women earned by picking hops was usually the only part of the family income over which they had control, and it was often used to buy children the boots and coats they would need for the coming winter.

The tradition of employing Londoners to pick hops in Kent began in the mid-fifteenth century when Flemish weavers first began cultivating the bines in the Kentish weald, though it’s possible that cultivation itself began long before, since we know that the Romans, who marched into Britain through Kent along what is now the A2 Dover-to-Canterbury road, brought hops with them. The first recorded hop garden in Britain was thriving at Westbere near Canterbury in 1520, and hops were still growing on the same site more than 450 years later.

The hop plant, Humulus lupulus, a relative of cannabis, is a fast-growing herbaceous perennial which dies back to its rhizome in the winter. Although vine-like, it is strictly speaking a bine, the stout stems being covered with little hairs to assist in its clockwise clambering habit. Though hardy, it requires deep, well-draining loamy soil and shelter from the wind, and in the soft undulations of the Kentish downland, Flemish weavers found the perfect growing conditions. At that time, hopped beer was virtually unknown in Britain, but it had long been popular in central and northern continental Europe. All over medieval Europe, beer was a relatively safe substitute for water, which was often contaminated. In Britain, people tended to drink ale, a much heavier, sweeter drink, brewed without hops. Adding hops to beer not only imparts a grassy, bitter flavour and a spicy aroma, but the acids in the hop resin have a mild antibiotic effect which assists the work of the yeast and, along with the alcohol itself, helps preserve the beer for longer. Hopped beer can thus be brewed with a lower alcohol content than ale, which makes it a more practical substitute for water.

There were numerous early attempts to restrict hop production in Britain – Henry VIII forbade his own brewer to use such foreign fripperies and his Catholic daughter, Mary Tudor, condemned the hopping of beer as a nasty Protestant habit. All the same, the popularity of hops grew with the practically minded British, and many growers also became brewers, planting hop gardens for use in their own breweries and building drying oasts, the word taken from Flemish. During the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, gardens were planted all over southern and central England, but the hops continued to flourish best in Kent, where there was a ready supply of sweet chestnuts with which to make poles to support the bines, the enclosed fields provided shelter, and the hops did not have far to travel to the vast breweries of London. So important did Kent become in hop production that in 1681 the London hop market moved from Little Eastcheap to Borough to be nearer to the main thoroughfare to Kent.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, troops of indigents, Gypsies and Irish and a few Londoners poured into Kent to pick the hop crop, staying on to pick the apples, pears and plums that also flourished in the ‘garden of England’, but the real inflow of Londoners began after the mid-seventeenth century, when Londoners took to drinking beer rather than the gin they had previously favoured, and Kentish farmers began to plant more hops to meet the demand. At first, only the poorest and the most desperate for work came, either walking the fifty or so miles from the East End of London to the Weald or, for the few who could afford the passage, travelling by boat as far as Gravesend and on foot from there to the gardens in north and east Kent. On the way, these new migrants slept in cart and cow sheds and in pigsties on mattresses of old hopbines, or, if there were none around, under hedges.

By the end of the seventeenth century Britons were consuming 300,000 hundredweight of hops every year, more than half of which were grown in Kent. A hundred and fifty years later 40,000 acres of Kentish loam were being put down to hop gardens, each acre requiring 200 pickers, numbers that could be met only by bringing Londoners down in their thousands.

As luck would have it, the hop boom coincided with the development of the railways. By the 1850s the Southeastern Railways company and the East Kent Company were putting on special hoppers’ trains in the season, using cattle trucks as carriages, and the Joint Transport Committee of Railways and Farmers began printing postcards that farmers could send to London hoppers, allocating them a picking spot and a place on one of the ‘hoppers’ specials’. By 1867, demand was so great that Kentish farmers started using hiring agents actively to recruit hoppers from the poorest districts in London: Poplar, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Bow, Stepney and parts of Hackney to the north of the river and Bermondsey and Southwark in the south.

Families began returning to the same farms every year, often giving up their jobs and homes in order to do so. Whole neighbourhoods came en bloc, and set up their London streets in the rows of hop huts. By 1878, 72,000 acres of Kent were laid to hops and 250,000 mostly women and children were making the three- or four-week trip into Kent every year to pick them. Of these, nearly half were Londoners. And so a social and cultural event unique to Britain was born.

As I was researching the ‘Londoner’s Holiday’ and thinking I would like to write about it, a letter arrived from a man who had read Silvertown and knew of my grandparents. For the purposes of this story, I am calling this man Richie Baker. A relative of Richie’s had worked in my grandparents’ greasy spoon for a while, and his aunt, who I’m calling Daisy Crommelin, counted my grandmother, Jenny Fulcher, among her friends. At some point in the 1970s, Daisy and my grandmother stopped seeing one another. Whether they disagreed over something or the friendship simply ran its course, I don’t know. Jenny Fulcher outlived Daisy Crommelin but I’m pretty sure Jenny did not go to Daisy’s funeral; the friendship clearly died some considerable time before Daisy herself.

From such seemingly tenuous connections, Richie and I established a regular correspondence, during which Richie began to reveal, bit by bit, his family story.

Daisy and her husband Harold Baker, Richie’s uncle, led ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Using Richie’s letters and doing some research of my own, I began to piece together the story of their relationship. For Daisy, the annual hop was a kind of Oz, the place where life meted out most of its magic. It is no exaggeration to say that, along with her family, hop picking was one of the central pillars of Daisy’s life. Harold had other pleasures, as we shall see, but he was no less of a family man. On the surface, the marriage between Daisy and Harold could be seen as a pact between two people driven together by common wounds and a shared sense of fragility, the feeling that they were never more than a beat away from disaster. The contrast between the delicacy of their position and the harshness of the conditions in which they lived was one of the habitual ironies of survival in the East End in the first part of the twentieth century. As I dug around further and came to understand them more deeply, though, I realised that pain and practicality alone could not explain the bond these two people shared.

Theirs was, I believe, a great love affair, not in the Hollywood style, an explosive melange of sentimentality and sex, but in a much more profound and, perhaps, old-fashioned way. Harold and Daisy lived by the same principles. To survive and flourish in a place and at a time that offered little other than fellow travellers and almost nothing by way of second chances, they understood that happiness in life was to be found by making the most of whatever small, bright joys might flit by. For Harold and Daisy, as for many couples, the joys were not always to be had from the same things, but they tolerated each other’s small claims on happiness and thereby created much for themselves. Theirs was a marriage of affectionate solidarity. Like all couples, they made compromises, but unlike many, they kept each other’s confidences. They proved their love through unshakeable loyalty.

The story here belongs first and foremost to Daisy and Harold. They are not here to give their consent to my telling their story but, knowing their lives are worth the telling, I have taken the liberty of doing so. To protect their posthumous privacy I have changed their names and many others of people in this story. Like many people living in straitened circumstances in the East End of the twentieth century, Harold and Daisy did not leave a written record of their lives. There are no diaries or extensive correspondence, few official letters or documents. Richie knew them, of course, and there were others who remembered them and the events of their lives, but no two people’s recollection of any event is ever identical. My correspondence with Richie and subsequent investigations are the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. Had I stuck strictly to the knowable and verifiable facts, the lives of Daisy and Harold, and many of the other people in this story, would not have been recorded on paper. To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story. The lives Daisy and Harold led were in some ways emblematic; they were lives that, in their broad sweep, could have been lived by any number of hundreds of thousands of East Enders born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Their struggles and triumphs were, if not the same, then similar enough to countless others to allow Daisy and Harold in some way to stand in for those who left no records and who may already have been forgotten.

Harold Baker and Daisy Crommelin were good, ordinary people. They were not celebrities or champions of anything, they achieved nothing of public note and left little behind when they died. Their lives were the most ordinary, least likely kind of lives to be put down on paper. That is why I have chosen to record them.

Contents

Title Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Epilogue Acknowledgements Also By Melanie Mcgrath Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

It was on a Monday in the early winter of 1913 that ten-year-old Daisy Crommelin’s childhood came to an end. The day began ordinarily enough. At six or thereabouts, Daisy and her younger sister, Franny, were woken by their mother Elsie, and creeping from their bed so as not to disturb the lodger, Mrs Anderson, and her daughter, Maisie, who were sleeping beside them, the two girls threw on their overcoats and made their way down the rickety stairs to the scullery below. The room was dank and smelled of stewed trotters from the night before. Elsie had made their usual breakfast of mashed bread in milk and was now applying Union Jack corn paste to her feet and tutting over her chilblains. The girls’ father, Joe, Freeman of the River, was rinsing off his cut-throat razor in an enamel bowl beside the sink, singing to himself and trying to ignore his wife. Seeing Franny, of whom he was particularly fond, he said:

How’s me little princess?

Today, as always, Daisy tried not to mind her father’s favouritism. She told herself that you couldn’t expect to be loved as much when you weren’t the pretty one. In any case, her father might love Franny more, but she, Daisy, had loved him longer. She brought over the two bowls her mother had prepared and sat them on the table. Joe Crommelin finished up his task and sat himself down before the plate of fried bread and faggots Elsie had made for him. Franny clambered on to his lap and all three tucked into their food in contented silence. At a quarter to seven Joe Crommelin rose from the table, threw on his blue serge lighterman’s garb and kissed his daughters goodbye. As he reached the door, Franny called out:

Kiss me again, Dad, and Joe, delighted by the pretty little creature he had helped bring into the world, turned and said:

Dad’s gonna bring you something nice home.

Then he waved, went out of the front door and joined the general flow of men and women making their way towards the river.

Daisy watched her father go with the usual tug of pride. Just before she was born, so her mother said, a group of dockers had set on Joe on account of the free water clause which made it legal for ships to bypass the docks and unload directly into lighters. The dockers supposed that lightermen like Joe were taking their jobs. Joe had suffered horrible injuries, and the shock of it, so Elsie said, not only brought on Daisy’s birth too early but was in some indefinable way responsible for her oafish ears, her spindly neck and fuzzy brown hair.

With Joe gone, Elsie put the washing copper on to boil with a handful of carboxyl then fetched herself some Beecham’s Powders on account of it being a Monday and her nerves playing up. On Mondays, Elsie did the family laundry and took in neighbours’ washing and was usually rather grumpy, and the children knew better than to risk vexing her further. Daisy plaited her sister’s velvety hair and turned her attentions to the washing up. Just before eight, she laced her boots, which were too tight, rolled up the sleeves of her winter coat so she could see her hands, said goodbye to her mother and sister and went out into the rusty air of Bloomsbury Street.

At this moment in her life, Daisy Crommelin’s world – which she took to be all the world there was – comprised a huddle of streets, riverside factories, railway yards and docks about two miles long and a mile deep, flanked on the western side by the district of Limehouse and to the east by the River Lea. This was the parish of Poplar, five miles to the east of Tower Bridge, in London’s East End.

A few hundred years earlier Poplar had been a sybaritic little fishing settlement on the banks of the Thames. The river currents carved a natural deep basin on the eastern, seaward, side of Poplar at what is now Blackwall, and by the fifteenth century it had become an anchorage for the trading ships discharging their cargoes on to barges. Soon enough, a pier was built and named Brunswick after its chief financier, and in 1606 it was from this pier that the Virginia Settlers set sail to found the first permanent colony in North America. A company of shipbuilders set up shop nearby and continued to build ships at Blackwall for three centuries until the last remnant of the old business closed in 1980.

The settlement came to be called Poplar after a single tree which lay on the road leading east out of London towards the sea, and by the late eighteenth century it had a permanent population of 4,500 and was temporary home to thousands of sailors working on the tea clippers moored up on Brunswick Pier and Blackwall Wharf. To the west of the anchorage, a number of smart terraces went up, and at a polite distance from these the East India Company built almshouses for the seafaring poor. By then Poplar was a bustling, prosperous little place, growing plump on the proceeds of marine trades, its tarry turnings connected by a web of rope-walks. In 1802, anxious to protect its cargo from pilfering, the West India Company opened its first large inland dock in Poplar and added a new waterway, the City Canal, dug from marsh on the Isle of Dogs on Poplar’s southern side. The new West India Dock was a wonder of modern engineering, with space for 600 clippers, each up to 1,000 tonnes in size, and nine five-storey warehouses, protected by 20-foot-high walls and looming gates. Four years later, the East India Company followed suit, opening its own dock just a few miles east at Blackwall and building two new roads, the East India Dock Road and the Commercial Road, to connect the docks to the city.

Thousands of impoverished rush cutters and weavers from the dwindling Essex rush beds, eel fishermen and agricultural labourers flooded into the area to take up navvying jobs in the construction of the docks. Among these were Daisy’s ancestors on her mother’s side. Gradually, the shipowners and merchants of old Poplar slipped away to quieter, greener districts and their once grand houses were soon split into multi-occupancy lodgings. Speculators threw up tenements and turnings and dingy rents on the marshy ground and the place began, bit by bit, to accumulate the flotsam and jetsam of human desperation. Drinking and gambling dens appeared, brothels looked out on to open sewers, and poorhouses, missions, soup kitchens and charitable lodgings soon went up to serve the most basic needs of the fallen and destitute. The river became a dumping ground for sewage, industrial waste and the leavings of slaughterhouses.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the area changed again, when the North London and the Great Eastern railways arrived, chopped the little place in two and blanketed it in coal dust, smuts and grease. A giant gas works went up in the east, beside the River Lea, followed by sawmills, a jam factory, chemical works, a corn mill, a metallic cask works, breweries, a paint works and a factory making incandescent mantles. People joked that in a prevailing westerly wind, you could smell Poplar all the way to France.

Exiles from remote wars and famines and distant pogroms began pouring into Poplar, and by the time Daisy Crommelin was born, in 1903, the district was the poorest in London; 40 per cent of Poplar’s inhabitants lived with their families in a single room.

The Crommelins had escaped the worst of the poverty. Joe’s trade, piloting lighters across the Thames from ship to jetty, was protected by a guild and, though his wages were modest, they were regular. Elsie had been in domestic service until Joe had rescued her with his offer of marriage, and she now supplemented the family income by taking in laundry and assembling silk flowers. They occupied the scullery and the downstairs front room of number 7 Bloomsbury Street; the girls shared their bedroom with Mrs Anderson and Maisie and the second bedroom was rented to a distant cousin. There was a yard with a yard dog and a privy shared with next door. Modest thought it was, the Crommelins were proud of their home, knowing it to be several steps up from some of the rat-, child-and scandal-infested sinks in the street. Only two doors down lived Helen Reid. No one had ever seen a Mr Reid and one of ‘Mrs’ Reid’s four children was a half-breed. The Reids shared their house with old Flossie Lumin, who could regularly be seen out at night picking drunken fights with anyone who came by. Then there were the Greenbergs on the corner, not only Jewish, but anarchists too! Elsie had it that Bloomsbury Street got more common the farther down it you went. According to Elsie, the most distant end, which she called The Deep, was a hotbed of ruffians, criminals and loose women, and she forbade her two girls from going there or speaking to anyone who had. To distinguish her family from the residents of The Deep, Elsie spent much of her time scrubbing, whitening, blackening, polishing, mending, ironing, sweeping, dusting and bleaching. The Deep and the dirt were close bedfellows, she said. Respectable folk kept them both at bay.

In Elsie’s opinion, the only close neighbours who passed muster, despite being Irish, were the Shaunessys next door at number 5. Marie Shaunessy was a sweet-hearted, only mildly bossy woman who had married a hard-working French polisher called Patrick, and they had a son, Billy, who, unbeknown to Elsie, was a crybaby and a pincher. Billy Shaunessy would often wait for Daisy in a little alleyway a few blocks farther down the street then fire pieces of coal at her with his catapult, but when Daisy had once tried to wrest the catapult from him, he had pinched her then burst into tears in such an alarming manner that Daisy thought it better, on balance, to put up with the barrage of fired coals than risk Mrs Shaunessy finding out what a hopeless booby she had for a son, for Daisy loved Mrs Shaunessy. She and Franny would often go round to the Shaunessys’ while their mother recovered from one or other of her digestive and nervous complaints, and the two Crommelin girls viewed Mrs Shaunessy as a sort of maternal stand-in. Many were the nights that Daisy would lie in bed wishing that she and Franny could be Mrs Shaunessy’s daughters. Maybe their mother could have Billy in return. A year or two before Daisy was born, Elsie had birthed twin boys, but they had both died very shortly afterwards and, in accordance with East End custom, Elsie hadn’t attended the funeral.

If I’d only seen me twinnies laid in their boxes, she would say, I wouldn’t suffer these bonce aches, and this gnawing in me bones.

The arrival of Daisy, on 17 March 1903, as blue as a monkey’s arse, as Elsie put it, only seemed to remind Elsie of the loss she’d suffered.

The gel’s got her father’s elephant ears and doggy chops, Elsie would announce, cheerfully, to Mrs Shaunessy. Ain’t no one gonna mistake her for no Mona Lisa.

Oh, I don’t know about that, Mrs C, Mrs Shaunessy would reply. That gel of yours is a regular sweetheart. Good as gold, not a mean or nasty hair on her head.

Later, Elsie would complain to Joe about their neighbour.

I ain’t saying she ain’t good to us, Elsie would say, mustering her righteous indignation. But she should mind her p’s and q’s. I ask you, what kind of woman thinks she has the right to tell a mother about her own daughter?

Now, Else, Joe would say, hanging up his jacket and cap and sitting down for his tea, calm down, old gel, there’s plenty worse at sea.

Elsie would slap down her husband’s tea of brawn and boiled greens.

Like you’d know, Joe Crommelin, she’d say. What’s never bleedin’ been at sea but spouts so much sailor talk you’d think he was Sir Walter Bleedin’ Rally. Then she’d turn back to her daughter.

Eat your tea or the Sandeman’ll eat it for you.

The Sandeman lived in The Deep and sometimes spirited naughty children away. Whenever Daisy vexed her mother, Elsie would hold her head in her hands and swear that if Daisy didn’t start being good in short order, the Sandeman would appear and snatch her up and there wouldn’t be a thing Elsie or anyone else would be able to do about it.

When Franny came along, Elsie’s sourness softened, at least for a while. Daisy’s younger sister was a peach, with a head of light brown curls and dimpled little hands. When Elsie took Franny out in her pram, people would stop and coo and say what a darling baby she was and Elsie, endeavouring to look modest, would explain that she’d lost her twinnies and given birth to a plain girl, but Franny was proof that bad luck only ever ran in threes and her arrival had made up, at least in part, for Elsie’s earlier disappointments.

Sensing from early on the power her physical attributes gave her, Franny quickly developed an alarming determination to use them to her advantage. Though neither of her parents seemed to notice, Daisy realised early on that her sister was turning into a canny little manipulator, but in the light she brought with her Daisy could see Franny faintly illuminated a fragile path to Elsie’s heart, and she could not find it in herself to resent her sister. She was everyone’s darling.

Now Daisy walked along Bloomsbury Street in thin rain and stopped at the corner to wait for her best friend, Lilly Seldon. Elsie didn’t approve of the liaison, insisting that Lilly was as rough as pumice, but Elsie was like that about almost everyone Daisy showed an interest in.

Common is as common does, she’d say, but she did not prevent her daughter from seeing her friend. Lilly and Daisy had been friends since their third week at Culloden Street School, when Lilly had backed Daisy into a corner and asked her why her ears stuck out. Later, Lilly said she was sorry about the ears and that she herself had a big nose, and even though she wasn’t a Jew, she had often wondered where that had come from too.

’Ere, Lilly said, a penny says you can’t guess old Peasewell’s nickname. Miss Peasewell was the teacher who daily struggled to inculcate into her pupils a sense of respect for their betters, who numbered almost everyone.

I don’t know: Pease Puddin’? Daisy ventured, conscious that her future in some way depended on the answer.

Pease Puddin’? Lilly snorted. Pease Puddin’? What a doze you are. Pease Puddin’ ain’t a name.

Daisy shrugged and said she couldn’t think of any other name.

Pigswill, silly, said Lilly, landing a friendly punch on Daisy’s arm. Old Piggy Pigswill, ha ha ha. Then she looked up at Daisy and saw those ears and relented. I suppose Pease Puddin’ ain’t so bad, though, she said.

And after that, the two girls became the best of friends.

Four years of education had not served Daisy well and she often relied on Lilly to dig her out of the holes in her learning. She could read and write well enough to check a pawn ticket, though, or decipher the numbers on the tallyman’s chit, and she knew just by looking at the coins in her hand whether or not a trader had short-changed her; already she sensed that these skills were likely to be most of what she needed to reach the low horizons mapped out for girls like her. She would stay on at school until she reached twelve and join the half-and-half system, spending half her time at school and the other half working in a factory. A year or two later, if she was diligent and lucky, the factory might take her on full-time, or she might find work sewing collars and cuffs or wrapping bars of soap. If not, she would become one of the 30 per cent of working women who were forced to leave their homes and families and find work as domestic servants. She’d heard enough about life as a domestic from her mother to find the prospect terrifying: the slavish hours, the removal from family and friends and the complete dependence on the whims of strangers. She knew she wasn’t sharp like Lilly, but what she lacked in brains she determined to make up for in diligence. One day, she hoped Keiler’s or Peek Freans or some other factory would see how hard she applied herself and want to take her on.

At midday, she packed her slate and headed back home for her lunch. A warm, fatty smell greeted her at the door of number 7. Elsie was in the scullery shuffling the piles of drying laundry she had been washing all morning. It was no longer raining and Franny was shut outside in the yard with the dog. Elsie opened the door and called her in, then, making a space at the table, she slopped down two bowls of bacon barley soup and, announcing she had a bonce ache so bad it felt like a horse had kicked her in the head, went to lie down for a while.

Whenever the family needed a bit more money than usual, Elsie would keep Daisy back from school in the afternoons to help her with her flower-making. From one o’clock to six o’clock they would sit on the floor in the scullery, twisting and wiring and stringing, starching and curling, delicately painting spots and shadings on scraps of silk until what had been nothing more than a pile of brightly coloured fragments had been transformed into the silk irises, forget-me-nots, violets and roses that would adorn the hats of women and girls more fortunate than themselves. While they worked, Franny would be dispatched to Mrs Shaunessy, or sent to play in the yard, or, if the weather was bad and Mrs Shaunessy wasn’t in, locked in her room to prevent her from messing up the scraps of silk and delicate fixings.

It was piecework and poorly paid; on cold and damp days Elsie would complain that her finger joints knitted together and on warmer days the silk dust scratched at both their lungs and brought on bronchitis. By the end of the afternoon, their eyes were often so irritated by glue and fibres that they swelled and oozed with yellowish fluid. But there were worse jobs for the homeworker, like making matchboxes or stitching newly tanned leather for shoe soles, and, as Elsie liked to remind Daisy, there were plenty of women and children down in The Deep who were at that very moment busy doing them.

On weekday evenings, after work or school, Elsie expected Daisy to play outdoors, and she and Lilly would pass the time spinning tops, or playing pat-a-cake or skipping games, or they would simply walk about the streets of Poplar, hanging off the street lamps and gazing in the windows of the shops. In winter, Mrs Shaunessy would sometimes take pity on them and let them warm themselves at her fire and give them a slice of parkin or a rock bun.

The one exception to this was Friday afternoon, when Daisy was expected carefully to wrap the week’s flowers in tissues, arrange them in a series of old cigar boxes and place them inside a tea chest on to which Joe had grafted some old pram wheels, then help her mother push the chest three miles west along the Commercial Road to Leitkov’s millinery in Aldgate, where they would collect their payment for the week’s work and pick up a new allocation of silk scraps, ribbons, wire, beads and paints. These Elsie stored in a large keel-shaped basket woven from Kentish willow which she kept beside the fireplace to keep the silk from getting damp.

You ever touch this basket without my say-so, Elsie would warn her daughters, and the Sandeman will carry you off to the orphanage so fast you won’t know what’s hit you.

So they never did.

Daisy always looked forward to Friday evenings, when Joe would often bring them some treat he’d lifted from his lighter cargo – a few locust beans or carob pods, some liquorice twigs, a handful of monkey nuts or even a crab or two. While he ate his tea, he would regale his daughters with all that had happened to him that week on the river. Sometimes the tar boats caught fire and the whole of the river would become a wall of blue and orange flame or the water would freeze into a slush littered with icy diamonds. Other times, great fish would rise from the water and tell stories about all the drowned sailors who lived in huge cities at the bottom of the sea, or Joe would uncover a smugglers’ den or spot a mermaid stranded by the tide.

Saturday mornings were taken up with chores, but on Saturday afternoons Joe would take his girls to the Sally Army concerts in Tunnel Park and afterwards treat them to a piece of cold fried fish or a little waxed cone full of whelks and a jam jar of lemonade. On Sundays Elsie would boil up a sheep or pig head. On special occasions she would take a piece of gammon ham or a pork leg to the bakers to roast and follow it with a steamed syrup pudding or a spotted dick. Sunday nights were lived in dread of Elsie’s Monday feints and tantrums.

Today was no exception. If anything, Elsie had been even more grumpy than was usual on a Monday. The Friday before, Leitkov had given Elsie and Daisy twice the usual amount of silk and ribbon and finishings so they might complete enough flowers for the Christmas rush, and Daisy and her mother had worked late on Friday night, then again on Saturday and Sunday, but by Monday morning they had made barely a dent in the piles of scraps and pieces of ribbon in the willow basket, and Elsie decided to keep her eldest back from school in the afternoons so they could get the job done. Now she was ill with one of her innumerable, vague complaints, and Daisy was left trying to get through the task alone.

At five, Elsie rose from her bed in a fluster, glanced at the mantelpiece clock, started muttering to herself about the time and getting Joe’s tea, then, throwing on her coat, announced she was going to fetch a piece of pork belly or maybe a spot of jellied trotter, leaving Daisy with instructions to begin boxing up the flowers and to make sure Franny remained in her room until they were all safely packed away. In recognition of her daughter’s efforts she put a halfpenny in Daisy’s hand, telling her to spend it on muffins or a toffee apple from one of the vendors who paraded their wares around the streets on open trays, accumulating smuts and factory fumes.

Now you be careful while I’m gone. The Sandeman’s watching and don’t you forget it.

Daisy began gathering up the flowers and scraps of unused silk, but within minutes of her mother’s departure, she heard Franny crying and begging to be released from her room. For a while Daisy ignored her, but, eventually, her heart pricked, she climbed the flimsy staircase and opened the bedroom door, thinking she would set her little sister in the yard to play with the dog. When they reached the back door they saw that a greenish fog had come down and Franny shook her curls and screwed her delicate little face into a fist, and Daisy, who could never bring herself to do anything that made her sister unhappy, sat her at the table and told her to sit as still as the clock on the mantelshelf and touch nothing.

No harm might have come of this minor infraction of the rules had the toffee apple man not turned into Bloomsbury Street at precisely that moment, crying:

Apples and flats, apples and flats!

Flats, the discs of toffee that pooled from the toffee apples when they were left to set, were the two girls’ favourite treat, and it was so rare for them to have any money with which to buy anything, that Daisy could not resist the impulse to go out into the street and get some.

Don’t touch nothing. I’ll only be a minute.

Despite the weather, a line of wide-eyed children had already formed around the toffee apple man’s tray and it took Daisy a while to push through the crowd, claim her prize and hurry back to the house. When she did, she realised immediately the mistake she had made in leaving her little sister alone. The scullery looked as though a high wind had passed through it. Silk scraps lay scattered across the lino flooring and between the scraps broken flowers lay, their petals wrenched out or torn or bent at strange angles. There was ribbon strewn across the table, torn and knotted in places. The air was dense with fibres and silk dust and the sheets and pillowcases that had been hanging on string lines beside the fire were spotted all over with little pieces of silk, whose bright colours were already creeping their way across the whiteness of the cotton. And there was Franny sitting in the midst of it with her hands in the basket.

Oh, my knees and knuckles, Daisy said, Franny Crommelin, what have you done?

You said sit still as the clock, Franny cried in a voice ripe with indignation, but the clock moved! Daisy glanced towards the mantelpiece, where the clock was still in the place it had always been, its spot marked out on the mantel in dust and smuts from the fire. But ten minutes had passed and the hands of the clock had indeed moved.

I want the flowers! Franny screamed. You always have the flowers.

Suddenly, Daisy understood why her sister had done what she had. Franny had torn up the silk because she didn’t want Daisy to have anything she didn’t have, and because she knew she could. Already so sure of her power over the family, Franny knew that, whatever she did, her older sister would somehow always shoulder the blame. The thought of it was unbearable to Daisy, yet at the same time she knew it was true.

This time she had gone too far. Half lifting, half dragging, Daisy forced her sister through the scullery, and pushing her out into the yard. As she stumbled on to the flags, Franny uttered a low growl, the sound, Daisy remembered later, of a cornered cat, full of defiance and contempt. She shut the back door behind her, turned the key in the lock and leaned on it, trying to catch her breath. After all she’d been to her little sister, it hadn’t been enough. Franny resented her, hated her even, and wanted her to fail. She began scurrying about, picking up silk scraps, pressing them back into shape with her hands, scooping up the pieces of feather and red and green ribbon, trying to salvage what she could from the mess, but pretty soon Franny began a piteous wailing in the yard, and all the love and protectiveness Daisy felt for her little sister flooded back and she felt disabled and ashamed. Opening the door, she said:

All right, all right, there, there.

You said to stay still as the clock, Franny said sulkily. You said it, but the clock moved.

Daisy nodded. Franny was right. What had happened was her fault. It was all her fault. She returned to the clearing up. It very soon became clear that most of the flowers, the silk scraps and ribbon were ruined and the laundry was dotted about with blooms of transferred dye. Daisy dreaded her mother’s return.

When Elsie saw the mess she screamed so loudly that Mrs Shaunessy came rushing round, thinking she was being attacked, and after she left, Elsie pounded and thumped Daisy so hard that her breath came in rasps as if from an old kettle.

I wish the Sandeman would come and take yer. I wish he would, Elsie raged. ’Cause you ain’t no good to me, yer blue-arsed little weakling with yer elephant ears. I wish you’d never been born. I wish the Sandeman would take yer right now so that I wouldn’t ever have to trouble me eyes with you again.

As she swore and rampaged about, Franny sat at the table, perfectly still, with a little smile playing on her face.

What Daisy did not know and could not know then was how far and with what shocking speed this event would tumble into another, and another and another, until only the thinnest barrier, as fragile as eggshell, separated the Crommelin household from catastrophe. She did not know this because she did not consider her family to be poor – hadn’t Elsie always said they were respectable? – and because she had no notion yet of how vulnerable they were, and because she had not been alive long enough to understand the relentless cruelty of the East End tides, which daily washed in the hopeful and the desperate and daily dashed their hopes. She did not know, yet, what Joe Crommelin knew and had not thought to tell her, because she was not a boy, that to survive you had to steer your course mid-stream, where the water was deepest and ran fastest, that you had to paddle fast, as fast as you could, to stay there, to stay still in the rushing current, because the price of failure was to be washed up on the beach or be dashed to pieces on the wharves.

On Friday, Daisy walked alone to Leitkov’s, but instead of the usual boxes of jaunty irises and delicate roses, she carried the Kentish willow basket with what remained of the scraps. Listening to her story, the milliner sat impassively for a while, then reached for his account book and started totting up figures in his head. Eventually he said:

Tell your mother she owes me eight shillings and sixpence and there’ll be no 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.

CHAPTER 2

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.

The Shaunessys returned in a flash, Mrs Shaunessy carrying two slips of paper, and they soon found themselves on a long platform beside which stood an immense, sooty train. Daisy and Franny heard them coughing along the railway tracks at Poplar, but they had never seen one so close and looking so huge. Mrs Shaunessy parked her hop cart and began looking up and down the platform, then she turned to Daisy and said:

When I say to get on the train you do it and sharpish. Not a second early, not a second late. Billy here will help me with the pram.

She leaned down into the pram again and, pretending to fluster with the baby blanket, whispered:

And not one tiny word from you, miss, not a bleep or a toot. Babies go free and for now you’re one of them, or your father will be paying the price of your ticket.

Soon a whistle blew and Mrs Shaunessy lunged forward. Elbowing several women out of the way, she swung open the door of the carriage and hissed, Now! Billy, for whom this was an annual routine, leapt to the top of the steps, and helped his mother yank and heave the hop box on to the train, then did the same again for the pram.

They took up a bench in the middle of one of the emptier carriages. Mrs Shaunessy parked the pram beside her so that the hood was facing outwards into the corridor and Franny’s face was obscured. Not long afterwards the train hooted and began to lurch from the station.

Now Daisy, ducky, Mrs Shaunessy said, laying her overcoat and a blanket on the bench and spreading her skirts across it, you just creep under here and don’t make no noise. She lifted the coverings. And don’t you come out a second before I tell you to, or you’ll be bringing a whole heartful of trouble down on me. No noise, mind, quiet as mice.

Under Mrs Shaunessy’s overcoat and skirts it was dark and foisty and the prevailing smell of damp and mothballs was so penetrating that for a while Daisy felt as though she might be sick. The train gathered speed, some minutes passed, then she became conscious of a man’s voice asking for tickets, after which there was some hasty movement of Mrs Shaunessy’s skirts and she heard Mrs Shaunessy saying:

Only me and the boy, mister, plus the babe there, but she goes free, now, don’t she?

Eventually, she became accustomed to the cloying whiff and the warmth and the gentle tick-tocking of the train did their work and she remembered nothing more of the journey until she was pinched awake by Billy Shaunessy and, surfacing, saw to her astonishment that they had left the world she knew and had entered a new and strange one. The sun was rising but instead of the dun glimmer that signalled the start of the day in Poplar, everything was bathed in the colours of silk freesias. All along the carriage women and children were gazing from the windows and a hushed silence had fallen of the sort Daisy usually associated with the moment her mother put hot food on the table. She clambered to the window and took her place at it.

At first she saw only a blur of unfamiliar shapes within which she could discern no building, no factory, no street or row of shops, no market or press of people. When she tried to focus on a single object outside the train it raced away from her. Gradually she began to pick out gentle slopes, wooded knolls and copses, and stands of trees. Between the trees, she could see now, the great green swell was divided here and there by little green walls enclosing streets of gnarly trees or bushes, and dotted inside these walls were cows like the ones she’d once seen at Limehouse dairy. A few lonely-looking buildings, which Daisy took to be factories or poorhouses, were dotted about. Some of these were circular and topped with cones on which sat white dunce’s caps. She remembered with a jolt what Billy had once said about her mother: Me mum says your mum’s jigged in the bonce and got put in a fool hasylum. She wondered whether these, too, were hasylums. The distance to the horizon took her breath away. She hadn’t imagined the world could be so big. Where the sky met the land there was a ribbon of such vivid blue that it reminded Daisy of the turbans of certain Lascar sailors.

Soon, they were passing streets of red-brick houses and the train began to slow and, for an instant, until she saw the sign on the platform, which read Faversham, Daisy thought they were back in London. A great many women and children stepped off the train and there was a short commotion of baggage and shouted instructions before the carriage doors slammed and the engine began to heave itself from the station once more. They hadn’t been going long before there was a loud whoosh of air and they were crossing a bridge with a high embankment painted with pink and yellow flowers, then descending towards a tiny cluster of houses separated by meandering paths banked with hedges. It all looked so empty and old and crooked, Daisy thought, like the pictures on biscuit tins, only without the courting couples.

Soon Daisy felt the engine begin to slow again and she noticed Mrs Shaunessy fussing with her things. They helped Franny out of the pram and the train came to a halt beside a neat brick and clapboard building decorated with fancy cut-out work. From this hung a sign reading Selling. Billy Shaunessy opened the door, leapt on to the platform and reached back in to receive the hop box and the pram. Once everything was unloaded, Mrs Shaunessy signalled for the children to follow her down the platform. A party swung by laughing wildly and chanting:

Oh, they say hopping’s lousy

I don’t believe it’s true.

We only go down hoppin’

To earn a bob or two,

Oooohhhh, with an ee- aye- o, ee- aye- o, ee- aye- ee- aye- o

Among them, Daisy recognised familiar faces. She was struck by how much smaller everyone looked out here, in this new world. It was as though the countryside had reduced them all to dolls.

Despite all the jollity, or perhaps because of it, Franny was unimpressed with their new surroundings.

I want me dad, she wailed, shuffling in close to her sister. I wanna go ho-ome.

But Daisy knew there was no hope of going home soon. London was an almost infinite distance away, behind endless hills and trees. The air felt thin and cutting, its smell something between river mud and the salted cabbages Jews sold out of barrels. She took in a deep breath, picked up her bag, grabbed her sister’s hand and began to shuffle down the platform towards the station building.

We’re here now, Franny, she said. Let’s make the best of it, eh?

She spotted Mrs Shaunessy up ahead, waving, and they stepped through the station building on to the soft ooze of a cinder path, its give under the feet strangely unsettling, like the grass in Tunnel Park after the river had flooded.

Opposite the station stood a handful of red-brick cottages spread out along a flinty road coloured rosehip pink in the early sun. Up ahead, Mrs Shaunessy was making her way towards a rustic wagon watched over by a solid-looking carter, who wore the kind of thick, crescent-shaped beard Daisy had only seen before on the very old men who lined up outside the Sally Army soup kitchen waiting for food. The carter was directing two nut-brown assistants in billowing shirts as they hoisted hop boxes and suitcases into the wagon, and when that was done, he shouted, Hoi, hoi to his horse and the wagon began to trundle along the flinty road and away.

Mrs Shaunessy took hold of the pram and began striding off after it, and they made their way through the village, which seemed to consist of a single row of modest houses whose red bricks had grown speckled from the salted wind swooping in from marshes a few miles to the north. The houses did not give directly out on to the street as they did in Poplar, but were fronted by neat little plots planted with vegetables and fruit bushes. Everywhere there were trees, leaves clattering alarmingly in the breeze like panicked hoofs on distant cobbles.

Ah, save us, said Mrs Shaunessy, breathing in deep. The cabbagey, empty smell had been replaced now by a thick and tarry aroma. If it ain’t the hops.

Just then the wind blew up again, scattering pieces of straw across the road.

It stinks, shrieked Franny, burying her face in her sister’s coat. I want to go home.

Billy Shaunessy raised his eyes to heaven and kicked a stone.

Listen to Little Miss Muck, Mrs Shaunessy said, not unkindly. Before the week’s out she won’t want to be nowhere else. Ain’t that right, Billy boy?

Billy grunted and kicked another stone.

They passed a road sign reading Neames Forstal and Mrs Shaunessy explained that Selling station wasn’t actually in Selling, but not to worry because everything would become clear.

Pretty soon they had left Neames Forstal behind entirely and were progressing along a deeply rutted road that slid between hedges embroidered with the lace umbrellas of hogweed and pink bladder campions. Others joined them, greeted each other and exchanged gossip. Every so often, when someone she recognised overtook them, Mrs Shaunessy would shout out:

Flossie Felcher, well I never! or Janey Simpson, now don’t you look a picture. You ain’t never had another little ’un! and the two women would look one another up and down, shake their heads over the general state of things and vow to have a good catch-up later on.

After a while, they crossed a footpath that dipped down into a little valley filled with apple orchards, and these in turn gave way to a wood. They could still see the wagon up ahead, the carter slapping his horse from time to time with the reins. The hedgerow here was lined with wildflowers between which danced pretty little blue and brown butterflies.

Look, Franny said, momentarily forgetting her misery to toddle along the bank scooping at the creatures with her hands. Baby birds!

They walked on, past a huge grey house and a cluster of smaller cottages, the most distant of which gave on to fields sprinkled with the cone-hatted houses. Far to the north was the glittering strip of blue Daisy had seen from the train.

They stopped finally, beside a mossy oak gate guarding the entrance to a large grassy field. The carter and his assistants were already unloading the bags and boxes and piling them up on the verge and there were women and children reloading their belongings into wooden wheelbarrows. Beyond the gate, the field rose before them. At its farthest fringe sat a row of whitewashed huts, and outside the huts there were women moving to and fro and children playing. Fires had been lit and some of the women were stirring pots hanging over the flames. Mrs Shaunessy located her hop cart in the melee and was busy pulling it towards the pram, guarded by Billy.

Well, don’t just stand there like a pair of pickles. Get pushing! she said.

They were part-way up the slope when a girl came running down to meet them.

What you doing here, Doze? It was Lilly Seldon. So relieved was Daisy to see her friend that for a moment she thought she might burst into tears.

Lilly took the pram handle and began helping to push.

Daisy said that for some reason to do with the war and her mother, they had come with Mrs Shaunessy. When she’d asked for an explanation, Mrs Shaunessy had placed her finger on the bridge of her nose and shaken her head, saying, Now, now, nosy parker. Curiosity killed the cat.

I suppose your mum’ll fetch you when she gets back, Lilly said.

Daisy looked up, past the huts through the thicket of trees to the cloudless sky above.

I suppose, she said. She looked down at her feet. Talk of her mother sent a pulse of shame through her, then another of guilt for the shame. She knew it was something more than rest her mother needed. Perhaps Billy Shaunessy was right and Elsie was in a dunce hasylum. A leafy stalk had attached itself to her boot and when she bent down to pluck it off, the stem stuck to her fingers. She pushed it away only to have it attach itself to her leg.

Goosegrass, you doze, Lilly said, laughing. She plucked it off between two fingers and flung it into the hedgerow. I’m glad you’ve come.

Like all the other huts, hop hut number 21, about halfway along the field, was put together from rough planks set on to a strip of concrete and roofed in tarpaper. It had a window roughly glazed and a stable door made from whitewashed planks fixed with padlocks, which Mrs Shaunessy was busy unlocking. She passed Daisy a bucket and told Lilly to show her where to fetch water. A queue of children stood noisily beside the single tap serving the huts. As Lilly and Daisy waited their turn, Lilly pointed out the cookhouse, the path leading to the hop gardens and, at some distance away, a shed that served as the privy. When they returned with the water, Mrs Shaunessy handed them each a rag and told them to begin wiping the walls. Inside, it was dark, the air was oddly still and there was a familiar smell of dampness overlying another, earthy aroma. Cobwebs lay across every surface and, as they scrubbed, huge spiders, evicted from their homes, scuttled away into the darker corners. While they worked, Mrs Shaunessy laid a piece of lino on the mud floor. That done, she began hanging pots and cups on hooks and stringing a makeshift curtain at the window, instructing Daisy and Lilly to busy themselves stuffing a palliasse with straw from a bale left outside the hut. Pretty soon, a man with a lazy eye and a squint and a plump, homely-looking woman arrived. It seemed that the man was Mrs Shaunessy’s brother, Alfie, and the woman, Joan, was his wife. Later, an old woman with metal hair rollers and a witchy-looking goitre fetched up and sat herself down on a sawn-up log outside the hop hut next door. This was Nell, with whom Daisy, Franny and the Shaunessys would be lodging.

By five their chores were done and they sat on the grass outside, which was long, unlike park grass, and ate jam sandwiches and drank hot tea. Franny asked whether they were having a picnic and Daisy said they were but then Franny said her sandwich tasted of grass and began to cry.

Tired, overexcited, said Mrs Shaunessy, carrying Franny into the hut and shooing the older children off to play.

Lilly took Daisy along a pathway that ran into the wood beside the huts. There were fairies there, she said – she knew because she’d seen them. Light fell through the leaves and lit the path with little sparkles. The stillness and quiet inside the woods were so peculiar and so daunting, Daisy had to keep blinking to make sure she wasn’t caught in some odd dream. A thousand ideas flipped through her mind. They walked in silence for a while, reaching the edge of the wood and skirting a field. How many trees were there? Daisy wanted to know. Had Lilly ever counted them? Did the fields go on for ever or was it possible to reach their end? Why did the wind blow so fiercely and everything move? What was the point of houses that stood on their own? But Lilly only answered her with a shrug.

That’s just the way the country is, innit?

They emerged from the wood into an area of rolling fields, their brows studded with copses and with orchards and hop gardens nestled in the more sheltered places. Here and there they could see the bright painted cowls of oasts.

Daisy cast her eyes around the scene. The wind had died down now and nothing moved. She thought of the men in uniform heading for the docks, of Old Pigswill and the policeman shouting into his megaphone and her mother, in an asylum somewhere, at war with herself.

It’s all right here, ain’t it? Lilly said.

Daisy didn’t answer because she didn’t know.

By the time they returned to the huts, the air had begun to darken. The hoppers were already lighting smoky paraffin lamps and the sound of singing rose up in the sharp, leafy air and tangled in the trees. The two girls separated, each returning to her party. Nell was still sitting on her log and someone had studded the fire with roasting potatoes. They drank a cup of cocoa and sat round the embers listening to the adults gossiping. By the time Mrs Shaunessy packed them off to bed there were stars in the sky and in the branches of the trees bats were stirring, waiting to begin their night-time journeys.

From inside the hut, they could still hear the noise of laughter and singing. Franny fell asleep almost immediately but Daisy lay awake for a while, her sister’s breath warming her neck. She felt strange, expanded somehow, and wondered whether this was what happened in the country – there was so much space that you had to grow to fit it. Gradually, though, the extraordinary events of the day began to drift off and she felt her breathing deepen. It was still dark when she was woken by Franny’s little hands prising open her eyes. From outside came a faint panting sound and a tap-tapping. Sufficient moonlight filtered through the gaps in the boards to give Daisy a dusty impression of the interior of the hut. Old Nell was lying next to them, now, asleep, and on the palliasse beside lay Mrs and Billy Shaunessy.

I don’t like it here, Franny whispered.

Daisy held her younger sister and stroked her head.

Ssh. Tomorrow I’ll take you to where the fairies live.

I don’t want to see the fairies, Franny said, I want to see the toffee apple man.

When they next woke it was only half dark in the hut. Daisy thought she heard a man shouting, then his voice became fainter. Nell was no longer lying beside them and the smell of wood burning drifted in from outside. Daisy pulled on her clothes and boots and went out. It was only half light but already Alfie had a fire going and Mrs Shaunessy was busying over it with a tea kettle. The grass was hung with white cobwebs. Down by the long drops rabbits scudded along the fringes of the woods, their bobtails bloody with the sunrise. Daisy returned to the hut, woke her sister and helped her to dress, and Mrs Shaunessy set down a breakfast of bread and marge and warm milk, but Franny pushed hers away, saying she couldn’t eat with the trees watching.

After breakfast the girls followed old Nell, Alfie and Joan, and Billy and Mrs Shaunessy out of Pheasant Field, and along a small flinty lane and past another row of huts that Mrs Shaunessy referred to as the Dovers, because the pickers from Dover were staying there, to the dip that marked the boundary between Big Kit and Old Ground. Here, there was a fence of wide stakes which acted as a windbreak – Mrs Shaunessy called it a Poll Loo – and beyond the Poll Loo Daisy became aware of a great swell of talk and song and they found themselves at the entrance to a sort of country factory whose walls were made of leaves. Here dozens, maybe hundreds, of families milled about, laughing and chattering, and there was a slightly nervy, competitive air, which reminded Daisy of Chrisp Street market at half past seven in the evening, just before the costermongers began reducing their prices. Many of the families carried paraffin stoves, baskets of food and jars of tea, and most seemed to have covered themselves with sacks or heavy aprons. Among the throng, Daisy recognised Lilly, who waved and gesticulated. Then Mrs Shaunessy drew some sacks from her bag and, ignoring Franny’s protests, she began tying them round the girls with lengths of string, before covering herself. Not long afterwards, a man arrived on a chestnut horse and opened the gate and the women and children surged forward, elbowing and pushing anyone who got in their way.

Hold hands and don’t lose me, shouted Mrs Shaunessy, but this was easier said than done in the general scrum, and even though Daisy and Franny were used to crowds, even though they wandered daily through the most overcrowded alleys and rookeries in a fiercely overcrowded city, it was as much as they could do to keep themselves from being heaved upwards by the crowd and flung down and trampled.

The leaf factory was divided into long alleys marked by a kind of high fencing of poles and wire, along which the hop bines curled upwards to a height of 20 feet. Men were moving about directing families down the passageways, at the ends of which sat huge baskets. Up ahead they saw Alfie waving and shouting.

This is our drift.

Mrs Shaunessy turned to the two girls and through the din signalled them to wait and not do anything until Billy showed them how to pick. Not long afterwards, the man on the chestnut horse drew a large handbell from his saddle pouch. At the sound of the bell, a roar rose up from the crowd of the sort that Daisy had only ever heard before outside the football grounds, as hundreds of women and children dived as fast as they could into one or other of the green alleys, shouting and jostling. Alarmed, Daisy followed Billy, dragging Franny behind her as Billy elbowed his way inside the alley. The air suddenly felt dense and musty. Sprinkles of sunshine fell from the roof but otherwise the only light came from the now distant ends, and when her eyes had adjusted, Daisy saw Billy standing beside them with a thin twine in his hands, from which soft leaves flapped, like pieces of brushed cotton. Between the leaves hung bunches of papery grey-green buds. Billy dropped on to a piece of sacking. With his left hand he held fast on to one end of the twine, then quickly he ran his right hand along the bine, applying force whenever he reached a bunch of cones.

Strip and pinch, strip and pinch. See? There ain’t nothing more to it than that.

When the bine was stripped and the cones had accumulated in a dip in the sacking, he gathered them up and threw them into an upturned umbrella that sat between himself and the spot where his mother stood, pulling down the cut ends of bines from the high wire around which they were entwined, then he grabbed another bine and began to repeat the procedure.

Daisy picked up a bine of her own. The soft stem, still coiled clockwise, felt downy and wet. She moved her hand along it, reached a short stem from which a few cones hung, and pinched. The cones did not give way immediately and she was surprised at how hard she had to squeeze her fingers to maintain a purchase on the short stem. So this was where Billy had perfected his pinching technique. No wonder he was such a master at it. She carried on down the bine, stripping and pinching, until she reached the end, then, copying Billy, she lay the naked bine neatly down in the alley and reached for another. Franny sat beside her, playing at picking, but for every cone she removed from its stem, she picked a half-dozen leaves. The work wasn’t arduous exactly, but neither was it as simple as it had at first seemed. From time to time Billy took up the umbrella and emptied it into the basket at the top of the alley. Every so often a pole puller came round with a wooden pole on to which was bound a curved knife. With this hop dog, he sliced at the bines caught in the roof of the factory, and having cut them, he yanked each in turn until they tumbled to the ground. Over in one corner of the garden, a family had begun singing.

They are lovely hops

When the measurer comes round

Pick ’em up, pick ’em up off the ground

When he starts to measure, he don’t know when to stop

But we don’t care, we’ll pick some more

Cause they are lovely hops

Oh! Lovely hops they are

They are lovely hops.

Soon they were joined by others, until the song spread right out across the garden.

After an hour or so there was a great cry of Tally! from the top of the drift and Alfie shouted Hover up!, at which Billy Shaunessy dropped what he was doing and raced to the basket. By the time Daisy reached it, he was already elbow deep in the hop basket, pulling up twigs and leaves and turning over the hop cones so they sat lightly on one another and filled more of the basket.

Two men appeared at the top of the Shaunessys’ drift. One of them scooped out the cones into a smaller basket, then tipped them into a long, cylindrical sack, while the other handed Alfie a wooden tag and made notes in a book. A family followed behind, collecting up the cylindrical sacks, sealing them and heaving them up on to the same wagon that had brought their bags from the station.

Over the course of the next few hours, Daisy began to refine her technique, speeding up the pinching action until she was picking almost as fast as Billy. Before long, she realised that the bines were coated with tiny claws pointed in a downward direction. If you pushed your hands upwards, the claws pricked and the skin soon became very irritated and sore, but so long as you kept your hands moving towards where the root of the plant would have been, the claws didn’t bother you. Once she realised this, she noticed that Billy Shaunessy was meticulous about avoiding being pricked but had not bothered to warn her. Well, never mind. After a day or two’s practice, she would have perfected the art of pinching. Then he’d better watch. There was not much between hopping, she thought, and assembling flowers. Though the flowers were fiddlier, both required the same complex hand movements but demanded no particular mental effort, and pretty soon she found she was free to allow her mind to wander. She thought about her mother then, and how much she was already missing her father. At midday another bell rang and everyone immediately stopped picking and set about preparing lunch. While Mrs Shaunessy handed round slices of Dutch cheese and raw onions, wrapped in sacking to protect the food from the bitter tar now covering everyone’s hands, Joan put a kettle on the paraffin stove and made everyone a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk. Heated discussions broke out about the heaviness or lightness or houseyness of the cones, whether they were larger or smaller than usual, and whether they were softer or crisper, ripe or unripe. Half an hour later the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, and bit by bit the women and children vanished back down the green factory walls.

By mid-afternoon, the sun was beating down hard through the canopy of leaves and the gardens were sultry and filled with dappled light. A nearby family began a rendition of ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ and others joined in, some in rueful tones, but everyone seemed in good humour. At five o’clock, when Daisy’s arms and shoulders were aching and her hands were dark as fury and the fingers needly and stinging, the man on the chestnut horse rode by and called out No more bines and, a few moments later, Daisy found herself in the flow of women and children heading out of the green factory and back along the flinty lane towards Pheasant Field.

Lilly was waiting for her outside hop hut number 21.

So?

Daisy looked at her blackened hands.

Oh, that ain’t nothing to fuss over, Lilly said. Here, you wanna come blackberrying? Daisy glanced over at Franny but she seemed to be busy with some game, so she left her there.

The two girls started down Pheasant Field hand in tarry hand, washing themselves in the trough just beside the gate, then they continued on until they reached Featherbed Lane. Turning north, they marched along the flints, grabbing at delicate umbrels of cow parsley and scatters of pink bladder campion as they went, as far as Danecourt Bridge where the railway line formed steep shoulders lined with hazel and elderflower and brambles, stopping every so often to plant blackberries in their mouths, and by the time they returned to the huts, Pheasant Field was already bathed in twilight shadow. There were fires lit and some families had made torches from bulrushes, which gave off a magical, orange light. Someone was playing a piano accordion, and outside number 21 Alfie was cursing the wall-eye that left him unfit for duty and Mrs Shaunessy was talking about the letters she’d already had from Patrick. It wasn’t all rosy. Some of the letters the sweethearts sent to the soldiers made them laugh. In one, Patrick had said, a young wife had asked her husband how many times the soldiers had managed to get out to the pictures. Patrick Shaunessy was trying not to be too downhearted, though, because the war would be over soon. He was sorry not to be able to visit the hop that year, and he missed it, since to him the hop was the merry in England and the great in Britain all combined. Still, he said, Marie was to keep his place for him, because as sure as eggs is eggs, he’d be there next year.

Alfie said he’d drink to that and the adults all raised their mugs of tea and Mrs Shaunessy started up ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.

The following morning Daisy woke to a dewy dawn full of cobwebs and pink-tailed rabbits. At seven thirty she and Franny set off once more with the others through the oak gate towards the great green factory. Daisy picked quickly from the start now, methodically stripping and pinching until she had a rhythm going. After a lunch of bread and cold sausages, Mrs Shaunessy told Franny to go and play, and without the distraction of her sister, Daisy found she could work faster still, her fingers and hands knitting the delicate movements together with such proficiency that by the time the man on the chestnut horse had called No more bines, she was confident she had perfected her technique, and she sensed from the care Billy Shaunessy was taking with her that he knew it too. If nothing else, hopping had given her a pinch to be reckoned with.

That evening, Mrs Shaunessy told them to go off and play, so Lilly took Daisy to the old gravel pit where a colony of feral cats was chasing butterflies, and they gave each cat a name – Big Marmalade, Smuts and Ship’s Cat. Daisy noticed not only how many butterflies lived in the country, but also how many birds there were, so many that even if you rolled your index finger and thumb into a tiny circle and looked through the hole, there would always be birds trapped inside your fingers. They were returning back across the fields when they saw Billy coming towards them with a smirk on his face, saying Mrs Shaunessy wanted Daisy to return immediately to Pheasant Field. There they found a great hullabaloo of women, with Franny, red faced and weepy, at its centre.

What were you thinking? said Mrs Shaunessy, grabbing Daisy by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. Leaving your sister like that?

The little girl had been picked up by the carter, who had seen her dangling her legs over the platform at Selling station. When questioned, Franny had said she was waiting for the train to Poplar, but the carter, surmising from her accent that the little girl was an East End picker, had brought her back to Gushmere Farm.

She could have been killed, and then what’d I say to your poor ma what’s already lost her twinnies and ain’t all there in the head? Lord save me, Daisy Crommelin, if you shouldn’t be bleedin’ well shamed of yourself!

Daisy had never heard Mrs Shaunessy swear before. It was rather alarming. She felt rage and shame in equal measure. The injustice of it, when it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told them to go and play! But she knew such thoughts were dangerous. It had been thoughts like these – like thinking she deserved a toffee apple flat and had a right to one – which had set off the train of events leading to Elsie’s absence and their current exile. Whatever happened, Franny was special, and it was Daisy’s responsibility to look after her, particularly now, when they were away from their mother and father.

Mrs Shaunessy never heard the full story behind Franny’s flight but Lilly heard it later from another girl and passed it on to Daisy. Billy Shaunessy had taken Franny to one side and told her that a giant lived at the top of the beanstalks in the hop garden waiting for little girls to eat. So terrified had she been by this news that she had run directly to the train station to wait for the next train home. It was only fortunate that no train had come, or Franny Crommelin might have found herself alone at London Bridge.

From then on, Daisy did her best to keep her sister in her sight. During the day, while she picked hops in the Shaunessy family drift, she had Franny stay beside her and play with some dolls Daisy had made for her from twigs and pieces of rag. At five every day all picking would cease. This was the time Daisy loved best, when the evening stretched out before her, plump with possibility. She would take Franny and with Lilly they would go blackberrying or swimming in the dank little pool the locals called Ghost Hole Pond, or they would sit at the rim of the chalk pit watching the antics of Big Marmalade and Ship’s Cat or the swallows diving for insects and dandelion clocks rising up on the summer thermals. At other times they would clamber across the downed oaks in Winterbourne Wood and climb to the top of Iron Hill and watch horses and carts and the occasional steam tractor or thresher lumbering along the Roman Road, and Franny would say Is that the tram? and Daisy would laugh and reply:

There ain’t no tram in the country, silly, and gazing out across the beamy hills and wooded nooks of the Kentish Downs, Daisy would comfort herself with the thought that here, where the horizon stretched out as far as the eye could see, the tumult of war and even her mother’s illness seemed so fantastically remote it was hard, sometimes, to remember them. She began to miss her old life less and less; Elsie, flower-making, Old Pigswill and sickly-coloured fogs. All she longed for was Joe, and his stories.

And so the weeks passed until, one day in September, it started raining. It rained so hard that the bines dripped with drowned insects and the hop cones softened and clung to their stalks; it rained on the huts until tiny ropes of water snaked along the walls and on to the palliasses and the cinder paths until they ran in muddy streams; it rained on the evening fires and on the washing put out to dry. And it rained the next day and the day that followed that. By the end of the third morning, Franny was coughing green phlegm and by the afternoon a fever had set in. The next day the hop doctor called, announcing himself, as he always did, with a cheery Bring out your dead!, but he had nothing to offer except to tell Mrs Shaunessy to keep the girl warm and dry, two things which, given the weather, had become impossible. Old Nell suggested taking the invalid to the vardoes for a Gypsy cure, and having no better idea herself except to pray, Mrs Shaunessy bundled the little girl into her hop cart and, with Daisy and Old Nell helping to push, trundled along Vicarage Lane towards Poppington Bungalow, where, scattered among the trees, were a dozen or more gaily painted caravans.

Franny was too ill to protest about the intrusions of the Gypsy women as they ruffled through her hair, pulled up her eyelids to inspect the eyes and prodded the tiny ribcage, and too ill to notice the taint of their herbs in the spoonfuls of treacle Mrs Shaunessy doled out to her. But whatever the Gypsies gave Franny it worked. By the following morning her fever had gone and she was no longer coughing up phlegm. By the end of the week she had never looked so healthy, and though she continued to complain about almost everything, she never again repeated her flight to Selling station, nor spoke much of going home.

As September drew to a close, the annual hop wound down. There was a party with jugs of beer and three whole roasted pigs. Bit by bit, women and children drifted back to the city, but the Shaunessy party stayed on to pick plums, apples and pears. The leaves began to turn, and each morning in the hop huts seemed a little colder than the last. In the first week of October Lilly left, and not long after that, a telegram arrived for Mrs Shaunessy. They were at the hop huts preparing breakfast when the man on the chestnut horse rode up. On hearing there was a telegram for Mrs Shaunessy, Old Nell and Joan came bustling over, with grave looks on their faces. Mrs Shaunessy took the telegram, read it and fell over. After Joan had picked her up, the man took Mrs Shaunessy back to the farmhouse on his horse. Nell looked after the two Crommelin girls and Billy Shaunessy for the remainder of the day, and burned the onion pud. The next day they heard that Patrick Shaunessy had lost both his legs and was being discharged, as a consequence of which Mrs Shaunessy would be returning to Poplar the following afternoon, taking her son and the Crommelin girls with her.

Though Daisy longed to see her father, she didn’t want to leave. She spent her last evening saying goodbye to Big Marmalade and Smuts and Ship’s Cat, to the hop gardens and to Ghost Hole Pond. At the pond she noticed something red lying in the water and, poking at it with a stick, saw that it was a Union Jack flag on a stick. She thought she could guess whose it was. That night, her last in hop hut number 21, she lay awake listening to the screech owls and the barks of the foxes, wondering how she could ever have found them strange or frightening. The next morning she woke early with a feeling of dread. The rabbits were out, and old Nell was fixing breakfast. In the six weeks she had been away, she realised that she hadn’t once thought about the Sandeman in The Deep, but now that she remembered them, she had no doubt that they were both still there, and that she was about to go back to them.

CHAPTER 3

Henry Baker began his working life in the West India Docks the year after the Great Dock Strike in 1890, at the age of twelve. He started by fetching and carrying ropes, winches, dockers’ hooks and whatever else the breaking gang he worked for needed shifting. Once the gang had broken up and cleared the cargo, young Henry would be lowered into the ship’s hold to sweep and clean, an experience that left him with an abiding horror of dark, enclosed spaces. At the age of fourteen he graduated to breaking, becoming one of a small team within the gang responsible for dividing the cargo, attaching rope strops to it and seeing it out of the hold. It was dangerous work. Cargo routinely loosened and shifted at sea, and even the most experienced breaker couldn’t tell exactly what he was dealing with until he was standing beside it in the hold, as a result of which barely a month went by without someone being crushed by a bale of rubber or a cord of timber. In common with most of the gangs working around the docks, Henry’s gang had set up a funeral savings club to which everyone contributed tuppence a week. Nothing shamed a docker more than the thought of a cheap funeral.

At the age of twenty-one Henry married May and took her out of domestic service. In short order they had a son, Jack, then, three years later, another, Harold. Jack was handsome and reckless and got himself into trouble from an early age for petty theft and dipping. Harold was his opposite, born small with an odd, enlarged head which stayed that way as he grew. Poverty added rickets, the disease of dark, sunless places which Jack had somehow been spared. The disease gave Harold bowed legs, knocked his knees and made half his teeth fall out. Yet despite these afflictions, young Harold was a remarkably upbeat, optimistic and stoical boy, with no trace of self-pity, so unlike the noisy, blustering, self-centred Jack that it was almost as though they had come from two different broods.

Growing up, the two boys saw very little of their father. Henry left the Baker family house in Gaselee Street at six thirty every morning in order to be at the docks in time for the seven o’clock bomp-on, when he would learn whether there was work for him that day. The Great Dock Strike had been in part a response to the casual cruelty of the bomp-on system, where men would have to compete – and sometimes even physically fight – one another for an hour or two’s work. Since dock work was both unpredictable and highly seasonal, some dockers would find themselves unemployed for months with no means of keeping their families from starvation. Henry’s father had been among these, and this had made Henry a staunch union man. After the strike, the bomp-on had been modified. Dockers were now required to register, it was no longer possible for shipowners to hire a man for less than four hours, and those dockers who were attached to gangs, like Henry, had at least some protection from the ravages of a casualised labour market.

When there was no work at the docks, Henry would offer his labour on the cheap to the nearby goods station, hydraulic works, timber store or knacker’s yard. If that failed, he’d spend the day in one of the dockers’ clubs. One way or another, he was rarely back until seven in the evening, when he’d bolt down the tea May Baker had prepared for him before going out to the pub or to the bare-knuckle fights at Wonderland in Whitechapel that were his weakness.

Despite the fact that he rarely saw them, or perhaps because of it, Henry remained the most powerful presence in his sons’ lives; more powerful certainly than May, who was a bitter, silent woman; more powerful too than the railway, which thumped and ticked all night beside the house in Gaselee Street where the Baker family lived; and more powerful even than the docks themselves, which stretched out broad and filthy not a minute’s walk away, their cranes so close that Harold would lie in the bed he shared with Jack and imagine them reaching through the window and plucking him up.

From the moment they were born, it was assumed that Henry’s sons would follow him to the docks. It was a matter of familial pride that they did so. In the East End, as elsewhere, docking ran in families. It wasn’t something you did, it was something you were. In 1914, at the age of fourteen, Jack followed convention and went into the West India with his father, but by then it was already clear that Harold would never join them. Four years before, in 1910, when he was seven, Harold had suffered an accident, and ever after he walked with a pronounced swagger brought on by one leg being much longer than the other and the shorter one being calipered.

While Harold and Jack were still at school together in Union Street, Jack protected his younger brother from the worst of the teasing from his schoolmates. Jack grew up tall and well built and with a reputation for toughness and recklessness. No one wanted to mess with him. Once Jack left for the docks, at the beginning of the Great War, Harold was considered fair game. By then, most of his schoolfellows had grown used to his limp and, knowing him to be a kind and decent boy, counted themselves as among his friends, but the arrival of Albie Bluston at the school changed all that. Albie’s father had been killed during the earliest days of the war, and an elder brother returned home burned the colour of a plum. Albie had been sent to live with his aunt while his mother nursed her older son back to some semblance of a life. To Albie, a boy who had come about his injury without having to fight was nothing short of a coward, and he immediately set on Harold with the specific intention of making his life a misery. All of a sudden, boys Harold had grown up with and considered friends began to trip him up or kick him down for the pleasure of watching him struggle to right himself. When that became a bore, they set wires to trip him up or rolled marbles under his feet, stumbling alongside him in exaggerated imitation of his gait, hurling highfalutin insults, with toffee-nosed expressions on their faces.

I say, look at that blundering blunderbuss.

How outré he is.

Shall we pulverise his bony arse anon?

Still, Harold being Harold, and as generous minded a boy as you are likely to come across, he held no grudges against his former friends, nor even against Albie. He accepted what had happened and, when he thought about the accident, realised he had brought his fate down on himself.

Having no friends to speak of any more, Harold vowed to make the most of the extra time being on his own afforded him. In 1916, Henry was called up, and in his absence, the family had trouble making ends meet. To please his mother and win the favour of his father on his return (for Henry had lost interest in his younger son the moment it became clear that he would never become a docker), Harold took to spending his free time selling second-hand programmes outside the Queen’s Theatre in Poplar. Hanging around the Queen’s, he soon picked up the words and melodies to most of the popular music hall songs of the time, and he’d sometimes sing one or two favourites to keep the people in the queue entertained and make a little more money. People felt sorry for a boy in a caliper. The song that always got the best response, particularly from the women, though Harold had no idea why, was:

I like pickled onions

I like piccalilli

Pickled cabbage is all right

With a bit of cold meat on Sunday night

I can go tomatoes

But what I do prefer

Is a little bit cu- cum- cu- cum- cu- cum

Little bit of cucumber.

Aside from an occasional attack from a Gotha or a Zeppelin visit and the inconvenience to everyone of air-raid warnings and gas alerts, the East End itself remained relatively unscathed during the Great War, and the event had had none of the terrible consequences for the Bakers that it did for many East End families. As white feathers began to appear in letterboxes, Jack Baker’s colour-blindness exempted him from the call-up and Henry was quickly invalided out of service and sent back to the docks. He never spoke about his injury, but it seemed to be of little hindrance to him. In fact, Henry’s spell in the army proved positively advantageous. Having served, he was immune from accusations of shirking or cowardice and, having seen what conditions were like and witnessed desperation and guessed at the lonely intimacy of trauma, he knew exactly how to anticipate the returning soldiers’ needs and soon saw an opportunity to supply some of them.

While Harold recited his times tables and did his best to fend off Albie Bluston, Jack and Henry Baker were busy establishing a tidy business selling pilfered rum to the East End’s growing tribe of war-wounded, gassed and shell-shocked. Not everyone had the ready cash to buy their drink in pubs or the means by which to distil their own poteen, and it was to these men, men at the bottom of the pile, that Henry and Jack extended rum and credit. After all, did they not deserve a drink as much as, or even more than, the next man? Once they’d got drink on tick, the men very often wanted to borrow more money to indulge in cards or women or to gamble on the fights. Neither Jack nor Henry saw themselves as moneylenders or pawnbrokers, but they were happy enough to direct drunk men to a friendly pawnbroker for a portion of the ticket, or to a card sharp for a percentage of the bet, come to that. They usually went to freelance enforcers, though neither Jack nor Henry was above throwing a punch for a deserving cause, and by 1916, their rum and tick business was flourishing.

Harold wasn’t particularly keen to join it. He loved his father and his brother very much but he couldn’t help thinking there was something a little dishonourable in selling drink to desperate men. On the other hand, it was difficult to see what he would do. At school he had proved himself a diligent student, good at numbers in particular, but who would take on a boy with an affliction such as his when there were crippled war heroes tramping the streets half starved? Nonetheless, as 1916 turned into 1917, and the time neared for him to leave school, he knew that he would have to find something. No one could make a living selling second-hand programmes and singing songs to half-cut women.

A week or two before his fourteenth birthday, when he was expected to leave school, the headmaster, Mr Stuart, took Harold aside for what he called his ‘demob’.

You’ll not be following your brother Jack into the West India when you leave here, I take it?

No, sir.

You’re bright enough, but it won’t be easy to place that wooden leg, you see? So what do you propose to do?

It ain’t the leg what’s wood, sir, Harold said, feeling the need to explain himself, it’s only the caliper.

Mr Stuart nodded slightly.

Harold expressed his intention to find an apprenticeship until he was old enough to sign up – if the war was still going on.

Mr Stuart tried not to smile.

Well now, listen here, he said. That’s all well and good, but in the meantime, take this. He scribbled a few words of recommendation on to a piece of paper, named a handful of factories and suggested Harold go to see the foremen there.

So that was exactly what Harold did. At Keiler’s jam and pickle works he was asked to sit and wait for a Mr Taylor, who failed to appear. At Venesta’s a bulky, flustered man took one look at him and said they wouldn’t be taking on any crippled boys. Deciding he might fare better in a shop, Harold presented himself with his letter of recommendation to one establishment after another along the Commercial and East India Dock Roads, then down Poplar High Street, but no one had any positions open for crippled errand boys and he returned home empty-handed. For a while, he rather reluctantly helped out his father and brother, and his mother’s cousin gave him work delivering clean laundry, but when someone complained that the corners of their sheets had been dipped in mud on account of Harold’s lurching gait, his mother’s cousin said she couldn’t afford to have him ruin her business and he would have to go on his way. He continued selling programmes, and added to his portfolio by picking up horse manure and selling it to the tenants of the new allotments which had begun being dug all over the East End, and sweeping coal dust to sell to those who could not afford lump coal. In the afternoons, May would send him off to fetch the evening tea. So long as he didn’t expect them to employ him, the local shopkeepers were often sympathetic and would slip him an extra rasher or two or a couple of eggs, shaking their heads and saying:

Your poor mother.

It was on one of these expeditions, as he was making his way home with a slice of jelly brawn and some potatoes, that Harold spotted a cardboard sign propped up in the window of Spicer’s Grocers and Purveyors of Quality Goods on the Commercial Road. The sign read:

Honest boy req’d.

Tucking the brawn and potatoes down his trousers, which, being Jack’s hand-me-downs, were also very big on him, Harold pushed open the shop door and entered. The place was deeper and larger than it had appeared from its frontage. The walls were lined with dark green shelves on which sat tins of treacle, jam in ceramic jars and tea in penny packets. Beneath the counter were four large floor cabinets, two containing bandages, starch, soap, packages of Carter’s and Beecham’s pills, worm cakes, flypapers, hairnets and all manner of pharmaceuticals and haberdashery. On the counters above the cabinets slabs of butter and cheese were laid out, and behind these were rows of biscuit tins and jars containing honeycomb, toffee and liquorice. Hearing the bell, a plump man with thinning hair, who was arranging piles of kindling, turned to see who had entered and said:

Yes?

Harold felt the man’s gaze alight on his caliper.

It’s about the position, Harold said, trying to sound bold. The man took a breath and, introducing himself as Mr Spicer, flapped his hand, motioning Harold to approach. Harold did so, aware all the time that Mr Spicer was appraising his leg.

You always been a cripple?

Harold shook his head and gave his usual answer. He’d had an accident, he said. He preferred to remain vague about the details.

Rickets too?

Mr Spicer leaned back slightly and rubbed his chin.

Can you ride a bicycle? I wonder. For deliveries, I mean.

Oh yes, Harold said, though he’d never been on a bicycle and had in fact only ever seen one at close quarters when the air-raid policeman had left his lying in the street while giving chase to a boy who had popped him with his catapult.

Well, said Spicer, sucking his teeth and waving Harold closer, come round the back and we’ll see what your learning’s like.

Harold followed him through a hessian curtain at the back of the shop, then down a damp, dark corridor into a small, draughty room filled with a large oak table at which sat a gaunt woman with a lavender scarf tied around her neck. Beside her, on a stand, a sleek mynah bird swung in a small wire cage. For a moment, everyone looked at one another.

He’s come about the position, Mrs Spicer, Mr Spicer said to his wife.

Oh, he has, has he? Mrs Spicer said, though not unkindly.

Give him something to read, Mrs Spicer. Mrs Spicer rummaged for a moment then drew out a single broadsheet. It was an invitation to attend a meeting on votes for women in Limehouse, tea and biscuits served. Harold read without a stumble. As he finished, Mr Spicer coughed and raised his eyes to heaven.

Here, then, Mrs Spicer, he said. Give this boy one of them accounts books. Spicer waited until Harold had taken the leather-bound book. Well, open it then, said Mr Spicer, and add up all them numbers in the right-hand column and give me an answer quick!

Twenty-seven shillings and tenpence ha’penny. Mr Spicer took the book and began to scan the column, mouthing the numbers to himself. After a short while he passed the book to his wife and said:

Here, you check this.

While Mrs Spicer made her way down the column, Harold fixed his gaze on the mynah.

They’ll speak, you know, if you train ’em, said Mr Spicer. Which is just as well since they ain’t much to look at.

Yes, Harold said. He explained that the Baker family had a similar bird and that it, too, wasn’t much to look at.

Mrs Spicer confirmed Harold’s figure. For a moment Spicer stood fiddling with his moustache, thinking, then he said:

Got family what served, sonny?

Harold explained that his father had been invalided out and that his older brother had worked in the docks for most of the war. Spicer listened with apparent concentration, then tapped the bars of the cage and began to sing ‘Laddie Boy’:

Goodbye and luck be with you, Laddie Boy, Laddie Boy.

After a little while, the bird began to join in with the chorus and even managed a bit of one of the verses.

Ha ha ha, see? Spicer shook with laughter and wiped his eyes with a mucky sleeve. Mrs Spicer sighed and began very quietly drumming her fingers on the table.

Your father not badly injured, I hope? said Spicer, taking another tack. Employed?

Harold replied that his father worked in the docks. He didn’t know the nature of the injury because his father didn’t talk about it.

What do your bird say, sonny?

Peg leg, sir, Harold said.

Spicer pulled himself upright and coughed a little.

Peg leg? Not nothing else?

Spicer gazed at Harold wide-eyed for a moment, then, striding forward, clapped him on the back and said:

Come back tomorrow morning, eight sharp, and, so long as you can ride the bicycle, you can have the job.

When Harold got home and told his mother the news, May said:

So what’s the wages? and biffed him round the head when he said he didn’t know.

Fishlips! Always ask about the wages.

But when Harold turned up at Spicer’s early the following day, Mr Spicer met him at the door and with a grim look on his face said he was very sorry but he’d reconsidered his position and decided that, when there were war heroes without jobs, he couldn’t in all honesty offer the post to a boy. Even to a boy like Harold. Especially to a boy like Harold.

And so Harold went home, feeling puzzled about the world and the dilemmas it offered up. It was true that it didn’t seem right to take a job from a war hero, one of those men with a single eye or two missing feet that you saw staggering around the streets looking dazed and ragged. But what was he to do? He had to make his way in the world in some fashion or other. He understood that he was a cripple and with rickets, but did that make him so incapable? Had he not proved himself able to make calculations that even Mr Spicer couldn’t manage?

By the time he reached his front door he had decided not to tell his mother about Spicer’s rejection. He hated lying to her, but he couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. He’d have to tell her that Spicer had asked him to start the following morning and think up some strategy meantime. Never knowing him to have lied, May accepted what her younger son said without a blink, but guilt gnawed away at him so badly that, lying top to toe in the bed he shared with Jack that night, he finally confessed the awful truth to Jack’s feet. His older brother sat up and swore a great deal.

War heroes my arse. Ain’t our dad a war hero? Don’t he deserve his crippled son start bringing in a bit of a wage?

Harold hadn’t considered this argument but, considering it now, a flush of pride blossomed on his face.

Don’t you worry, Crip, Jack said. Ever since the accident he had called his younger brother Crip, though never in public. We’ll soon sort it out. Jack turned away and moments later his snores were rattling the mattress.

The following morning, on Jack’s instructions, Harold limped to the door of a friend of Jack’s, Tommy Bluston, and asked to borrow his bicycle. The wheels wobbled and the bicycle swung wildly about but he managed to remain on the saddle. For an hour or so he practised, pedalling faster and faster up and down the quiet terraces. Pretty soon he had gathered his confidence sufficiently to venture out into traffic and was bowling along the granite sets as though he’d been born to it. It was exhilarating. The rough air of Poplar whipped his face and he had the sensation of being pulled, but the best part of it all was that, on the seat of the bicycle, Harold ceased to be a cripple. On the contrary, he suddenly became someone people admired or even envied. He had only to ring his bell and women would hurry out of the way, dogs would bark, children would point and sometimes even run behind him. So wrapped up was he in his new-found freedom that he lost all awareness of time. Suddenly, becoming conscious of the twelve o’clock chimes, he pedalled as fast as his legs would take him along the East India Dock Road towards the docks. As he pulled up, Jack was standing beside the police sentry box at the entrance to the West India with a cigarette in his mouth.

You’re late.

Harold followed his brother, pushing Tommy’s bicycle past the workhouse and into an alleyway beside The Resolute pub. Jack tapped on the pub window and nodded to someone inside, then the two brothers went around the back to a latched gate. A dog chained up beside a shed started barking, then, seeing Jack, it quietened down, slapping its tail against the dim concrete of the yard. From the inside pocket of his jacket, Jack produced a key with which he unlocked the padlock to the shed. Immediately inside the door stood a few wooden crates, their outlines dissolving gradually into the gloom.

Now this Spicer cove, Jack said, finally. He sell black treacle? Coconut mats?

Harold closed his eyes and tried to reimagine Spicer’s shop. It seemed to him that Spicer’s sold everything, so much and in so many varieties that he couldn’t put names to them all, but he thought he could remember green tins of black treacle sitting beside the sugar loaves wrapped in blue paper.

Good, said Jack, ’cause we got consignments of them both. He dived into the shed and reappeared with a large basket which he attached to the front of the bicycle with rope. Into the basket they loaded half a dozen tins of treacle and six mats.

You tell that Spicer, this is for free, but he takes you on there’ll be more: black treacle, coconut mats, rum, the lot. He’ll have to pay, mind, but not half what he’d pay the wholesaler.

Harold stood beside the bicycle, committing this message to memory. Then, for no particular reason, he heard himself say:

Mr Spicer’s got a mynah what sings ‘Laddie Boy’. He’d heard Jack and Henry singing the song. He don’t know all the words, but he can sing the chorus.

Jack looked interested. Oh, our man likes birds, do he? Well, I’ll give him birds. Wait here, then, Crip. He went into the pub by the back door and emerged a few moments later holding a crude wooden birdcage inside which sat a startlingly large white cockatiel with a bristling yellow crest.

Some tyke give me this for a card game. Spotless, this bird. Lovely singer. Tell Spicer if he gives you the job, it’s his for six shillings.

Jack tousled his brother’s hair.

Listen, Crip. All this cargo what you see here. This is a family matter, all right? Just a little bit of duck and dive. Your dad and me, we like to keep it private, so only tell that Spicer fellow what I said you could.

Harold reassured his brother and went to mount the bicycle. With the mats and the treacle in the basket and a large birdcage hanging from the bars, the bicycle was a good deal trickier to manage than it had been, but Harold set himself to the task and he was soon pedalling north again and hearing his brother calling after him:

And don’t forget to tell him your dad’s a bleedin’ war hero and all.

He made his way back to Spicer’s feeling upbeat. His brother’s words had settled him. Jack was right. Everyone in the East End made a big play out of being neighbourly, and they were. If you were in some kind of crisis, your neighbours would always do what they could to help you out. That was how the East End was. But no one confused that with family. Family was the core, the essence. Family was what you were, and if that meant doing whatever it took to get a job, knowing there were one-eyed men and limbless veterans who might need the job even more than you did, then that’s what you had to do. Ultimately, it was family that counted.

Presented with the treacle, mats and cockatiel, and persuaded that Harold’s father was indeed a war hero, Mr Spicer decided he was running a business, not a charity, and hired Harold Baker on the spot for a weekly wage of five shillings and a direct line to his brother’s unorthodox grocery wholesalers. Harold’s duties included sweeping and dusting, stocktaking, the afternoon deliveries and occasionally helping Mrs Spicer with her books.

The Spicers proved themselves to be kind and reasonable employers and Harold quickly and happily made himself indispensable. In the mornings he mopped and swept the pavement in front of the shop, then dusted the shelves and washed and polished the floor, before feeding and cleaning out the mynah bird. In the afternoon, he hitched up the delivery trailer to Spicer’s bicycle and took off along the streets of Poplar, delivering packages here and there. From time to time he would cycle down to the pub beside the West India to pick up consignments of molasses and black treacle, bananas and spiced rum from Jack and Henry’s store.

After some months, Spicer sold the bristling cockatiel and bought a breeding pair of Cumberland fancy canaries, and it became Harold’s responsibility to put out their white grit and seed every morning and to change their water, wipe their cuttlebone free of droppings, and lay new paper on the cage floor. There was no more talk of war heroes, nor of crippled boys. May never called her younger son fishlips again, and even his father seemed to treat him with a new respect. The Spicers, who had no children of their own, developed an affection for their errand boy and were touched by the care he took with everything, and in particular with the birds. Spring came round and Spicer made a breeding box and offered Harold a cut of the sale price of every canary chick he could bring to adulthood. Pretty soon the hen laid eggs, each of which Harold carefully removed with a spoon and replaced with a clay dummy. Once the clutch was complete, he put all the eggs back in the nest together and waited for the hen to settle on them. Of the first brood, he lost three chicks and managed to bring up two, but he was picking up tips at the bird market in Sclater Street now and he knew where he had gone wrong. With the money he made on the two he sold, he bought another breeding pair and successfully raised six chicks. He sold the males, which were the only singers, and kept the females for breeding on.

Summer passed into autumn and on 11 November, the Armistice was signed and, despite the ravages not only of the war, but of the influenza which came in on its coat-tails, the whole of the East End devolved into one giant street party. Young men not yet drafted laughed with relief, children boasted about their fathers, and wartime sweethearts schemed to extricate themselves from their promises.

The curtains opened, the lights came on and everyone remembered their lines. Life was on again.

There followed the briefest of booms as the economy picked itself up from the war and then a deep depression hit.

How’s about I pay yer next week, sonny boy? women would say when Harold turned up to deliver their groceries. Mr Spicer won’t mind a bit. Sunken-eyed mothers would come into the shop with their crying children carrying the most pitiful array of shabby goods – a baby’s rattle, a spinning top, a rabbit’s foot good-luck charm – to trade for food, and Spicer would have to take them to one side and remind them sternly that it was a business he was running and if they wanted charity they should apply to the Sally Army.

Them politicians have got a lot to answer for, Mrs Spicer said. Ain’t those poor women got enough on their plates? Half of them widows and all.

But that’s just it, Mrs Spicer, Spicer replied, shaking his head at the way of things. Most of ’em ain’t got nothing on their plates at all.

Things got so bad that on one day in 1921, four members of Poplar council were arrested for diverting the rates into a food voucher scheme designed to protect Poplar’s poorest residents from starvation. When news spread of the councillors’ arrest, men and women in the docks and factories began putting down their tools and taking to the streets. Spicer watched them moving slowly past the shop windows and tutted with disapproval. Things were bad, he knew, but there was no need to make a public scandal of it. Besides, the demonstrators were putting off his customers.

At lunchtime that day, Mrs Spicer put on her coat and brown cloche hat and announced she was going to the post office. Spicer tried his best to persuade her not to go, but she was insistent. By late afternoon, when the demonstrations and street protests had spread across Poplar and even the rookeries and turnings were jammed with aggrieved men and women, jostling for a view of their leaders, and Mrs Spicer had not returned, Spicer sent Harold out on the bicycle to look for her. For several hours, Harold slowly pedalled through the throng, along the Commercial Road, down the East India Dock Road into Poplar High Street and farther east to Blackwall and the oxbow of land at Bow Creek where the river Gypsies lived, weaving his way through the tides of people, but he saw no sign of Mrs Spicer until, making his way home, he was bicycling down Poplar High Street when he thought he spotted her brown cloche hat among a group outside the town hall. He clambered from his bicycle and, leaving it in the care of a boy in return for a farthing, he made his way through the throng of people until finally there, over on the other side of the street, next to the slipper baths, his suspicions were confirmed. Mrs Spicer was standing with the protesters. She had a banner in her hand and was shouting. He knew then she had never intended to visit the post office but needed an excuse to leave the shop. In her own quiet way Mrs Spicer was a rebel; most likely she’d been a rebel all her life. Harold found the idea exotic. Until that moment he had thought that rebels were all like Jack.

He reported back to Mr Spicer that his wife was nowhere to be seen and that she was probably caught up somewhere in the tide of people, but he saw no need to worry because no one seemed to be much in the mood for violence. It was all right to lie to keep a secret, he thought, to avoid hurting people. Sometimes, it was probably better than telling them.

Later on that week, he lifted his new clutch of young canaries into an old wooden port box, tied it to his bicycle with string, and pedalled along the Commercial Road, past the soup lines at the Sally Army, past thin men standing smoking on the corners, past sallow-skinned women and tearful children to the animal emporium in Sclater Street, where he sold all four, and throughout the whole journey it never once occurred to him that it might be an odd thing, in the midst of such poverty and misery as there was in the East End of the 1920s, that men and women would happily give what little money they had to possess just one of those tiny, yellow gems, whose song recalled sunshine and laughter and better times.

CHAPTER 4

On their return from Kent and all through the war years, Daisy and Franny visited Elsie at her Wanstead Flats asylum once a month with Joe. Sometimes they’d take a rock bun or a piece of Mrs Anderson’s tea loaf, but after Mrs Anderson and Maisie left for alternative lodgings nearer to Mrs Anderson’s sister, there was rarely anything worth taking. Elsie didn’t seem to bother one way or another. Every so often her face would beam with recognition, but most times she seemed confused and mildly irritated, as though their presence interrupted her peace. No one had any real idea what was wrong with her. The diagnoses ranged from nervous exhaustion to hysterical grief and melancholic disorder. She was prescribed complete rest for an indefinite period. Whether she would recover or not was anyone’s guess. Still, the asylum was warm, the nurses seemed kind and the food was plentiful, and Daisy often thought her mother was happier in her walled prison, shorn of memories, than she had been on the outside, though she knew enough never to say this to her father.

Without Elsie’s luxuriant moaning and numberless afflictions, life at number 7 Bloomsbury Street felt oddly amputated but it, too, was happier, especially for Daisy, who had always suffered the hard edge of her mother’s misery.

While she remained at Bloomsbury Street, Mrs Anderson was drafted in to help out with the domestic chores and Mrs Shaunessy was taken on to do the cooking and watch Franny when there was no one in the house. The most immediate practical consequence of Elsie’s absence was that, with medical bills to pay, and Mrs Anderson and Mrs Shaunessy to compensate for their time, and with no income from laundry and flower-making, the Crommelin family found themselves very short of money. Joe took on extra shifts, leaving the house before the gas lamp man had snuffed out the street lights and returning long after the last lamp had been lit for the night. He no longer brought treats home on Fridays. Gone, too, were the Saturday afternoons in the park.

In 1915, six months or so after her return from the hop fields, at the age of twelve, Daisy went out to work on the half-and-half, spending her mornings at school and her afternoons at an assortment of factories, sweeping floors and sorting cans. The arrangement brought in a few shillings but it put an end to her evenings with Lilly and to the possibility of another summer visit to Kent.

Notwithstanding the downturn in their own fortunes, the Crommelins never ceased to count their luck. They had only to look next door to see what wreckage the war had left in its wake. Since his return from the front limbless and half blind, Pat Shaunessy had been reduced to selling kindling on the street and Mrs Shaunessy had started putting in long days washing and mending, ironing and darning, cooking and looking after children in order to try to make ends meet. Even so, they sometimes had to resort to the Relieving Officer, and Mrs Shaunessy would have to send Billy round to number 7, shamefaced, clutching bags of linen and tins of corned beef, for the officer would not issue food coupons to any family who had anything left to sell.

The Shaunessys’ slide into poverty made Billy Shaunessy meaner and angrier than ever. Now he would lie in wait in a turning for Daisy and Franny as they walked to school every morning – from 1916 onwards Franny also attended Culloden Street School – and spring out, taking a pinch out of the both of them and shouting:

Your ma’s as mad as a stick. Yes she is, yes she is. Me ma says so and me dad says so and all.

Billy Shaunessy, you stop that! Daisy would cry, but to no effect. Billy relished the upset he caused and her protests seemed only to encourage him further. For weeks together, he carried on in this vein until, one day, deciding to take things into her own hands, Franny finally turned about and, marching up to him, stood on her tiptoes and flipped him so hard on the nose with her tiny fingers that he froze to the spot in sheer bewilderment, leaving Franny the space she needed to announce that Billy was a fine one to talk, whose so-called dad was a Patty-no-legs what begged in the street for his living.

After that, Billy Shaunessy left the Crommelin girls alone and they saw him only when he slunk in, red-faced and arms full of corned beef tins, in advance of a visit from the Relieving Officer.

The Crommelins’ luck – if you could call it that – ran out one morning in 1917, when Joe returned from a visit to the asylum with bad news. Though no one seemed to be able definitively to say what was wrong with Elsie, the doctors had agreed the longer her ‘turns’ went on, the less likely she would be to make a recovery. This meant that further cutbacks were necessary. Daisy would have to leave school and find paid work the moment she reached fourteen. In the meantime, Joe would have to tell Mrs Shaunessy that the Crommelins could no longer afford her services. He was loath to do it – the Shaunessys had been good neighbours and Mrs Shaunessy had helped out when Elsie had first been taken ill. For weeks he wrestled with himself, struggling to find some way to soften the blow. Until, one afternoon, Mrs Shaunessy did the hard work for him.

She came round as usual at five, carrying a piece of brisket for the Crommelins’ tea. While Daisy put on the kettle, Mrs Shaunessy began carving paper-thin slices of meat to make into sandwiches, chattering inconsequentially as she worked. As instructed, she’d bought a sixpenny piece of brisket, which would usually be enough for tea and for Joe Crommelin’s sandwiches in the morning. While the girls were eating, Mrs Shaunessy fussed about at the sink for a while before making as if to leave. As she moved towards the door, she hesitated and, in a casual voice, said that brisket had been particularly dear that day and that Daisy was to tell her father that she hadn’t been able to buy enough for his morning sandwiches. For a moment she put down her basket and turned to put on her hat, and in that moment the cloth she’d used to cover the basket dislodged itself and both Daisy and Franny saw the unmistakable remains of the brisket wrapped in wax paper wedged beneath.

Daisy didn’t want to tell her father that Mrs Shaunessy had stolen the meat, because it was hard enough for the Shaunessys what with Mr Shaunessy having no legs and Billy Shaunessy being the crybaby that he was. She figured that if they just repeated what Mrs Shaunessy had said it couldn’t really be called lying, since it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told the lie. But Franny, who was fast developing into a telltale, ignored her older sister and Joe was barely in the door, taking off his blue serge overcoat, before she was breathlessly relating Mrs Shaunessy’s crime.

Wait up, wait up, girl, Joe said, while Daisy unwound the string strapping up the hessian he always tied around his shins to protect his trousers, your tongue’s got caught on the current, but when he saw there was no meat for his sandwiches the following morning, only a couple of pieces of stale bread, he was very angry and started grumbling about ‘interfering’. It was the excuse Joe needed. He told Mrs Shaunessy that very evening not to come any more and asked Mrs Anderson as far as possible to keep to her room, and from then on the Crommelin girls were left to bring themselves up more or less alone.

Low though they might have sunk, though, even the Shaunessys hadn’t suffered the worst of it. By the end of the war the same could not be said of all the inhabitants of Bloomsbury Street. One of the Lumin boys at number 47 was killed in action, and Mrs Lumin’s young nephew was blown to bits when a bomb dropped on Upper North Street School in June 1917. A French polisher and his cousin, who shared lodgings in The Deep, were both killed at Ypres. Two or three others in the street contracted typhoid or dysentery, one went mad from shell shock, another was gassed and then, if that weren’t enough, the Greenbergs lost two children to the influenza epidemic and several elderly men and women in Bloomsbury Street were cut down the same way.

In March 1917, only a week or two after her fourteenth birthday, Daisy left school for good and found work at the Apex Laundry. Lilly’s elder sister had worked there for some years and had put in a good word for her younger sister, who had started there a few months before. When the Apex’s formidable forewoman, Mrs Bentley, mentioned that there might be another vacancy for a hard-working, honest and healthy girl direct out of school, Lilly had immediately thought of her best friend. Daisy was not new to laundry work. Like any East End girl, she’d been expected to assist her mother with the weekly wash from a very early age. Elsie Crommelin did her laundry the old-fashioned way. She owned a buck, a wooden washing trough, inherited from her mother, who’d no doubt inherited it from hers. This she kept in the yard, and it was large enough to enable her to earn a few pennies taking in neighbours’ washing. On washing day – invariably Monday – she would set a copper of water on to boil, then fill the buck with the water, fold the clothes and linen to be washed into the buck with a scoop of ashes and one of hen dung. She’d turn the lot over with a prosser then finally leave it to soak. This was an old technique to save soap, which, at least when Elsie was a young woman, was an expensive luxury. After an hour or so, she’d drain off the lye and dung through a spigot in the buck, rub each piece of cloth with shavings of pig fat soap and work up a lather on the rubbing board before filling the buck once more with cold water and rinsing the lot in it. It was this washing which was hanging to dry when Franny took it upon herself to raid her mother’s sewing box with consequences everyone, except possibly Elsie herself, now knew.

The Apex, which took in sailors’ uniforms and the linen from several West End hotels as well as a hospital or two, was rather more up to date. It was situated in a once-red-brick, now blackened building which was part of a huddle of small factories and workshops just off the East India Dock Road. The laundry itself was divided into three principal rooms, each serving several functions. Of these, the washroom was the largest, containing vast copper cauldrons set on gas burners and a state-of-the-art Victress Vowel turner operated by levered wheels, with an area at one side devoted to stain removal and special treatments, and another at the back where the mangles and hanging racks stood. The washroom gave on to a separate ironing room. Beyond that lay the finishing and packing room.

The Apex Laundry hours were from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. The pay was poor, six shillings a week for a junior girl, and there were no paid holidays or sickness benefits. The laundry seemed to run by a set of rules designed to transfer as much of the weekly wage as possible back to its owners. Any infraction of these rules – which Mrs Bentley was careful never fully to explain – resulted in a docking of the guilty party’s pay. Among the infractions included grating the soap too finely, or too thickly, using too much or too little, bleaching or starching any fabric not intended to be bleached or starched or in any other way damaging fabric or fixings, however inadvertently; insufficient mangling, sneezing or coughing on newly ironed laundry, failing to fold correctly, speaking when not required to speak or failing to speak when required to do so, illness, lateness and other assorted malfeasances as and when required.

When the laundry arrived at the Apex, it was first inspected then, if necessary, taken to the soaking and stain-removal area, where it was the responsibility of the stain workers to remove any marks on the fabric with hot flour and water or ground pipeclay, ashes or lime chloride, or salts of lemon and cream of tartar, depending on the stain. The stain-free laundry was then placed in hot water with shredded soap and soda in one of the cauldrons, and turned with a Victress Vowel operated by levered wheels. Every kind of fabric required a different treatment. Coloureds were set with salt and vinegar, prints soaked in liquor boiled from ivy leaves, and blue and black silk fixed with gin. After its wash, the laundry was lifted out with dolly sticks, and, in the case of linens, boiled, then rinsed three times, in warm, cool and blued water respectively, before being moved to the starching area, to be stiffened with rice flour or size made from boiled hoofs and glossed with borax. It was then mangled in huge, multiple-rollered mangles operated by a set of giant wheels and levers, and set on the drying racks. While still moist, linens were transferred to the ironing room, where they were ironed with turps, then polished with glass calenders on a hardboard, and, finally, sent to the packing room to be finished and folded and from there dispatched back to their owners.

Because her sister was a good worker, Lilly was assigned to the packing room, the least arduous area of the laundry, where she had only to fold sleeves and pin shirts and set fancy work in tissue before bundling each customer’s order together in brown paper and tying it up with string. Daisy, on the other hand, was put to the mangles. Her job was to fold the newly washed laundry, then feed it through the rollers, turning the levered wheels with one hand, using the other to catch the newly mangled fabric as it appeared at the other end, then transfer it to the drying racks. If the laundry was insufficiently mangled it would drip on to the floor and dry unevenly; if too dry, the ironing room would complain that it was unmanageable. It was, quite literally, grinding labour. At the end of each day, Daisy’s shoulders and elbows would throb from turning the wheels. After the first few weeks, the sensitive skin between her fingers opened up, leaving itchy wounds which never healed, then the skin on the back of her hands developed a bloom from exposure to carbolic and soda and the hands themselves throbbed from the constant damp. Several months in, the muscles in her mangling arm began to swell beneath taut, roped veins.

That’s more like an elephant’s trunk than an arm, Lilly said one day as they were sharing their midday sandwich. Careful, or they’ll think you’ve escaped from the circus or else… She whispered this with her hand to her mouth so that only Daisy could see…. or they’ll think you’re one of them.

Them were the nancy boys who hung around the docks at night dressed in women’s garb. Some worked as dockers by day and by night their thickly muscular bodies, granite legs and leather faces looked rather comical dressed in silk skirts and daubed with rouge and beauty powder. They were tolerated, even pandered to so long as they took in good part the jokes made against them, but you wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of them, not for any amount of money, not even if you did have an elephant’s trunk for an arm.

Later Lilly apologised, pointing out that her own arms were none too clever, neither, so she had no right to pitch in on anyone else’s, and the two girls were as thick as any two girls can be once more.

It didn’t occur to Daisy to resent her friend for her easier lot, just as it didn’t occur to her to resent her sister for being pretty. Things were as things were. There was nothing to be done about any of it. In any case, Daisy quite liked her work. Her walk to and from the laundry took her past Charrington’s and the Anchor Brewery, from whose streaming chimneys forever came the delicious, bitter, spicy scent of hops. There was a certain satisfaction in turning the wheel and seeing wet, sloppy fabric emerge the other side flat, crisp and evenly moist, and the camaraderie between the laundresses made up in part for the laboriousness and monotony of mangle-turning. The East End was full of filthy work in glue factories, meat processing plants and paint and gas works. The laundry at least had the advantage of being clean.

More than anything, though, the twice-daily exposure to the smell of hops kept Daisy going, because it reminded her of the happiest times, during those weeks of late summer and autumn, she’d spent in Kent at the beginning of the war. She looked back on that period as a procession of brilliant, sun-drenched days, each bringing more happiness than the last, and she’d returned to Poplar with a new and uncomfortable perspective on her home patch. The crush of people, which had once seemed so comforting, now grated, and the speed of everything made her anxious. She started to feel penned in and longed to see the thin turban-blue stripe of the sea once more. But she knew that until Franny had left school and was bringing in a wage and could be trusted to look after their father, she would not be returning to Kent.

It pleased her to be able to make a difference to the family economy, though, and by the early 1920s, the Crommelins were once more on an even keel financially, and Daisy was even able to save a shilling or two for entertainments for herself and her sister.

From the mid-1920s, picture houses sprang up across the East End as fast as dandelions through paving stones. By the early 1930s, there were eight around Poplar alone, among the largest of which were the Pavilion, the Hippodrome, the Grand and the Gaiety, each capable of seating thousands. The Troxy, which opened in the early 1930s, seated 3,500 alone. For a while they competed furiously for custom, each decorating its foyer and viewing room more elaborately than the next, with velveteen, crystal chandeliers and gilded gesso. The sisters loved them, but Franny found their blend of magic and luxury particularly enchanting and would have happily spent every waking minute in one or other picture house had she not had school to attend and a concerned older sister to make sure she went. The picture houses soon became a major part of the sisters’ weekend routine. Every Saturday morning after her shift at the laundry, Daisy would walk to Chrisp Street to wait for her sister to emerge from the morning children’s show; the two girls would go and do their shopping in the market and as they made their way home Franny would entertain Daisy with descriptions of what she’d seen. In the afternoon they’d head for the matinee at the Gaiety or the Hippodrome and they’d walk home with heads full of stars and stories.

Franny began to become quite obsessed with pictures and stars, and when she wasn’t actually watching a film, or talking about it, she’d be memorising lines of dialogue, cast lists and plots, or standing in front of the mantelpiece mirror in the living room, styling her hair and doing her film make-up and talking about becoming a star of the screen. No entreaties by her sister or scolding by her father could make her give up her fantasies. No laundry could contain her, no factory feed her talent. Joe and Daisy would see. She was meant for better things. In a year or two Franny Crommelin intended to be at least as famous as Louise Brooks, as glamorous as Gloria Swanson and as rich as Mary Pickford.

And so, when Franny was finally released from her schooling aged fourteen, the first thing she did was to wave her hair and dab rouge on her cheeks and lips, don her Sunday dress and present herself at the staff entrance of several of the larger picture houses requesting a screen test. Mostly, the picture house managers would say there weren’t any openings for picture starlets that week, but a few, noting Franny’s lush hair and bonny features, would tip her a wink and tell her to come back after the night’s performance and discuss matters over a drink.

Cheeky bleedin’ cusses, Daisy would say, I catch them taking any liberties with my little sister, I’ll give ’em a clip round the ear so hard they’ll be seeing stars all right.

Finally, after months of persistence, during which Franny fended off the managers of half the cinemas in East London, with varying degress of success, the manager of the Pavilion, Freddy Ruben, offered her a position as a junior usherette. This she accepted, though not in the best grace, on the assumption that, before the year was out, her true talents would be recognised and rewarded. When, after three months, then six, then nine, she was still sweeping peanut shells and cigarette butts off the floor, with no prospect of advancement, Franny Crommelin decided to change tack. If the world wouldn’t come to her, she would have to go out to the world. She began adding face powder and lipstick to her already rouged face and took to curling her hair with rags and irons. When Joe wasn’t looking, she would sit in the living room making alterations to her clothes, putting in tucks here and there to accentuate her curves. On her fifteenth birthday she came home sporting a fetching new hat, swearing she’d picked it up for pennies from Flitterman’s misfits, even though Daisy could see it had come from somewhere more expensive, like Selwyn’s. A few weeks later, a silver-plated filigree brooch appeared on the lapel of her coat, and not long after that, she returned home carrying a new pair of tan kid leather gloves. All of these things, she said, she’d bought from her wages, but Daisy had seen how Freddy Ruben had begun to watch her sister and she sensed trouble ahead.

Trouble there was too, but this time it was out on the streets of Poplar. On 2 May 1926, Joe arrived home from work with the news that a General Strike had been called for the next day.

The bosses had it coming, was all he’d say.

Daisy knew nothing about workers’ rights or trade unions. She was vaguely conscious of the fact that, from time to time, Lilly attended union meetings, but Daisy believed it was better not to make a fuss about anything if you didn’t have to. Her heart went out to men like Paddy Shaunessy, who’d given their legs for their country only to be abandoned by it, but to her way of thinking men like Paddy were precisely why more fortunate families such as the Crommelins, who really had nothing to complain about, were better off keeping their gripes to themselves. There was something unfair, even unseemly, complaining about working conditions or even about unemployment when there were so many people worse off than herself. Life wasn’t fair on anyone, but it had been a good deal fairer on those who still had the legs to march than it had on men like Paddy Shaunessy.

On the other hand, Daisy always obeyed her father, and Joe Crommelin was a union man. If there was a General Strike, Joe said, the Crommelins would stand alongside their fellow workers.

The following morning was the strangest since Daisy had come home to find her mother locked in the understairs cupboard with Mrs Anderson yelling at her. After Joe had left, Franny didn’t want to leave the house, but Daisy decided to venture out. It was as though a huge tide had broken during the night and taken away everything familiar. Instead of the usual morning bustle, there were no omnibuses, no wagons or delivery boys on bicycles on the streets, and what few men were making their way along the street in their work clothes kept their own company. Most of the shops along the Commercial and East India Dock Roads had been padlocked and some had even been boarded up, and the routes to the dock gates, which would usually at this time have been aflow with dockers in flat caps and serge suits with neckerchiefs for collars, were oddly empty, as though a strong wind had whistled through and blown them away. The factory gates were padlocked and, along her habitual route to the Apex Laundry, Daisy could no longer smell the rich tang of hops. As for the laundry itself, the door was barred and someone had pasted up a notice, around which a number of laundresses were clustered, gossiping in muted voices.

Daisy returned home past gaggles of men, grouped at the corners of the street, subdued-seeming and anxious. Some of the women had already taken out tea and pieces of bread and dripping to them. Every so often a boy would arrive with a message, which would spread between the groups of men, drifting finally into the houses, where the women passed it on among themselves.

In the afternoon, with Joe still absent, Daisy persuaded Franny to come out with her. The locked shops and barricaded frontages were obscured now behind a phalanx of men and women carrying placards and banners and shouting for jobs and justice. Volunteer policemen, many of them mounted, surrounded the marchers on all sides and the streets were as tense as barrel straps.

I don’t suppose no one much will be at the pictures today, Franny said, tossing her hair in a peevish gesture, as if all the shenanigans on the street had been done somehow deliberately to thwart her.

I don’t suppose, her sister said.

No point in turning up for me shift, then. I wouldn’t mind going to the pictures myself, though, later. If hardly no one comes, they might sell the posh seats for tuppence.

But there won’t be no one to buy the tickets off, Daisy pointed out, nor no one to show people to their seats if you ain’t there. Nor no one even to project the picture.

Oh, said Franny, I hadn’t thought of that. A man in a suit walked by and Franny followed him with her eyes, adding in a distracted manner, Closing the docks is one thing, but say what you like, it don’t seem right, closing the pictures.

When they got home, Joe was sitting in his chair, smoking, and there was a smell of beer in the air.

Where you been? he said.

Round and about, said Franny. It wasn’t my idea.

Well, from now on you’re staying in. Ain’t no place for a gel out there, all sorts going on, Joe said.

Daisy knew he meant a pretty girl. A girl like Daisy went largely unnoticed. He finished his cigarette then reached into his pocket and, pulling out the lining to find nothing hiding inside, he went to his jacket, which was hanging on a peg in the passageway, and, fishing out a coin, he turned to Daisy and said:

Fetch your old dad a half-ounce of tobaccer. Ain’t no one open but old Settle up the road at number seventeen, I seen him selling shag to a docker, so knock on his door. He knows me.

Later, after a tea of leftovers boiled into soup, Joe rolled Settle’s tobacco into newspaper and sat smoking and shaking his head.

I ain’t saying I’m for that Lansbury cove, nor for socialism neither, but I’ll tell you this for free; it ain’t right what’s happening and that’s that.

The strike lasted nine days and the Baldwin government did everything they could to stop it. In the London docks they continued recruiting volunteer militia police, including some pretty disreputable men, and brought in two navy submarines into the Royals to act as generators for the refrigerated warehouses where 750,000 beef and lamb carcasses were going nowhere. On the fifth day, lorries driven by soldiers broke the picket line and on 12 May the Trades Union Congress admitted defeat and called the strike off. Though the action was a failure, it proved to be iron ore to Joe Crommelin’s moral compass. From that day in May 1926 on, he was almost always to be found at evening meetings of one kind or another: trade unions, workers’ education committees, strike committees, fringe meetings and hustings. Joe didn’t talk about these meetings much, though he often brought home pamphlets, which he kept in the locked drawer in the chest into which Elsie had once placed Daisy and Franny when they were babies. Every so often he would unlock the drawer and remove a pile of leaflets, but he never spoke about what became of the leaflets or of his meetings for that matter, and Daisy did not care to quiz him. It was enough for her that for the first time since before the war, Joe Crommelin seemed happy and, for short periods at least, to be able to forget Elsie’s absence. Unionism had given him a cause less painful, less puzzling and certainly less hopeless than his wife.

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