Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ he’s a blackleg!’

      More men turned to face the confrontation and a few moved towards Billy Clark.

      ‘He … he’s not in the union,’ said Billy, suddenly uncertain, looking from face to face, appealing to the men to share his burning sense of injustice. Two men jumped forward and grabbed Billy’s arms. The knife dropped to the floor.

      ‘I couldn’t care less if he’s Blackbeard,’ called Lizzy from behind the bar. ‘You don’t pull out a knife in Cundy’s.’

      The men bundled Billy out of the door. A couple of minutes later they returned and one of them handed Fred his knife and his money.

      ‘Thank you,’ said Fred, breathing hard. ‘I think you just saved my life.’

      ‘Think nothing of it,’ said one of the men. ‘Now get out of Silvertown, you fucking blackleg.’

      This, then, was Silvertown on the eve of the First World War, an island of the disparate, a hellish insular outpost of fiery furnaces, giant boiling vats, noxious fumes, belching chimneys, dirty smogs that made your eyes run and your nose sting, a metropolis of clanking, screeching machinery and a raw, quick-witted, downtrodden populace, raised on inequality and with little to show for their long hours of endless toil beyond a couple of dank rooms in a house where the air is always damp, fungus grows through the wallpaper and there are four children to a bed.

      On the face of it this was a slum among slums, streets of houses with no roads, no pavements, no gas and little lighting. So damp was Silvertown as the buried marshes tried to rise to the surface again with, the thoroughfares a permanence of puddles, that some people wondered whether Silvertown folk at the turn of the twentieth century had webbed feet. It was almost as if the place had risen from the depths and could be drawn back down again, back among the drowned of centuries.

      Yet magical, world-changing things happened in Silvertown, most of it achieved via the hands and broad backs of the dockers and labourers of the locality, the people who’d come from near and far to settle in that choking, muddy place by the river. These were proud people, strong people, people whose lifelong struggles had taught them to stick together, to look out for one another. Their collective experiences, whether in the shipyards of Scotland, the steelworks of South Wales, the flat farmlands of East Anglia or beyond, had taught them all that together they were strongest. Their accents might differ and their trades might differ, but the people of Silvertown were always united.

      These were island people, people of the water – two of the main businesses on Constance Street in 1914 were even run by families called Marsh and Reed – bound together by their half-natural, half-artificial shoreline as much as their shared histories and experiences.

      War was coming. Just as Silvertown and Constance Street had begun to find themselves, to assert an identity, a chain of events was underway that would challenge everything.

      Oh, and the Greenwoods were on their way.

Chapter Eleven

      Nell Painter had always had a good, sensible head on her shoulders, even as a child. ‘Bright as a button, this one,’ her father would say as he sat her on his knee and rubbed the tip of her nose with his forefinger. ‘Reckon she’ll go far.’

      Nell was his favourite; that was clear, and had been since the day she was born at home in Stratford, then a burgeoning railway town on the eastern outskirts of London around four miles north of Silvertown, in the freezing January of 1878. Billy Painter could rough and tumble a bit with his baby sons Christopher and William, but he doted on Nell. As soon as he came through the door at the end of the day he’d seek her out, lifting her from whatever she was doing and carrying her to the chair, the plaster dust getting up her nose and making her sneeze.

      Her mother Harriet would scold him for not changing his clothes as soon as he came in, or at least not brushing himself down before he came through the door, but nothing would come between Billy Painter and his Nell.

      ‘Been thinking of you all day, gel,’ he’d say, brushing the curls away from her forehead. ‘Thinking, “I’ll make these walls as smooth as my Nellie’s cheek,” I was.’

      In his eyes she could do no wrong.

      ‘Sometimes, Billy Painter, I think you love that girl more than you love me,’ Harriet would complain.

      ‘Sometimes, Aitch, I think I do,’ he’d smile.

      Nell’s childhood was hard but happy, typical of the times. The relentless, steamroller progress of the industrial revolution showed no sign of abating and, with thousands being drawn to the cities in search of work, houses being built across the east end of London in unprecedented numbers, Billy was never short of plastering work. ‘Stratford’s the place to be,’ he’d say. ‘There’ll always be work around here. It’s the railway, see? The station brings people here, the depot gives them work. We’ll be all right here, Aitch.’ Billy was a good plasterer, reliable, skilled and well thought of, and sometimes had to turn work away as he was so busy.

      Harriet wouldn’t disagree, being a Stratford girl herself. She was a couple of years older than Billy and they’d married three years before Nell was born, but after Christopher had arrived, something that hadn’t endeared her to her family at the time. She took in a bit of laundry for some extra money now and again, initially for something to do, but the children took up so much time and with Billy’s job paying so well she concentrated mainly on bringing up the family.

      Nell enjoyed school and the teachers seemed to like her, inasmuch as her answers would receive a prim nod rather than the outright derision meted out to most of her classmates. Wanstead Flats were close by, where she and her friends could go and explore, but she enjoyed helping her mother at home. The permanent cloud of plaster dust in which Billy moved meant the Painter dwelling took more cleaning than most, and Saturday being laundry day meant Nell was usually to be found kneeling over a wooden barrel in the yard, scrubbing, dunking and scraping the dirt from the family’s clothes and linen, her hands pink and raw, her face a picture of concentration, singing the songs her mother had taught her quietly to herself as she did so.

      Even as she grew up she always looked forward to her father coming home. He made her laugh, he was funny, his friends often said he’d have been great in the halls but he always countered that the only way he’d ever work in a music hall was if they needed some plastering done. Nobody made Nell laugh like he did; sometimes he only needed to give her a look and she’d be gone, doubled up with laughter.

      Harriet had a beautiful singing voice – ‘my Whitechapel nightingale’, Billy sometimes called her – and her father would tell Nell she’d inherited her mother’s vocal talents and would one day make all their fortunes for them. The music halls were reaching their peak in the 1880s and the east end of London was the beating heart of this entertainment revolution. Billy would take Nell to the halls sometimes, which she found absolutely magical. The heat, the smells, the laughter: her senses were overloaded. But the singers, their smiling faces lit from below by the lime footlights, left her open-mouthed in wonder. She was entranced by Marie Lloyd – when she sang ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ Nell would well up with emotion at the simple beauty of it – and especially captivated by the male impersonator Vesta Tilley. All the way home she’d memorise the songs as far as she could, and then sing them by the fireside at her proud father’s encouragement.

      The Painters’ world fell to pieces the day Billy died. Nell came home from school singing ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ to СКАЧАТЬ