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

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Chapter One

      A little before seven o’clock on the evening of 19 January 1917, Nellie Greenwood was just about to close up the laundry when all the windows blew in.

      Just before it happened the lamps had flickered for a couple of seconds, causing her to look up with the heavy iron poised just above the sheet she was pressing. There was a brilliant flash, a second for the breath to catch in her throat, then a whump, a deafening roar, a blizzard of shards and a screeching ring in her ears. She clamped her eyes closed and, as the ringing diminished, other sounds began to emerge from the white noise: a metal lid spinning to a halt on the floor nearby, the Christmas tinkle of the last slivers of falling glass, the bang of a window frame flapping open, all as if it were a very long way away.

      Then silence, and the chill seeping into her cheek that told her she was lying on the stone floor.

      Tendrils of cold began to seep through the broken windows and open door and settle around her. Silvertown was never silent, not ever, which despite the screaming noise inside her own head made the sudden absence of the clanking of dock cranes and the distant shrieking of the sawmill even more curious. As Nellie slowly began to regain her senses she realised there was something else nagging at her; something about the silence inside 15 Constance Street was wrong.

      A week earlier her husband Harry had wheeled her around this very floor, dancing to a hummed tune of his own devising to mark her thirty-ninth birthday. He’d managed to coax her out to Cundy’s, the pub at the end of the street, for a couple of hours in the evening, leaving their eldest child Winifred in charge of her five younger sisters, and when Nell insisted on checking whether she’d left the float in the till when they’d returned from the pub, he’d pushed his cap back on his head, grabbed her waist with one hand and her hand with the other and whisked her in circles.

      ‘Forty next year, doll,’ he said between hums, his breath sharp with the tang of alcohol. ‘Who’d have thought we’d live so long, eh? And you not looking a day older than the first time I clapped eyes on you.’

      She told him to get away with himself. In the mirror that morning she’d noticed more grey streaks in her brown hair as well as the lines spreading from the corners of her eyes and heading due south from the corners of her mouth to her jaw line. She’d run her fingertip down them, her hands permanently pink and shiny from years of washing and scrubbing, from domestic laundry as a girl to running her own laundry today.

      Thirty-nine, she’d thought, and I’m looking and feeling every day of it. And me with a four-month-old baby, too.

      A four-month-old baby.

      Nell scrambled to her feet, kicking away the drying frame that had fallen across her legs, and stood bolt upright, blinking, glass falling from her pinafore and her green floral dress. She ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. The door to the back bedroom had slammed shut: Nellie shouldered it open and half stumbled, half fell into the room. There was broken glass everywhere, the washstand had blown over, the basin was smashed, the little framed pictures were off the walls, and in the corner was the crib, tipped onto its side and sprinkled with sharp slivers that twinkled in the twilight like birthday icing. Next to the upturned crib, face down and sprawled motionless on the floor among the daggers of glass, four-month-old Rose.

      Fighting back a sudden surge of cold nausea, Nellie took two long paces forward, each seeming as if there were suddenly miles between her and her child. She reached down with her raw, laundress’s hands and carefully picked the baby off the ground. She was limp. She turned the child around and held her face to face. Rose stirred, stretched her arms, fanned her fingers, yawned and half opened an eye.

      Nellie СКАЧАТЬ