Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath

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      The foreman says it’s more like pneumonia and advises Sarah to call a doctor, though he already knows a doctor will not be called.

      Never mind, Mrs F, he says, patting the soft wodge of Sarah’s arm. Don’t you worry ’bout nothing, there’ll be work in plenty waiting for Frenchie the moment he’s well enough to do it. We got a war on, after all, ain’t we?

      A week drifts by, then another, and Frenchie’s nightsweats begin to lose their putrid smell and dry up, and instead of the bloody sputum, great green gobbets of mucus appear whenever Frenchie coughs. From then on he is a little better every day but it is a long recuperation, marked by downturns and surging fevers.

      Ah, Frenchie, you’re a credit to us all, the foreman says when he next visits. Sure as eggs is eggs you’ll be up and at it in no time and there’ll be plenty of work ’cetra ’cetra.

      Seeing the foreman to the door, Sarah braces herself and says, Listen, mister, we’ve had to do a spot of belt-tightening. I don’t suppose … ?

      Ah yes, says the foreman, shaking his head. Belts tightening all over the East End. Can almost hear ’em creak. I’m sorry, Mrs F, I really am. But belts is a family’s business and none of mine.

      For a week they live on the tuppences Sarah has put in a jam jar for Christmas. A cousin sends round soup and the odd half-loaf, a neighbour takes in the washing and Tarbun the grocer and Harwood the greengrocer are good enough to ease the Fulcher’s credit. But once a poor family in the East End is taken with illness or unemployment there is no backstop that can prevent their fall, no neighbour or relative who can do more than slow its pace a little. The Fulchers are reduced to soup and bread scraped with lard, until the soup and the lard run out and then it’s just bread. Hearing of their distress, the vicar’s wife brings round porridge and, hovering over the bed where Frenchie is heaving, says, So I’ll be seeing you in church, then? And Sarah replies, Right enough, Missus, but after the vicar’s wife has left there is nothing she can do to persuade her husband.

      Sarah, old girl, I ain’t never been righteous and I ain’t gonna start pretending now. Mebbe I’d be moved to do a spot of praising if the vicar’s wife had turned up with pasties instead of porridge.

      For a month the children go hungry every day. Their insides rumble through their lessons. In the evenings Sarah mops their tears and feeds them stale bread made soft in sugared water, but the sight and sound and smell and memory of food plague their waking moments and their dreams. The whole family is set to work. John junior brings in six shillings a week loading wagons at the coal yard, Frances Maud and Rosie find jobs in a munitions factory. The younger children run errands, mind horses and stand beside the queues for the music hall in Mile End Road fetching ices and beigels for those that want them. All the same, they live in a twilight of hunger. At night they hang around the dustbins at the back of Harwoods watching the pauper children rummaging for remains.

      We’ll never be like that will we, Rosie? asks Jane.

      Never.

      Because we’re respectable, ain’t we?

      Because we are.

      Their mother, who knows nothing of their night-time excursions, says, We ain’t reduced just yet. Ee’ll be as right as rain in no time and the foreman says there’ll be more work for ’im than a man can do in a month of Sundays.

      Six weeks after his first attack, Frenchie Fulcher wakes up one morning without a temperature. He feels his lungs, coughs experimentally and rises from the bed. Then he shaves, puts on his jacket and goes down to Orchard House. Calling for the foreman from the gate he shares a cup of tea with the guard there. He waits ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two. After four hours the guard takes him to one side and says, The foreman ain’t coming, sonny boy, now why don’t you go home?

      For the next eight months Frenchie does whatever he can, shouldering sacks for coalmen, heaving barrels off the brewers’ drays, lugging carcasses at the abattoir, sorting cow bones for glue, but the work is lowly and piece-rate and Frenchie can’t go at it as he might have done before his illness. His lungs still feel rackety and sometimes it’s a terrible trouble just to catch a breath. At night they sit in the cold and dark, with no coals and no money for the gas lamp, their stomachs burning empty. In the space of a year their world fades to grey. Frenchie grows bitter. He misses his friends at Orchard House; he misses his small luxuries – his Daily Mirror and his smoke. Most of all he misses the life of a craftsman, a man with a skill to bring to the world. His heart boils and rages. He begins to spend more time in the company of a tuppeny pint at The Wellington Arms than with his family.

      It ain’t your father’s fault, says Sarah. Ee’s from carriage people, but blow me if the carriage ain’t rolled clean away.

      To keep her children warm when winter comes round again, Sarah smears their chests in goose grease and sews them into brown paper like jars of potted meat. The thought of losing another of her babies keeps her up nights and makes her hair go grey. They look so tired, now, and thin. At Christmas that year, 1916, the vicar’s wife brings round a jug of soup with a piece of pig belly in it but Frenchie sends it back saying, She ain’t buying us a place in heaven, we’ll get there on our own. And so Christmas dinner that year is a plate of larded boiled potatoes and cabbage mush.

      On New Year’s Day they wake to the hollow horns of the ships in the West India.

      What do you think they’ll be cargoing? asks Jane.

      Scrag of lamb and sugar pie, says Rosie.

      Walnuts and marzipan, says Frances Maud.

      Stuffed hearts and candied peel.

      Faggots and mashed ’tater.

      Bacon pudding with fruit junket.

      Watch out, says Rosie, I’m gonna be sick.

      The day turns cold and then gets colder. By night-time the ice has crept along the window panes and gathered in great ranges across the walls of the rooms. They go to bed struggling with their freezing breath. In the small hours, Rosie really is sick; by the morning she cannot eat or drink and her skin is as hot as coals.

      She’s watery, says Sarah, mopping her girl. But it isn’t enough. Rosie begins to leak like a piece of bad piping. By the afternoon she’s shaking so hard it’s a wonder she doesn’t shatter. Red spots have come up and she’s moaning from the terrible pain in her stomach.

      Woolwich Free Ferry’s the thing, volunteers Mrs Smiley downstairs. Engine room warm as toast, don’t cost you nothing and the captain lets the women with their sick ’uns ride all day.

      There’s an idea, says Sarah, but a kind of fatalism has set in and she does not take Rosie to ride the Woolwich Free Ferry. Most likely it would have made no difference anyway. After school that day, Sarah sends the children to a cousin, except Jane who will not leave Rosie.

      The following night Frenchie goes out to fetch a doctor.

      The doctor shakes his head.

      Watery, see, says Sarah.

      Typhoid is my guess. Doesn’t help that she’s so thin. Got malnutrition too most like.

      Her parents gaze at their girl, the beautiful Rosetta, green skinned and dull-eyed but still beautiful in her going. Little Rosie.

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