Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath

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       CHAPTER 5

      In 1917, the year of the Silvertown explosion, Jane leaves Bright Street School for good. Through a cousin of Dora’s she hears there are vacancies for seamstresses at Moses’ outfitters in Stepney, just east of the Mile End Waste, and a few days later Jane and Dora find themselves in front of an old brick house propped up with a makeshift scaffold made from telegraph poles and a peeling sign reading M. Moses, Quality Tailoring. Pushing through the entrance, they clamber up broken stairs into a shabby hallway and knock tentatively at a damp brown door marked Office. The supervisor, a grey-faced man in his fifties with a voice like an old hinge, confirms that their information is correct and that yes, indeed, Mr Moses is thinking of taking on a couple of youngsters. Moses prefers boys, whom he can apprentice, but there seems little point in taking on anyone who might be drafted in a year or two’s time should the war go on that long. So, girls it is, says the supervisor, if girls it has to be. They can come back and speak to the proprietor himself on Friday afternoon when Mr Moses is always in the office sorting out the week’s wages.

      ’Ere, Dor, says Jane, on the walk back to Poplar. D’you reckon Mr Moses is a Jew-Boy?

      Not much! says Dora. Clot! What else’d he be? They make their way down to Commercial Road, past the alleys of Stepney. Me dad says all the Jew-Boys will end up in the poorhouse in the finish.

      Not us, though.

      Ah no, Janey, pet. Well we ain’t common, see?

      We’re respectable, Dor.

      We is that, Janey. We is that an’ all.

      Respectability takes up a great deal of Jane Fulcher’s time. How to be it, how to show it, how to live it and how to keep on living it. The fact that her grandfather had once owned a carriage necessitates the upkeep of certain standards of respectability. Respectability is, after all, a thin path around the Abyss. The Respectable are able to hold their heads up high at the grocer’s and the butcher’s, and get credit, too. The Respectable do not find themselves turfed out on the street when they cannot pay the week’s rent. The Respectable don’t wake to the early morning knocks of the tallyman and the loanshark and the bookie’s boy.

      Dor, says Jane, when we start working, will we be rich?

      Sure as eggs is eggs.

      How rich?

      So rich that we’ll eat headcheese and corny beef and sweets.

      They are walking along the towpath at Limehouse Cut, beside the gypsy boats with their brilliantly painted cabins.

      When I’m rich I’m gonna walk through the door of Mrs Folkman’s and say, So Mrs F, what have you got in today that is particularly good? And Mrs F will say, Well, Miss Fulcher, it’s funny you ask because only this morning I made up a batch of violet crèmes and there’s some splendid fudge an’ all. And I’ll say, Very good, Mrs F, top hole, make me up a half pound of both. I shall be paying, as usual, in cash.

      Before the war Mark Moses turned out high class coats and bespoke suiting for the shops in the West End. His was one of the thousands of sweatshops littering the East End, but, unlike those which functioned solely as middlemen for the distribution of fabric cut-outs to women working from home, Moses employed a handful of men and women to work full-time in his premises and actually paid them a decent wage. It was a successful business, not that you would have known it from the premises, which were two filthy rooms above a grocer’s shop in a terrace of black-bricked workshops and tiny factories. In the first of these rooms a dozen women sat in rows before treadled Singers and sewed piece-rate, the least experienced seaming linings and sewing gold galleon between the layers of coat fabric, and the most skilled working on buttons and hand-finishing cuffs and collars. In the second room pressers and basters hemmed and pressed the garments as they emerged from the machines, then hung them in steam to set the seams, and in a small antechamber between the two rooms a cutter laboured on the band-saw machine, cutting out pieces from stacks of cloth.

      The worst of the sweaters treated their workers as little more than slaves, obliging them to pick up their cut-outs twice a day and paying them nothing for their trouble or their tram-fare. They demanded impossible deadlines and fined their workers for lateness, so that by the end of a week women who were working fifteen-hour days at their machines and travelling two or three hours to the sweatshops to pick up their pieces would find themselves only three or four shillings in pocket. From this they were expected to feed their families, buy their buttons and pay for their threads. The worst of the sweaters worked in cahoots with sewing machine salesmen. The salesmen would provide the sweaters’ outworkers with machines on hire purchase, then, without warning, they would double the hire purchase rate and the sweater a cut. The buyer would eventually be unable to meet her payments, the salesman would then take it back, leaving the victim of his greed with no means of supporting herself or her children. Charles Dickens estimated that in his day between twenty-five and fifty per cent of the women working in sweatshops were resorting to prostitution in order to survive. Even so, there were many who favoured sewing over laundry work, which left you with leg ulcers and bronchitis, or packing flour in the mills where your lungs would bleed from the dust, or getting raw-skinned and stinking from the glue factory or half-crazed and fossy-jawed from the matchmaker’s.

      By the time my grandmother became a seamstress, sweating had improved a little. At least it was an established practice with established rules. None of the rules favoured the women who laboured at the machines, but there were rules, at least, and Moses, Quality Tailoring generally kept to them.

      The following Friday afternoon, Jane and Dora return to the Mile End workshops.

      A bulbous woman in a matt brown wig ushers them up the broken stairs with their covering of torn lino, and into the main workroom. Then she sets them down in front of a sewing machine and takes ten minutes explaining how to lift and drop the foot, how to feed in the fabric, thread the needle, control the speed of the sewing line with the treadle, and finally how to reinforce seams and remove the pins and basting. Then she hands each of the girls two small scraps of fabric and says she’ll be back in ten minutes to inspect their work. For what seems like the longest while, the girls sit speechless before the pitiless contours of the machine.

      Blow me if I know where to start, says Dora, poking cautiously at the needle. I ain’t been this scared of nothing since me mum cut a loaf and there was a rat baked inside. But at least the rat was dead. She brings her foot hard down on the treadle and the needle begins a mad jerking. Janey, she says, we ain’t never gonna be rich unless we get them seams done.

      I think you ’ave to do it slower, Dor. With the greatest caution, Jane eases her foot on to the treadle, and the needle floats upwards. Like this.

      Five minutes later Jane has put an elegant, forceful seam across the fabric.

      How d’you get it straight, then? asks Dora, struggling with a fishing net of knotted threads. Finish this off before Mrs Wig comes back, will yer?

      Right-o, СКАЧАТЬ