Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath

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      The two girls clamber back down the broken stairs with the promise of a job picking pins and clearing away the threads for six shillings a week and all the sugared tea they can drink, start on Monday. At fourteen they can already see their adult lives stretching out before them: work, marriage, children, a home to look after, tea cosies to sew, and all Mrs Folkman’s sweets they can manage. Marching across the Mile End Waste they feel as though they have grown a foot in an afternoon. They wander back down through the Waste Market, past stalls laden with ripe beef ribs and belly lamb, past trestles laid out with cabbages and haberdashery.

      Stopping beside the beigel bakery, Dora whispers, Me dad says them Jew-boys is a bunch of cowards the way some of them have gone on the conscientious to get out of fighting. Me dad says they don’t mind killing things when there’s some killing to be done. To see them out on a weekday evening at the back of their little shops cutting creatures’ throats and letting the blood run out and me’ Dad says that ain’t right. And most of them ain’t half canny in the business way ’cos me dad says you can always strike a deal with a Jew-boy. She meanders on, but by now Jane isn’t listening. She is thinking about six shillings a week and what you can buy for it if you get the bargaining right.