Custard Tarts and Broken Hearts (3 page)

‘I won’t be long, Simmons.’

She peered at the door numbers as she walked down the dimly lit street, and hesitated before eventually stopping at the last house in the little terrace. She knocked, a weak knock; certainly it seemed less loud than the pounding of her own heart. The door was opened by a young man with dark wavy hair. He didn’t smile, just swung the door wide open and stepped to one side.

‘Hello, Sam,’ Eliza said.

Nellie’s lungs burned and she was gulping in painful breaths by the time she arrived at the front door of their terraced house in Vauban Street. A gas lamp hissed and flickered halfway down the street and a few of the houses still had lights in the downstairs windows, but her own home was in darkness, with the shutters closed. She banged on the front door and when no one answered, stooped to call, in a half whisper, through the letterbox.

‘Alice, it’s Nellie, let me in!’

She heard footsteps on the stairs and, for a moment, was relieved that her sister had heard her. Then she heard her father’s voice booming.

‘Get back to bed, girl. I told her ten!’

Her sister’s muffled, pleading voice floated down to her and Nellie put her ear to the letterbox.

‘Please, Dad, she can’t stay out all night.’

She heard no reply, just her father’s footsteps, thumping down the stairs.

Nellie’s face was wet with sweat from her run in the sticky warm night, but now she shivered on the doorstep. She wasn’t sure which terrified her more, a night out here on the streets or a confrontation with her father. The front door was flung open and his large figure filled the passageway. He was dressed only in long johns and a hastily donned pair of trousers, baggy at the waist and held up by a pair of braces. He looked faintly ridiculous, but she wasn’t going to laugh, not now.

‘I’m sorry, Dad, I lost track of—’

‘What’s it to be?’ Her father held up the thick leather belt that he usually wore as well as his braces.

‘This, or a night on the streets?’

His voice was quiet and controlled, but his face was even redder than usual and thin spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth. She knew there was nothing George Clark hated more than to be crossed, especially by his children. Nellie avoided looking directly at him.

‘I’ll come in then.’ She knew what was coming.

He took her by the elbow and marched her into the little kitchen. She shot a glance up the stairs, to see her pale-faced sister hovering at the top. Alice shook her head, in a resigned way, that told Nellie she had tried on her sister’s behalf and failed. Nellie managed a weak smile, before being pulled into the kitchen. There her father grabbed her hand and administered his usual six smart slaps of the belt.

‘You dare defy me again and you’ll get more than that, next time!’

His large red nose glowed with exertion and what Nellie guessed was the effect of a drop too much of his favourite tipple. She wanted to grab the belt and strike him back. Images of red welts across his cheek flashed into her mind. But it was useless, then she really would be on the streets. One thing she wouldn’t give him was a tear. The bloody big bully could wait till kingdom come for that, she thought, in silent rebellion.

‘Get up to bed and don’t think you’re going out again of a night. And you dare lie to me again! I know it was a barefaced lie, about that Bosher boy being there tonight. You listen to me, girl, him and his Bolshy friends are trouble. Always stirring up people to be discontented with what they’ve got. Prancing about on soapboxes, telling me I’m hard done by. I can look after me own, and I don’t need some jumped-up docker’s son telling me different. I don’t want you having nothing more to do with them union lot. D’yer hear?’

Now he was shouting. Of course she heard, the whole bloody street could hear. She nodded, longing to get away, and then he let her go. She followed him upstairs and crept into the front bedroom, where, as expected, three heads shot up. The two boys, Freddie and Bobby, sat up in their bed, looking at her expectantly, and Alice jumped out of the bed she shared with Nellie, to put her arm round her.

‘Did the old git hurt you, Nell?’ she whispered.

‘Nah,’ Nellie lied, ‘he’s getting old and soft.’ But her palm stung as if a hot poker had been laid across it.

‘Gawd, you’re shaking, though.’

‘It’s temper, Al. I’m only shaking ’cause I can’t have a go back at the old sod.’

‘Come on, love, let me help you get changed,’ said Alice, starting to unbutton the back of her blouse.

But Nellie noticed that the two wide-eyed boys were still staring at her. Bobby, especially, looked close to tears. She knew his soft heart would not be able to manage seeing her vulnerable or in pain.

‘Go on, boys, back to kip,’ she said encouragingly. ‘I’m a tough old boot!’ She reached down to tickle Bobby and give Freddie a hug, before pulling the little curtain that separated their half of the room from the boys’ beds.

‘It’s so unfair, Al,’ she went on in a whisper. ‘He treats me like I’m still a child, but if it weren’t for me he’d have no one to cook and clean for him, or to look after the boys.’

She was seething as Alice tried to calm her.

‘Don’t leave us, Nell, will you? He’s harder on you than the rest of us and I know it’s not fair, but we’d be lost without you.’

When Nellie saw her sister’s lip trembling, she forgot her own injuries. It was easy to forget Alice was little more than a child herself.

‘Shhh, love, ’course I’m not leaving you, it’s just I think he could let me have a bit of a life.’

They didn’t dare light the lamp, so in the darkness, Alice helped Nellie out of her blouse and skirt. And when they were in bed, the sisters put their arms round each other, till they had both stopped shaking.

3

A Day Out

Fine pale powder hung in clouds above the women, drifting down slowly to cover window sills and walls with a gritty veneer. A blazing August sun glared through the high windows, striping the mote-filled air with light, turning the powder into a fine gold dust. It billowed up in vanilla-scented blooms each time a woman reached to fill a new packet at the delivery chutes, which ran in straight lines down the length of the factory floor. The women stood at a long bench, where one pulled a lever to release custard powder into an empty packet, then passed it on to her neighbour who deftly pasted it closed, while the third in the team stacked filled packets on to a trolley cart. Above the women, a cat’s cradle of steam-driven belts chugged and clattered, filling the vast hoppers that fed the delivery chutes. Unending streams of cloying powder chuted down, sending up yet more clouds of choking yellow smoke. Though the women wore rough cotton smocks, all were covered in a fine, sticky coating of custard powder.

Nellie Clark licked her lips, sweet, always sweet. Sometimes she longed for a trickle of sweat to reach her lips, just for the blessed difference of salt. On a day like today, she was likely to get her wish. It was sweltering in the factory and Nellie was suffering, in her voluminous cotton smock. The thought of putting on her best wool jacket made her feel faint. But they had decided to wear their best, and as she only had one good jacket, the woollen one it had to be. At least no one would be able to say that Bermondsey girls didn’t look smart. She looked at the clock. Not long now. She licked her lips again and tasted salt. Sweat beaded her upper lip and her face was covered with a sheen of moisture. She brushed her damp brow with the back of her hand, tucking away a strand of chestnut hair, and glanced over at Lily. Lily nodded towards the clock and mouthed, ‘Ten minutes.’

‘I’m not sure I can last ten more seconds in this oven!’ she whispered back.

And when it came to it, could she go through with it?
She liked to think she was strong, but even at sixteen years old and a woman earning her own keep, it irked her that her father could still make her quail like a child. The rows over her late arrival home, on the night of the meeting, had lasted for weeks. He would surely throw her out for this.

Nellie raised her blue eyes at the thought and blew out an overheated breath, which lifted another dank lock of hair from her forehead. Her stomach was churning, though whether from fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell. Other women around her were getting fidgety. Ethel Brown, a rotund woman in her forties, was turning an ever deeper shade of lobster. Nellie had caught a glimpse of a feather boa under her bench. Maggie Tyrell was rooting around in a bag at her feet and Nellie spotted a black straw hat, with green feathers.

Suddenly she noticed a change in the sounds filtering through the high windows. Distant shouts at first, then snatches of song drifted in. Women’s voices sang out, high and excited:
Are we downhearted no, no, NO!
The chanting was coming closer and closer. Then the sound of feet, lots of them, hundreds of feet, boots ringing on the cobbles. The chatter of the women around her ceased, as they registered the noise of the approaching crowd. Just as the clock struck eleven, Nellie found herself standing up. Suddenly she was flooded with the knowledge that she
could
do it! She wasn’t on her own. But still her legs felt like jelly and a queasiness lurched in the pit of her stomach.

More than a hundred women rose, as one, from their benches and ran to the windows, craning their heads, looking down on to the street below to see the first of the women marchers. Nellie saw rows and rows of women, filling the street as far back as she could see, some linking arms and singing, others carrying banners. One read:
WE’RE NOT WHITE SLAVES, WE’RE PINK’S!

The women around her called out excitedly. ‘There’s Pink’s Jam, can you see Crosse & Blackwell’s? Where’s Peek Frean’s? I can see Lipton’s. Have they all come? Have Hartley’s come?’

Albert, their astonished foreman, was running up and down behind the line of women at the windows. ‘Get back to your benches, what d’yer think yer doing!’

They pretended not to hear him and Nellie followed the others as they started to remove their smocks and caps.

‘This is it, Nell.’ Lily squeezed her hand. ‘You coming?’

Nellie paused for a heartbeat, then bent down deliberately and reached into a bag hidden behind a trolley. She pulled out her best wool jacket.

‘’Course I’m coming, I’m not missing this!’

Other women were putting on their fancy hats and feather boas, as they marched in orderly single file past the open-mouthed foreman. They joined a stream of women workers from higher floors. Jostling down the stone staircase, came the girls from baking powder and blancmange, distinguishable only by the white or pink powder coating them. When they reached the factory yard, Nellie glanced over at the jelly building. The foremen in charge of the great vats of fruit jellies had left the gelatine bubbling, coming out to stare incredulously as the jelly packers joined the other women marching out of the factory gates. They looked as if they were dressed for a day out, but they weren’t – they were on strike!

Once Nellie was down among the crowd, she grabbed Lily, feeling overwhelmed by the mass of humanity surrounding her. She had never been in such a vast crowd, not even during the new King George’s coronation celebrations, earlier that summer. There must be thousands of women there today, choking the width of Spa Road, holding up carts and trams, drawing shouts from drivers and hoots from the odd motor car desperate to get through the crush. Women poured from side streets, like the tributaries of an unstoppable river. They seemed to Nellie to move in an orchestrated way and yet no one was in charge; they were merely surging forward in a common purpose. Astonished onlookers lined the pavement, unable to negotiate their way through the throng of banner-carrying women. Many of the men and boys stopped, mid-stride, to gawp openly; others, shoving their hands into their pockets, pointedly ignored the women and attempted to barge through them. Some called out as they passed, ‘Get back ’ome, and cook yer husbands’ dinners!’ and other less decorous suggestions. But Nellie felt safe enough, amongst the group of burly dockers who had turned out to march with them. Some of these shouted back at the hecklers.

‘Don’t I know yer missus, mate? She’s here somewhere!’

Nellie pulled Lily in closer, linking arms. ‘Look, there’s Ted!’ She pointed towards the front of the crowd, where Lily’s brother and his fellow dockers marched.

Nellie thought Ted looked heroic, with his red-gold hair shining in the bright sunshine, and his strong arms holding one end of the dockers’ union banner. At the head of the march she could see the colourful banner of the National Federation of Women Workers, bravely proclaiming that they would ‘fight to struggle to right the wrong’. Nellie guided Lily nearer to the banner, which was held aloft by two athletic middle-class young women. Beneath it, marching four abreast with the other strike leaders, was Eliza James, dressed in a long, flowing grey silk coat and a broad straw hat. With her white scarf flying out behind her, she was smiling and urging the women on, calling out to the male onlookers, ‘Come and join the struggle, these are your daughters, and your wives!’

She looked magnificent, as bold and brave as Britannia on the face of a penny, and whatever misgivings she might once have had, Nellie felt she would follow Madam Mecklenburgh to the ends of the earth.

Nellie could hardly believe it had only been a few short weeks since she’d first met the woman. Then she hadn’t even heard of the NFWW, and she certainly hadn’t wanted to attend a meeting, listening to stuffy speeches. At the time, she had gone simply because Ted Bosher asked her to. Since then, she’d avoided her father as much as possible, stayed home in the evenings and attended every one of the trade union’s lunchtime meetings at the Fort Road Labour Institute. The more she’d heard the less frightened she’d become, anger and boldness replacing timidity. She and the other women were buoyed up by the dockers’ support. Even when the government caved in and gave the dockers their eightpence an hour, they’d pledged to stay out on strike until the women got their eleven shillings a week. Dockers in Hull and Liverpool were striking as well as those in London. The railwaymen had joined them, and her father was livid when even his fellow horse drivers in the carmen’s union had voted to support the strike.