Lizzie of Langley Street (5 page)

Dickie scratched his chin, his dirty nails raking against the grey stubble. ‘Talking of next week, are you going up to the city?’

Tom shook his head. ‘That ain’t likely now.’

Lizzie had been eagerly awaiting their trip to the Cenotaph even if she did have to push the chair all the way. ‘Why can’t we go, Pa? We could still sell them commemorations and buy
some more stock besides.’

‘You know the score as well as I do,’ Tom answered her gruffly. ‘You heard yer mother this morning. The rent’s got to be paid. What money is left won’t buy us
enough to make a trip to the city worthwhile. And don’t make those cow’s eyes at me, gel, ’cos I can’t bloody well work miracles, now, can I?’

Lizzie turned away. She loved going up West. It would be the only chance she had to see the city before Christmas. But the tone of her father’s voice told her that his decision was
final.

She glanced down the street. Danny would be one of the last traders to leave, the contents of his barrow a welcome warmth for the remaining few empty stomachs.

‘I’m off now,’ Dickie said, hoisting his sack over his shoulder. ‘Me pins are killing me. And the fog’s comin’ down quick off the river.’

‘Yeah, it’s gonna be a pea-souper.’ Lizzie saw her father shiver under his blanket. It was time to go home. She wouldn’t see Danny again for a whole week. And when she
did, she’d have to have a good excuse up her sleeve for not going out with him.

‘Take me home,’ Tom said.

Lizzie waved to Dickie, then started the long push home.

On the Sunday before Armistice Day 1920 the news was broadcast to the nation that King George V would unveil the new Cenotaph in Whitehall. As Lizzie and her family gathered
round the table in the kitchen, eating boiled potatoes and mutton stew, the talk was of the city in mourning.

Lizzie had helped Kate peel the potatoes and prepare the table. There were more vegetables than meat in the stew but Lizzie knew it would fill a gap in each of the seven hungry stomachs. Her
father was silent and withdrawn, but Kate was smiling. Lizzie had watched her tuck the rent money safely in the Ovaltine tin. ‘The old Cenotaph was an eyesore anyway,’ Kate remarked as
she surveyed her family. ‘No one liked it.’

‘What’s an eyesore?’ This from ten-year-old Flo.

‘A blooming great monstrosity, that’s what.’ Kate frowned at her youngest daughter. ‘In other words, a fake. It was erected in Whitehall, temporary like, for the peace
celebrations in 1919. But a bloke called Sir Edward Lutyens ’as designed the new one. And there ain’t a word on it about religion, mind.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Flo.

‘Because the blokes commemorated on it were of all creeds and none.’

‘What’s—’ began Flo again, only to be swiftly silenced by Tom, who scowled at her across the table.

Vinnie and Babs looked bored. Bert was almost asleep, his hands clasped over his stomach.

‘Can I ’ave Babs’ carrots?’ asked Flo, willing the food off her sister’s plate.

‘You’ve already had three helpings,’ Kate scolded.

Flo pushed her fringe from her eyes. ‘I could eat an ’orse, I could.’

‘She can have them,’ Babs shrugged. ‘I’m sick of veg.’

‘Well, I certainly ain’t gonnna have those carrots wasted,’ sighed Kate, passing the leftovers to Flo. ‘There’s souls out there who’d give their right arm for
food like this.’

Flo picked up her spoon. ‘Slowly, gel,’ Kate reproved her. ‘Anyone’d think you were starving. Just you watch yer digestion.’

‘What’s di . . . dig—?’

‘Innards,’ clarified Kate as Vinnie and Bert yawned loudly, twiddling their braces. They were eager to leave the table and have forty winks. Lizzie was relieved that neither of the
boys had returned to the Quarry since Friday. Despite his injuries, Vinnie had joined the family for Sunday dinner. His face was still yellow and blue but the swelling had gone down.

‘As I was saying about the Cenotaph . . .’ Kate picked up the thread of her conversation but was stopped by Babs.

‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about.’ Babs spoke truculently, with a swift glance from under her eyelashes at Lizzie. ‘The war’s over and done with. Besides,
who’d want to go up West on a day when all the shops are shut, anyway?’

Lizzie knew the remark was aimed at her. Leaving school that summer had given Babs a precocious air and she thought she knew it all. She had been taken under the wing of the women who came from
the affluent parts of the city, and she helped give out hot soup and tea at Hailing House, the old family home now used for the destitute. Lizzie knew Babs had envied her the visit to the city even
though Babs wouldn’t be seen dead pushing a Bath chair.

Kate intervened. ‘I don’t want to hear no talk like that, young lady. The war’s over, but like yer father tells you, at a cost to nearly every family on this island. Thank Gawd
yer brothers were too young to enlist or they might not be here today, just like poor Lil’s two sons, who didn’t even survive the first year.’

Lil Sharpe and her husband Doug lived next door at number eighty-four. Kate had helped Lil over the terrible period following the two boys’ deaths in 1915. Kate and Lil were close friends
as well as neighbours, and it was Ethel, their daughter, whose clothes and boots were handed down to Lizzie. Ethel was now married and had moved to Blackheath. She had two small children of her
own.

‘Miss Hailing says that all the other kings in Europe is gone,’ Babs continued airily, ‘and only our one’s left. She says that God was on our side. That’s why we
won.’

Tom began to shake his head, his fingers tightening into fists on the arms of the Bath chair. ‘God was on no man’s side, gel. The whole world lost.’

‘That ain’t what Miss Hailing says. She says—’

‘Listen here, young lady . . .’ Tom leaned forward, his face flushed with anger. ‘You tell this to your Miss Hailing from me. We’ve got strikes, we’ve got
unemployment, we’ve got civil war with the Irish and the king don’t give a toss. All he gives us is a load of blarney and expects us to swallow it. But we don’t want talk, we want
jobs, food on the table, our kids’ bellies full. We want what they promised us when we laid down our lives for their future. But what we want we ain’t never going to get. They told us
lies in the trenches and they’re still telling us them. What in God’s name have we got to live for?’

Babs had long since stopped listening and was staring disinterestedly into space. Tom looked hard at his family, his pale eyes going over them one by one. No one answered. Vinnie got up, belched
loudly and left the room.

Tom turned to Lizzie, his thin lips quivering. ‘Fetch me cap, Lizzie, and me coat and push me out into the yard.’

‘Oh, Tom, you shouldn’t upset yerself,’ Kate wailed, her hand going up to her mouth. ‘You haven’t eaten yer pudding. It’s yer favourite, Spotted
Dick.’

‘I don’t want it,’ Tom growled.

Lizzie rose from the table and did as her father told her. If she didn’t there would be another full scale row. ‘You carry on with dinner,’ she said to her mother as she helped
her father on with his clothes. ‘I’ll do the washing-up.’

Kate’s head was averted. Lizzie knew she was wiping away a tear. Tom’s aggression was getting worse and Babs and Vinnie did nothing to ease it.

Lizzie wheeled the Bath chair from the kitchen and into the yard. Here, in the freezing November afternoon, she turned her father towards the broken fence that divided the two backyards. Beyond
the fence Doug Sharpe attempted to thrust a spade into the earth.

‘There’s Mr Sharpe, Pa. Why don’t you have a chat?’ Doug and Tom were old friends. Lil and Doug had lived next to the Allens for twenty years. If anyone was able to
understand her father, Doug was. But her father shook his head and said quietly, ‘Leave me alone, Lizzie.’

‘But Pa—’

‘Go in, girl. Eat yer dinner.’

Lizzie stood for a moment. Sadness overwhelmed her at the sight of his slumped shoulders. She had seen desperation in his eyes and heard a new bitterness in his voice. Vinnie and Babs could be
relied upon to upset the apple-cart, but what satisfaction they derived from it, Lizzie was at a loss to know.

I
t was Monday and wash day in Langley Street.

‘I tell you, Lil, one morning I ain’t going to see the light of day,’ Kate Allen complained to her neighbour as they stood gossiping over the garden fence. ‘I’ll be
laying there in me bed, me heart stopped dead, the kids screaming their heads off, and what’ll happen to the lot of ’em then, I ask you?’

‘Well, one thing’s for sure, if you’re dead you won’t know a bugger about it,’ Lil Sharpe responded dryly.

Laughing, the women continued to peg out their washing. Minutes later, two neat rows of clothes were blowing gently on each line. Steam rose in the frosty air, the smell of carbolic and Sunlight
mingling.

‘Your Tom ready for Wednesday?’ Lil called out as she draped a pair of long johns over the line.

‘He’s only going as far as Poplar now. He had a good day on Saturday, so he ain’t got that much left to sell.’

‘Probably a good thing,’ Lil remarked. ‘They’re bringing the coffin from Dover, arriving at Victoria, so I hear. The city’ll be chock-a-block.’ Lil took a
spare wooden peg from between her teeth and clamped it on the line. ‘Your Lizzie still pushing Tom, then?’

‘Better at pushing the chair than her brothers.’ Kate lowered her voice, returning to the fence. Lil joined her there. ‘Bert’s so big and ugly he frightens off the women.
Vinnie makes himself scarce at the mention of the chair.’

‘You think he’d be proud to push his father on Armistice Day,’ Lil commented, folding her thin arms across her chest. ‘There ain’t many blokes round ’ere lost
two legs to the Kaiser. One maybe. Or an arm. But not two legs. You can’t do much these days without yer old pins to walk on.’

Kate sighed. ‘Yeah . . . and don’t I know it.’

Lil raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘Least you ain’t up the spout again. ‘S’pose that’s a comfort for you, gel.’

Reluctantly, Kate agreed. ‘Nor likely to be, either, with what that shell did.’

‘Don’t make a man feel like a man, I ’spect.’

The subject of sex always dismayed Kate, for Tom was disabled in all respects and her only release was to pretend that she had gone off it too. Not that it was the sex that mattered so much,
rather the tenderness and affection that her husband had once lavished on her. She longed to be taken into his arms and hugged; she didn’t care that he was crippled. She loved him for what he
was, her man. In fact, his disability had made her love him all the more. But she knew he felt he was repulsive to her. He recoiled when she slid her arms around him at night, and often she wept
into the pillow, sleep evading her. But tears did no good. Her husband’s heart had hardened.

Kate glanced at her neighbour and changed the subject. ‘We had another ruckus Friday night. Gawd knows what I’m going to do about our Vinnie. Pissed to the eyeballs, he was, his face
as black as a bruised plum. I tell you, me heart is having real problems catching up with me breath these days.’

‘At least you got your Lizzie. She’s a good girl, your Lizzie is.’

Kate nodded. ‘Yeah. At least I got her, poor little cow.’

‘And your Flo’s coming on nicely. She’s bright as a button for ten.’

This brought a smile to Kate’s face. ‘Ain’t she just. Always askin’ questions, that girl. Gawd help her teachers if there are more like her at school.’

‘She’s a real card, too. You can have a good laugh with your Flo,’ Lil agreed with a chuckle. ‘And Babs, well, she knows her own mind, that one. And with all that red
hair, she turns heads all right. She’s gonna be a stunner when she gets older.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Kate nodded. ‘Up with all them posh ladies at the House.’ Kate was secretly proud of the fact that the ladies of Hailing House had asked Babs if
she’d like to help in the soup kitchens. It didn’t matter that it was charity work. Babs would get on if she behaved herself.

‘As for your Bert,’ Lil continued, but in softer tones this time, ‘he hasn’t got a bad bone in his body, and me and Doug love him for it.’

Kate was aware that Bert reminded Lil of her two sons. They were only young when they had been killed in action in France. They’d been fine, strapping lads. Greg was sixteen and Neil
seventeen. Though Greg had been a little older than Bert, they had been good mates. It had been five years since their deaths. Kate knew her friend had never really recovered.

‘And I’ve got a bit of rent for old Symons on Friday,’ Kate said cheerfully, avoiding the subject of the boys.

‘That’s a relief, ain’t it?’ Lil pulled her turban round her ears to keep out the cold. ‘Maybe Christmas will see us all right, after all.’

And maybe she’d be crowned queen of England, Kate thought as the racing beat in her heart started once more. She took a breath and nodded at her neighbour’s hopeful words. She
didn’t want to depress Lil, who had her own troubles. And to complain she’d had this funny feeling inside her for some months now would only cause her friend to worry. It was probably
just a bit of indigestion. She’d take a double dose of salts and that was sure to ease it.

‘What we need is a bloody good party,’ Lil said suddenly. ‘Like what we had at the end of the war.’

Kate sighed. Life was full of wars. When one ended another started. Tom had come home from the German war to the war of survival, not in the trenches, but in family life with all its pains and
very few pleasures.

‘Yeah, I s’pose so,’ she agreed distractedly.

‘Come on, gel, keep yer pecker up!’ Lil laughed. ‘It ain’t the end of the world yet.’

‘Course not.’ Kate galvanized herself into action, shaking out a wet sheet. ‘You’re right. We should all get together at Christmas and have a knees-up.’

Lil nodded enthusiastically. ‘’Ere, I’ll get Doug on ’is spoons, Lizzie can sing and we’ll get our Eth on the Joanna. Some of the keys is missing, but never mind,
no one will notice.’

‘That’ll be nice.’ A sharp pain went across Kate’s chest and she dropped the sheet back into the tub. Keeping her face averted from Lil, she breathed slowly, the way
she’d been trying to do lately. It sometimes helped to make the pain go away. Lil was trying to cheer her up, bless her. She was a cheery spark, for all that had happened. It made Kate feel
that she was lucky to have all her family alive. She’d miscarried the twins, but they had just been scraps, no life in their minute bodies and only a brief agony. Lil carried her dead sons in
her heart – bravely and without complaint.