Hopping

While Harold recited his times tables and did his best to fend off Albie Bluston, Jack and Henry Baker were busy establishing a tidy business selling pilfered rum to the East End’s growing tribe of war-wounded, gassed and shell-shocked. Not everyone had the ready cash to buy their drink in pubs or the means by which to distil their own poteen, and it was to these men, men at the bottom of the pile, that Henry and Jack extended rum and credit. After all, did they not deserve a drink as much as, or even more than, the next man? Once they’d got drink on tick, the men very often wanted to borrow more money to indulge in cards or women or to gamble on the fights. Neither Jack nor Henry saw themselves as moneylenders or pawnbrokers, but they were happy enough to direct drunk men to a friendly pawnbroker for a portion of the ticket, or to a card sharp for a percentage of the bet, come to that. They usually went to freelance enforcers, though neither Jack nor Henry was above throwing a punch for a deserving cause, and by 1916, their rum and tick business was flourishing.

Harold wasn’t particularly keen to join it. He loved his father and his brother very much but he couldn’t help thinking there was something a little dishonourable in selling drink to desperate men. On the other hand, it was difficult to see what he would do. At school he had proved himself a diligent student, good at numbers in particular, but who would take on a boy with an affliction such as his when there were crippled war heroes tramping the streets half starved? Nonetheless, as 1916 turned into 1917, and the time neared for him to leave school, he knew that he would have to find something. No one could make a living selling second-hand programmes and singing songs to half-cut women.

A week or two before his fourteenth birthday, when he was expected to leave school, the headmaster, Mr Stuart, took Harold aside for what he called his ‘demob’.

You’ll not be following your brother Jack into the West India when you leave here, I take it?

No, sir.

You’re bright enough, but it won’t be easy to place that wooden leg, you see? So what do you propose to do?

It ain’t the leg what’s wood, sir, Harold said, feeling the need to explain himself, it’s only the caliper.

Mr Stuart nodded slightly.

Harold expressed his intention to find an apprenticeship until he was old enough to sign up – if the war was still going on.

Mr Stuart tried not to smile.

Well now, listen here, he said. That’s all well and good, but in the meantime, take this. He scribbled a few words of recommendation on to a piece of paper, named a handful of factories and suggested Harold go to see the foremen there.

So that was exactly what Harold did. At Keiler’s jam and pickle works he was asked to sit and wait for a Mr Taylor, who failed to appear. At Venesta’s a bulky, flustered man took one look at him and said they wouldn’t be taking on any crippled boys. Deciding he might fare better in a shop, Harold presented himself with his letter of recommendation to one establishment after another along the Commercial and East India Dock Roads, then down Poplar High Street, but no one had any positions open for crippled errand boys and he returned home empty-handed. For a while, he rather reluctantly helped out his father and brother, and his mother’s cousin gave him work delivering clean laundry, but when someone complained that the corners of their sheets had been dipped in mud on account of Harold’s lurching gait, his mother’s cousin said she couldn’t afford to have him ruin her business and he would have to go on his way. He continued selling programmes, and added to his portfolio by picking up horse manure and selling it to the tenants of the new allotments which had begun being dug all over the East End, and sweeping coal dust to sell to those who could not afford lump coal. In the afternoons, May would send him off to fetch the evening tea. So long as he didn’t expect them to employ him, the local shopkeepers were often sympathetic and would slip him an extra rasher or two or a couple of eggs, shaking their heads and saying:

Your poor mother.

It was on one of these expeditions, as he was making his way home with a slice of jelly brawn and some potatoes, that Harold spotted a cardboard sign propped up in the window of Spicer’s Grocers and Purveyors of Quality Goods on the Commercial Road. The sign read:

Honest boy req’d.

Tucking the brawn and potatoes down his trousers, which, being Jack’s hand-me-downs, were also very big on him, Harold pushed open the shop door and entered. The place was deeper and larger than it had appeared from its frontage. The walls were lined with dark green shelves on which sat tins of treacle, jam in ceramic jars and tea in penny packets. Beneath the counter were four large floor cabinets, two containing bandages, starch, soap, packages of Carter’s and Beecham’s pills, worm cakes, flypapers, hairnets and all manner of pharmaceuticals and haberdashery. On the counters above the cabinets slabs of butter and cheese were laid out, and behind these were rows of biscuit tins and jars containing honeycomb, toffee and liquorice. Hearing the bell, a plump man with thinning hair, who was arranging piles of kindling, turned to see who had entered and said:

Yes?

Harold felt the man’s gaze alight on his caliper.

It’s about the position, Harold said, trying to sound bold. The man took a breath and, introducing himself as Mr Spicer, flapped his hand, motioning Harold to approach. Harold did so, aware all the time that Mr Spicer was appraising his leg.

You always been a cripple?

Harold shook his head and gave his usual answer. He’d had an accident, he said. He preferred to remain vague about the details.

Rickets too?

Mr Spicer leaned back slightly and rubbed his chin.

Can you ride a bicycle? I wonder. For deliveries, I mean.

Oh yes, Harold said, though he’d never been on a bicycle and had in fact only ever seen one at close quarters when the air-raid policeman had left his lying in the street while giving chase to a boy who had popped him with his catapult.

Well, said Spicer, sucking his teeth and waving Harold closer, come round the back and we’ll see what your learning’s like.

Harold followed him through a hessian curtain at the back of the shop, then down a damp, dark corridor into a small, draughty room filled with a large oak table at which sat a gaunt woman with a lavender scarf tied around her neck. Beside her, on a stand, a sleek mynah bird swung in a small wire cage. For a moment, everyone looked at one another.

He’s come about the position, Mrs Spicer, Mr Spicer said to his wife.

Oh, he has, has he? Mrs Spicer said, though not unkindly.

Give him something to read, Mrs Spicer. Mrs Spicer rummaged for a moment then drew out a single broadsheet. It was an invitation to attend a meeting on votes for women in Limehouse, tea and biscuits served. Harold read without a stumble. As he finished, Mr Spicer coughed and raised his eyes to heaven.

Here, then, Mrs Spicer, he said. Give this boy one of them accounts books. Spicer waited until Harold had taken the leather-bound book. Well, open it then, said Mr Spicer, and add up all them numbers in the right-hand column and give me an answer quick!

Twenty-seven shillings and tenpence ha’penny. Mr Spicer took the book and began to scan the column, mouthing the numbers to himself. After a short while he passed the book to his wife and said:

Here, you check this.

While Mrs Spicer made her way down the column, Harold fixed his gaze on the mynah.

They’ll speak, you know, if you train ’em, said Mr Spicer. Which is just as well since they ain’t much to look at.

Yes, Harold said. He explained that the Baker family had a similar bird and that it, too, wasn’t much to look at.

Mrs Spicer confirmed Harold’s figure. For a moment Spicer stood fiddling with his moustache, thinking, then he said:

Got family what served, sonny?

Harold explained that his father had been invalided out and that his older brother had worked in the docks for most of the war. Spicer listened with apparent concentration, then tapped the bars of the cage and began to sing ‘Laddie Boy’:

Goodbye and luck be with you, Laddie Boy, Laddie Boy.

After a little while, the bird began to join in with the chorus and even managed a bit of one of the verses.

Ha ha ha, see? Spicer shook with laughter and wiped his eyes with a mucky sleeve. Mrs Spicer sighed and began very quietly drumming her fingers on the table.

Your father not badly injured, I hope? said Spicer, taking another tack. Employed?

Harold replied that his father worked in the docks. He didn’t know the nature of the injury because his father didn’t talk about it.

What do your bird say, sonny?

Peg leg, sir, Harold said.

Spicer pulled himself upright and coughed a little.

Peg leg? Not nothing else?

Spicer gazed at Harold wide-eyed for a moment, then, striding forward, clapped him on the back and said:

Come back tomorrow morning, eight sharp, and, so long as you can ride the bicycle, you can have the job.

When Harold got home and told his mother the news, May said:

So what’s the wages? and biffed him round the head when he said he didn’t know.

Fishlips! Always ask about the wages.

But when Harold turned up at Spicer’s early the following day, Mr Spicer met him at the door and with a grim look on his face said he was very sorry but he’d reconsidered his position and decided that, when there were war heroes without jobs, he couldn’t in all honesty offer the post to a boy. Even to a boy like Harold. Especially to a boy like Harold.

And so Harold went home, feeling puzzled about the world and the dilemmas it offered up. It was true that it didn’t seem right to take a job from a war hero, one of those men with a single eye or two missing feet that you saw staggering around the streets looking dazed and ragged. But what was he to do? He had to make his way in the world in some fashion or other. He understood that he was a cripple and with rickets, but did that make him so incapable? Had he not proved himself able to make calculations that even Mr Spicer couldn’t manage?

By the time he reached his front door he had decided not to tell his mother about Spicer’s rejection. He hated lying to her, but he couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. He’d have to tell her that Spicer had asked him to start the following morning and think up some strategy meantime. Never knowing him to have lied, May accepted what her younger son said without a blink, but guilt gnawed away at him so badly that, lying top to toe in the bed he shared with Jack that night, he finally confessed the awful truth to Jack’s feet. His older brother sat up and swore a great deal.

War heroes my arse. Ain’t our dad a war hero? Don’t he deserve his crippled son start bringing in a bit of a wage?

Harold hadn’t considered this argument but, considering it now, a flush of pride blossomed on his face.

Don’t you worry, Crip, Jack said. Ever since the accident he had called his younger brother Crip, though never in public. We’ll soon sort it out. Jack turned away and moments later his snores were rattling the mattress.

The following morning, on Jack’s instructions, Harold limped to the door of a friend of Jack’s, Tommy Bluston, and asked to borrow his bicycle. The wheels wobbled and the bicycle swung wildly about but he managed to remain on the saddle. For an hour or so he practised, pedalling faster and faster up and down the quiet terraces. Pretty soon he had gathered his confidence sufficiently to venture out into traffic and was bowling along the granite sets as though he’d been born to it. It was exhilarating. The rough air of Poplar whipped his face and he had the sensation of being pulled, but the best part of it all was that, on the seat of the bicycle, Harold ceased to be a cripple. On the contrary, he suddenly became someone people admired or even envied. He had only to ring his bell and women would hurry out of the way, dogs would bark, children would point and sometimes even run behind him. So wrapped up was he in his new-found freedom that he lost all awareness of time. Suddenly, becoming conscious of the twelve o’clock chimes, he pedalled as fast as his legs would take him along the East India Dock Road towards the docks. As he pulled up, Jack was standing beside the police sentry box at the entrance to the West India with a cigarette in his mouth.

You’re late.

Harold followed his brother, pushing Tommy’s bicycle past the workhouse and into an alleyway beside The Resolute pub. Jack tapped on the pub window and nodded to someone inside, then the two brothers went around the back to a latched gate. A dog chained up beside a shed started barking, then, seeing Jack, it quietened down, slapping its tail against the dim concrete of the yard. From the inside pocket of his jacket, Jack produced a key with which he unlocked the padlock to the shed. Immediately inside the door stood a few wooden crates, their outlines dissolving gradually into the gloom.

Now this Spicer cove, Jack said, finally. He sell black treacle? Coconut mats?

Harold closed his eyes and tried to reimagine Spicer’s shop. It seemed to him that Spicer’s sold everything, so much and in so many varieties that he couldn’t put names to them all, but he thought he could remember green tins of black treacle sitting beside the sugar loaves wrapped in blue paper.

Good, said Jack, ’cause we got consignments of them both. He dived into the shed and reappeared with a large basket which he attached to the front of the bicycle with rope. Into the basket they loaded half a dozen tins of treacle and six mats.

You tell that Spicer, this is for free, but he takes you on there’ll be more: black treacle, coconut mats, rum, the lot. He’ll have to pay, mind, but not half what he’d pay the wholesaler.

Harold stood beside the bicycle, committing this message to memory. Then, for no particular reason, he heard himself say:

Mr Spicer’s got a mynah what sings ‘Laddie Boy’. He’d heard Jack and Henry singing the song. He don’t know all the words, but he can sing the chorus.

Jack looked interested. Oh, our man likes birds, do he? Well, I’ll give him birds. Wait here, then, Crip. He went into the pub by the back door and emerged a few moments later holding a crude wooden birdcage inside which sat a startlingly large white cockatiel with a bristling yellow crest.

Some tyke give me this for a card game. Spotless, this bird. Lovely singer. Tell Spicer if he gives you the job, it’s his for six shillings.

Jack tousled his brother’s hair.

Listen, Crip. All this cargo what you see here. This is a family matter, all right? Just a little bit of duck and dive. Your dad and me, we like to keep it private, so only tell that Spicer fellow what I said you could.

Harold reassured his brother and went to mount the bicycle. With the mats and the treacle in the basket and a large birdcage hanging from the bars, the bicycle was a good deal trickier to manage than it had been, but Harold set himself to the task and he was soon pedalling north again and hearing his brother calling after him:

And don’t forget to tell him your dad’s a bleedin’ war hero and all.

He made his way back to Spicer’s feeling upbeat. His brother’s words had settled him. Jack was right. Everyone in the East End made a big play out of being neighbourly, and they were. If you were in some kind of crisis, your neighbours would always do what they could to help you out. That was how the East End was. But no one confused that with family. Family was the core, the essence. Family was what you were, and if that meant doing whatever it took to get a job, knowing there were one-eyed men and limbless veterans who might need the job even more than you did, then that’s what you had to do. Ultimately, it was family that counted.

Presented with the treacle, mats and cockatiel, and persuaded that Harold’s father was indeed a war hero, Mr Spicer decided he was running a business, not a charity, and hired Harold Baker on the spot for a weekly wage of five shillings and a direct line to his brother’s unorthodox grocery wholesalers. Harold’s duties included sweeping and dusting, stocktaking, the afternoon deliveries and occasionally helping Mrs Spicer with her books.

The Spicers proved themselves to be kind and reasonable employers and Harold quickly and happily made himself indispensable. In the mornings he mopped and swept the pavement in front of the shop, then dusted the shelves and washed and polished the floor, before feeding and cleaning out the mynah bird. In the afternoon, he hitched up the delivery trailer to Spicer’s bicycle and took off along the streets of Poplar, delivering packages here and there. From time to time he would cycle down to the pub beside the West India to pick up consignments of molasses and black treacle, bananas and spiced rum from Jack and Henry’s store.

After some months, Spicer sold the bristling cockatiel and bought a breeding pair of Cumberland fancy canaries, and it became Harold’s responsibility to put out their white grit and seed every morning and to change their water, wipe their cuttlebone free of droppings, and lay new paper on the cage floor. There was no more talk of war heroes, nor of crippled boys. May never called her younger son fishlips again, and even his father seemed to treat him with a new respect. The Spicers, who had no children of their own, developed an affection for their errand boy and were touched by the care he took with everything, and in particular with the birds. Spring came round and Spicer made a breeding box and offered Harold a cut of the sale price of every canary chick he could bring to adulthood. Pretty soon the hen laid eggs, each of which Harold carefully removed with a spoon and replaced with a clay dummy. Once the clutch was complete, he put all the eggs back in the nest together and waited for the hen to settle on them. Of the first brood, he lost three chicks and managed to bring up two, but he was picking up tips at the bird market in Sclater Street now and he knew where he had gone wrong. With the money he made on the two he sold, he bought another breeding pair and successfully raised six chicks. He sold the males, which were the only singers, and kept the females for breeding on.

Summer passed into autumn and on 11 November, the Armistice was signed and, despite the ravages not only of the war, but of the influenza which came in on its coat-tails, the whole of the East End devolved into one giant street party. Young men not yet drafted laughed with relief, children boasted about their fathers, and wartime sweethearts schemed to extricate themselves from their promises.

The curtains opened, the lights came on and everyone remembered their lines. Life was on again.

There followed the briefest of booms as the economy picked itself up from the war and then a deep depression hit.

How’s about I pay yer next week, sonny boy? women would say when Harold turned up to deliver their groceries. Mr Spicer won’t mind a bit. Sunken-eyed mothers would come into the shop with their crying children carrying the most pitiful array of shabby goods – a baby’s rattle, a spinning top, a rabbit’s foot good-luck charm – to trade for food, and Spicer would have to take them to one side and remind them sternly that it was a business he was running and if they wanted charity they should apply to the Sally Army.

Them politicians have got a lot to answer for, Mrs Spicer said. Ain’t those poor women got enough on their plates? Half of them widows and all.

But that’s just it, Mrs Spicer, Spicer replied, shaking his head at the way of things. Most of ’em ain’t got nothing on their plates at all.

Things got so bad that on one day in 1921, four members of Poplar council were arrested for diverting the rates into a food voucher scheme designed to protect Poplar’s poorest residents from starvation. When news spread of the councillors’ arrest, men and women in the docks and factories began putting down their tools and taking to the streets. Spicer watched them moving slowly past the shop windows and tutted with disapproval. Things were bad, he knew, but there was no need to make a public scandal of it. Besides, the demonstrators were putting off his customers.

At lunchtime that day, Mrs Spicer put on her coat and brown cloche hat and announced she was going to the post office. Spicer tried his best to persuade her not to go, but she was insistent. By late afternoon, when the demonstrations and street protests had spread across Poplar and even the rookeries and turnings were jammed with aggrieved men and women, jostling for a view of their leaders, and Mrs Spicer had not returned, Spicer sent Harold out on the bicycle to look for her. For several hours, Harold slowly pedalled through the throng, along the Commercial Road, down the East India Dock Road into Poplar High Street and farther east to Blackwall and the oxbow of land at Bow Creek where the river Gypsies lived, weaving his way through the tides of people, but he saw no sign of Mrs Spicer until, making his way home, he was bicycling down Poplar High Street when he thought he spotted her brown cloche hat among a group outside the town hall. He clambered from his bicycle and, leaving it in the care of a boy in return for a farthing, he made his way through the throng of people until finally there, over on the other side of the street, next to the slipper baths, his suspicions were confirmed. Mrs Spicer was standing with the protesters. She had a banner in her hand and was shouting. He knew then she had never intended to visit the post office but needed an excuse to leave the shop. In her own quiet way Mrs Spicer was a rebel; most likely she’d been a rebel all her life. Harold found the idea exotic. Until that moment he had thought that rebels were all like Jack.

He reported back to Mr Spicer that his wife was nowhere to be seen and that she was probably caught up somewhere in the tide of people, but he saw no need to worry because no one seemed to be much in the mood for violence. It was all right to lie to keep a secret, he thought, to avoid hurting people. Sometimes, it was probably better than telling them.

Later on that week, he lifted his new clutch of young canaries into an old wooden port box, tied it to his bicycle with string, and pedalled along the Commercial Road, past the soup lines at the Sally Army, past thin men standing smoking on the corners, past sallow-skinned women and tearful children to the animal emporium in Sclater Street, where he sold all four, and throughout the whole journey it never once occurred to him that it might be an odd thing, in the midst of such poverty and misery as there was in the East End of the 1920s, that men and women would happily give what little money they had to possess just one of those tiny, yellow gems, whose song recalled sunshine and laughter and better times.

CHAPTER 4

On their return from Kent and all through the war years, Daisy and Franny visited Elsie at her Wanstead Flats asylum once a month with Joe. Sometimes they’d take a rock bun or a piece of Mrs Anderson’s tea loaf, but after Mrs Anderson and Maisie left for alternative lodgings nearer to Mrs Anderson’s sister, there was rarely anything worth taking. Elsie didn’t seem to bother one way or another. Every so often her face would beam with recognition, but most times she seemed confused and mildly irritated, as though their presence interrupted her peace. No one had any real idea what was wrong with her. The diagnoses ranged from nervous exhaustion to hysterical grief and melancholic disorder. She was prescribed complete rest for an indefinite period. Whether she would recover or not was anyone’s guess. Still, the asylum was warm, the nurses seemed kind and the food was plentiful, and Daisy often thought her mother was happier in her walled prison, shorn of memories, than she had been on the outside, though she knew enough never to say this to her father.