Hopping

Without Elsie’s luxuriant moaning and numberless afflictions, life at number 7 Bloomsbury Street felt oddly amputated but it, too, was happier, especially for Daisy, who had always suffered the hard edge of her mother’s misery.

While she remained at Bloomsbury Street, Mrs Anderson was drafted in to help out with the domestic chores and Mrs Shaunessy was taken on to do the cooking and watch Franny when there was no one in the house. The most immediate practical consequence of Elsie’s absence was that, with medical bills to pay, and Mrs Anderson and Mrs Shaunessy to compensate for their time, and with no income from laundry and flower-making, the Crommelin family found themselves very short of money. Joe took on extra shifts, leaving the house before the gas lamp man had snuffed out the street lights and returning long after the last lamp had been lit for the night. He no longer brought treats home on Fridays. Gone, too, were the Saturday afternoons in the park.

In 1915, six months or so after her return from the hop fields, at the age of twelve, Daisy went out to work on the half-and-half, spending her mornings at school and her afternoons at an assortment of factories, sweeping floors and sorting cans. The arrangement brought in a few shillings but it put an end to her evenings with Lilly and to the possibility of another summer visit to Kent.

Notwithstanding the downturn in their own fortunes, the Crommelins never ceased to count their luck. They had only to look next door to see what wreckage the war had left in its wake. Since his return from the front limbless and half blind, Pat Shaunessy had been reduced to selling kindling on the street and Mrs Shaunessy had started putting in long days washing and mending, ironing and darning, cooking and looking after children in order to try to make ends meet. Even so, they sometimes had to resort to the Relieving Officer, and Mrs Shaunessy would have to send Billy round to number 7, shamefaced, clutching bags of linen and tins of corned beef, for the officer would not issue food coupons to any family who had anything left to sell.

The Shaunessys’ slide into poverty made Billy Shaunessy meaner and angrier than ever. Now he would lie in wait in a turning for Daisy and Franny as they walked to school every morning – from 1916 onwards Franny also attended Culloden Street School – and spring out, taking a pinch out of the both of them and shouting:

Your ma’s as mad as a stick. Yes she is, yes she is. Me ma says so and me dad says so and all.

Billy Shaunessy, you stop that! Daisy would cry, but to no effect. Billy relished the upset he caused and her protests seemed only to encourage him further. For weeks together, he carried on in this vein until, one day, deciding to take things into her own hands, Franny finally turned about and, marching up to him, stood on her tiptoes and flipped him so hard on the nose with her tiny fingers that he froze to the spot in sheer bewilderment, leaving Franny the space she needed to announce that Billy was a fine one to talk, whose so-called dad was a Patty-no-legs what begged in the street for his living.

After that, Billy Shaunessy left the Crommelin girls alone and they saw him only when he slunk in, red-faced and arms full of corned beef tins, in advance of a visit from the Relieving Officer.

The Crommelins’ luck – if you could call it that – ran out one morning in 1917, when Joe returned from a visit to the asylum with bad news. Though no one seemed to be able definitively to say what was wrong with Elsie, the doctors had agreed the longer her ‘turns’ went on, the less likely she would be to make a recovery. This meant that further cutbacks were necessary. Daisy would have to leave school and find paid work the moment she reached fourteen. In the meantime, Joe would have to tell Mrs Shaunessy that the Crommelins could no longer afford her services. He was loath to do it – the Shaunessys had been good neighbours and Mrs Shaunessy had helped out when Elsie had first been taken ill. For weeks he wrestled with himself, struggling to find some way to soften the blow. Until, one afternoon, Mrs Shaunessy did the hard work for him.

She came round as usual at five, carrying a piece of brisket for the Crommelins’ tea. While Daisy put on the kettle, Mrs Shaunessy began carving paper-thin slices of meat to make into sandwiches, chattering inconsequentially as she worked. As instructed, she’d bought a sixpenny piece of brisket, which would usually be enough for tea and for Joe Crommelin’s sandwiches in the morning. While the girls were eating, Mrs Shaunessy fussed about at the sink for a while before making as if to leave. As she moved towards the door, she hesitated and, in a casual voice, said that brisket had been particularly dear that day and that Daisy was to tell her father that she hadn’t been able to buy enough for his morning sandwiches. For a moment she put down her basket and turned to put on her hat, and in that moment the cloth she’d used to cover the basket dislodged itself and both Daisy and Franny saw the unmistakable remains of the brisket wrapped in wax paper wedged beneath.

Daisy didn’t want to tell her father that Mrs Shaunessy had stolen the meat, because it was hard enough for the Shaunessys what with Mr Shaunessy having no legs and Billy Shaunessy being the crybaby that he was. She figured that if they just repeated what Mrs Shaunessy had said it couldn’t really be called lying, since it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told the lie. But Franny, who was fast developing into a telltale, ignored her older sister and Joe was barely in the door, taking off his blue serge overcoat, before she was breathlessly relating Mrs Shaunessy’s crime.

Wait up, wait up, girl, Joe said, while Daisy unwound the string strapping up the hessian he always tied around his shins to protect his trousers, your tongue’s got caught on the current, but when he saw there was no meat for his sandwiches the following morning, only a couple of pieces of stale bread, he was very angry and started grumbling about ‘interfering’. It was the excuse Joe needed. He told Mrs Shaunessy that very evening not to come any more and asked Mrs Anderson as far as possible to keep to her room, and from then on the Crommelin girls were left to bring themselves up more or less alone.

Low though they might have sunk, though, even the Shaunessys hadn’t suffered the worst of it. By the end of the war the same could not be said of all the inhabitants of Bloomsbury Street. One of the Lumin boys at number 47 was killed in action, and Mrs Lumin’s young nephew was blown to bits when a bomb dropped on Upper North Street School in June 1917. A French polisher and his cousin, who shared lodgings in The Deep, were both killed at Ypres. Two or three others in the street contracted typhoid or dysentery, one went mad from shell shock, another was gassed and then, if that weren’t enough, the Greenbergs lost two children to the influenza epidemic and several elderly men and women in Bloomsbury Street were cut down the same way.

In March 1917, only a week or two after her fourteenth birthday, Daisy left school for good and found work at the Apex Laundry. Lilly’s elder sister had worked there for some years and had put in a good word for her younger sister, who had started there a few months before. When the Apex’s formidable forewoman, Mrs Bentley, mentioned that there might be another vacancy for a hard-working, honest and healthy girl direct out of school, Lilly had immediately thought of her best friend. Daisy was not new to laundry work. Like any East End girl, she’d been expected to assist her mother with the weekly wash from a very early age. Elsie Crommelin did her laundry the old-fashioned way. She owned a buck, a wooden washing trough, inherited from her mother, who’d no doubt inherited it from hers. This she kept in the yard, and it was large enough to enable her to earn a few pennies taking in neighbours’ washing. On washing day – invariably Monday – she would set a copper of water on to boil, then fill the buck with the water, fold the clothes and linen to be washed into the buck with a scoop of ashes and one of hen dung. She’d turn the lot over with a prosser then finally leave it to soak. This was an old technique to save soap, which, at least when Elsie was a young woman, was an expensive luxury. After an hour or so, she’d drain off the lye and dung through a spigot in the buck, rub each piece of cloth with shavings of pig fat soap and work up a lather on the rubbing board before filling the buck once more with cold water and rinsing the lot in it. It was this washing which was hanging to dry when Franny took it upon herself to raid her mother’s sewing box with consequences everyone, except possibly Elsie herself, now knew.

The Apex, which took in sailors’ uniforms and the linen from several West End hotels as well as a hospital or two, was rather more up to date. It was situated in a once-red-brick, now blackened building which was part of a huddle of small factories and workshops just off the East India Dock Road. The laundry itself was divided into three principal rooms, each serving several functions. Of these, the washroom was the largest, containing vast copper cauldrons set on gas burners and a state-of-the-art Victress Vowel turner operated by levered wheels, with an area at one side devoted to stain removal and special treatments, and another at the back where the mangles and hanging racks stood. The washroom gave on to a separate ironing room. Beyond that lay the finishing and packing room.

The Apex Laundry hours were from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and from 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. The pay was poor, six shillings a week for a junior girl, and there were no paid holidays or sickness benefits. The laundry seemed to run by a set of rules designed to transfer as much of the weekly wage as possible back to its owners. Any infraction of these rules – which Mrs Bentley was careful never fully to explain – resulted in a docking of the guilty party’s pay. Among the infractions included grating the soap too finely, or too thickly, using too much or too little, bleaching or starching any fabric not intended to be bleached or starched or in any other way damaging fabric or fixings, however inadvertently; insufficient mangling, sneezing or coughing on newly ironed laundry, failing to fold correctly, speaking when not required to speak or failing to speak when required to do so, illness, lateness and other assorted malfeasances as and when required.

When the laundry arrived at the Apex, it was first inspected then, if necessary, taken to the soaking and stain-removal area, where it was the responsibility of the stain workers to remove any marks on the fabric with hot flour and water or ground pipeclay, ashes or lime chloride, or salts of lemon and cream of tartar, depending on the stain. The stain-free laundry was then placed in hot water with shredded soap and soda in one of the cauldrons, and turned with a Victress Vowel operated by levered wheels. Every kind of fabric required a different treatment. Coloureds were set with salt and vinegar, prints soaked in liquor boiled from ivy leaves, and blue and black silk fixed with gin. After its wash, the laundry was lifted out with dolly sticks, and, in the case of linens, boiled, then rinsed three times, in warm, cool and blued water respectively, before being moved to the starching area, to be stiffened with rice flour or size made from boiled hoofs and glossed with borax. It was then mangled in huge, multiple-rollered mangles operated by a set of giant wheels and levers, and set on the drying racks. While still moist, linens were transferred to the ironing room, where they were ironed with turps, then polished with glass calenders on a hardboard, and, finally, sent to the packing room to be finished and folded and from there dispatched back to their owners.

Because her sister was a good worker, Lilly was assigned to the packing room, the least arduous area of the laundry, where she had only to fold sleeves and pin shirts and set fancy work in tissue before bundling each customer’s order together in brown paper and tying it up with string. Daisy, on the other hand, was put to the mangles. Her job was to fold the newly washed laundry, then feed it through the rollers, turning the levered wheels with one hand, using the other to catch the newly mangled fabric as it appeared at the other end, then transfer it to the drying racks. If the laundry was insufficiently mangled it would drip on to the floor and dry unevenly; if too dry, the ironing room would complain that it was unmanageable. It was, quite literally, grinding labour. At the end of each day, Daisy’s shoulders and elbows would throb from turning the wheels. After the first few weeks, the sensitive skin between her fingers opened up, leaving itchy wounds which never healed, then the skin on the back of her hands developed a bloom from exposure to carbolic and soda and the hands themselves throbbed from the constant damp. Several months in, the muscles in her mangling arm began to swell beneath taut, roped veins.

That’s more like an elephant’s trunk than an arm, Lilly said one day as they were sharing their midday sandwich. Careful, or they’ll think you’ve escaped from the circus or else… She whispered this with her hand to her mouth so that only Daisy could see…. or they’ll think you’re one of them.

Them were the nancy boys who hung around the docks at night dressed in women’s garb. Some worked as dockers by day and by night their thickly muscular bodies, granite legs and leather faces looked rather comical dressed in silk skirts and daubed with rouge and beauty powder. They were tolerated, even pandered to so long as they took in good part the jokes made against them, but you wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of them, not for any amount of money, not even if you did have an elephant’s trunk for an arm.

Later Lilly apologised, pointing out that her own arms were none too clever, neither, so she had no right to pitch in on anyone else’s, and the two girls were as thick as any two girls can be once more.

It didn’t occur to Daisy to resent her friend for her easier lot, just as it didn’t occur to her to resent her sister for being pretty. Things were as things were. There was nothing to be done about any of it. In any case, Daisy quite liked her work. Her walk to and from the laundry took her past Charrington’s and the Anchor Brewery, from whose streaming chimneys forever came the delicious, bitter, spicy scent of hops. There was a certain satisfaction in turning the wheel and seeing wet, sloppy fabric emerge the other side flat, crisp and evenly moist, and the camaraderie between the laundresses made up in part for the laboriousness and monotony of mangle-turning. The East End was full of filthy work in glue factories, meat processing plants and paint and gas works. The laundry at least had the advantage of being clean.

More than anything, though, the twice-daily exposure to the smell of hops kept Daisy going, because it reminded her of the happiest times, during those weeks of late summer and autumn, she’d spent in Kent at the beginning of the war. She looked back on that period as a procession of brilliant, sun-drenched days, each bringing more happiness than the last, and she’d returned to Poplar with a new and uncomfortable perspective on her home patch. The crush of people, which had once seemed so comforting, now grated, and the speed of everything made her anxious. She started to feel penned in and longed to see the thin turban-blue stripe of the sea once more. But she knew that until Franny had left school and was bringing in a wage and could be trusted to look after their father, she would not be returning to Kent.

It pleased her to be able to make a difference to the family economy, though, and by the early 1920s, the Crommelins were once more on an even keel financially, and Daisy was even able to save a shilling or two for entertainments for herself and her sister.

From the mid-1920s, picture houses sprang up across the East End as fast as dandelions through paving stones. By the early 1930s, there were eight around Poplar alone, among the largest of which were the Pavilion, the Hippodrome, the Grand and the Gaiety, each capable of seating thousands. The Troxy, which opened in the early 1930s, seated 3,500 alone. For a while they competed furiously for custom, each decorating its foyer and viewing room more elaborately than the next, with velveteen, crystal chandeliers and gilded gesso. The sisters loved them, but Franny found their blend of magic and luxury particularly enchanting and would have happily spent every waking minute in one or other picture house had she not had school to attend and a concerned older sister to make sure she went. The picture houses soon became a major part of the sisters’ weekend routine. Every Saturday morning after her shift at the laundry, Daisy would walk to Chrisp Street to wait for her sister to emerge from the morning children’s show; the two girls would go and do their shopping in the market and as they made their way home Franny would entertain Daisy with descriptions of what she’d seen. In the afternoon they’d head for the matinee at the Gaiety or the Hippodrome and they’d walk home with heads full of stars and stories.

Franny began to become quite obsessed with pictures and stars, and when she wasn’t actually watching a film, or talking about it, she’d be memorising lines of dialogue, cast lists and plots, or standing in front of the mantelpiece mirror in the living room, styling her hair and doing her film make-up and talking about becoming a star of the screen. No entreaties by her sister or scolding by her father could make her give up her fantasies. No laundry could contain her, no factory feed her talent. Joe and Daisy would see. She was meant for better things. In a year or two Franny Crommelin intended to be at least as famous as Louise Brooks, as glamorous as Gloria Swanson and as rich as Mary Pickford.

And so, when Franny was finally released from her schooling aged fourteen, the first thing she did was to wave her hair and dab rouge on her cheeks and lips, don her Sunday dress and present herself at the staff entrance of several of the larger picture houses requesting a screen test. Mostly, the picture house managers would say there weren’t any openings for picture starlets that week, but a few, noting Franny’s lush hair and bonny features, would tip her a wink and tell her to come back after the night’s performance and discuss matters over a drink.

Cheeky bleedin’ cusses, Daisy would say, I catch them taking any liberties with my little sister, I’ll give ’em a clip round the ear so hard they’ll be seeing stars all right.

Finally, after months of persistence, during which Franny fended off the managers of half the cinemas in East London, with varying degress of success, the manager of the Pavilion, Freddy Ruben, offered her a position as a junior usherette. This she accepted, though not in the best grace, on the assumption that, before the year was out, her true talents would be recognised and rewarded. When, after three months, then six, then nine, she was still sweeping peanut shells and cigarette butts off the floor, with no prospect of advancement, Franny Crommelin decided to change tack. If the world wouldn’t come to her, she would have to go out to the world. She began adding face powder and lipstick to her already rouged face and took to curling her hair with rags and irons. When Joe wasn’t looking, she would sit in the living room making alterations to her clothes, putting in tucks here and there to accentuate her curves. On her fifteenth birthday she came home sporting a fetching new hat, swearing she’d picked it up for pennies from Flitterman’s misfits, even though Daisy could see it had come from somewhere more expensive, like Selwyn’s. A few weeks later, a silver-plated filigree brooch appeared on the lapel of her coat, and not long after that, she returned home carrying a new pair of tan kid leather gloves. All of these things, she said, she’d bought from her wages, but Daisy had seen how Freddy Ruben had begun to watch her sister and she sensed trouble ahead.

Trouble there was too, but this time it was out on the streets of Poplar. On 2 May 1926, Joe arrived home from work with the news that a General Strike had been called for the next day.

The bosses had it coming, was all he’d say.

Daisy knew nothing about workers’ rights or trade unions. She was vaguely conscious of the fact that, from time to time, Lilly attended union meetings, but Daisy believed it was better not to make a fuss about anything if you didn’t have to. Her heart went out to men like Paddy Shaunessy, who’d given their legs for their country only to be abandoned by it, but to her way of thinking men like Paddy were precisely why more fortunate families such as the Crommelins, who really had nothing to complain about, were better off keeping their gripes to themselves. There was something unfair, even unseemly, complaining about working conditions or even about unemployment when there were so many people worse off than herself. Life wasn’t fair on anyone, but it had been a good deal fairer on those who still had the legs to march than it had on men like Paddy Shaunessy.

On the other hand, Daisy always obeyed her father, and Joe Crommelin was a union man. If there was a General Strike, Joe said, the Crommelins would stand alongside their fellow workers.

The following morning was the strangest since Daisy had come home to find her mother locked in the understairs cupboard with Mrs Anderson yelling at her. After Joe had left, Franny didn’t want to leave the house, but Daisy decided to venture out. It was as though a huge tide had broken during the night and taken away everything familiar. Instead of the usual morning bustle, there were no omnibuses, no wagons or delivery boys on bicycles on the streets, and what few men were making their way along the street in their work clothes kept their own company. Most of the shops along the Commercial and East India Dock Roads had been padlocked and some had even been boarded up, and the routes to the dock gates, which would usually at this time have been aflow with dockers in flat caps and serge suits with neckerchiefs for collars, were oddly empty, as though a strong wind had whistled through and blown them away. The factory gates were padlocked and, along her habitual route to the Apex Laundry, Daisy could no longer smell the rich tang of hops. As for the laundry itself, the door was barred and someone had pasted up a notice, around which a number of laundresses were clustered, gossiping in muted voices.

Daisy returned home past gaggles of men, grouped at the corners of the street, subdued-seeming and anxious. Some of the women had already taken out tea and pieces of bread and dripping to them. Every so often a boy would arrive with a message, which would spread between the groups of men, drifting finally into the houses, where the women passed it on among themselves.

In the afternoon, with Joe still absent, Daisy persuaded Franny to come out with her. The locked shops and barricaded frontages were obscured now behind a phalanx of men and women carrying placards and banners and shouting for jobs and justice. Volunteer policemen, many of them mounted, surrounded the marchers on all sides and the streets were as tense as barrel straps.

I don’t suppose no one much will be at the pictures today, Franny said, tossing her hair in a peevish gesture, as if all the shenanigans on the street had been done somehow deliberately to thwart her.

I don’t suppose, her sister said.

No point in turning up for me shift, then. I wouldn’t mind going to the pictures myself, though, later. If hardly no one comes, they might sell the posh seats for tuppence.

But there won’t be no one to buy the tickets off, Daisy pointed out, nor no one to show people to their seats if you ain’t there. Nor no one even to project the picture.

Oh, said Franny, I hadn’t thought of that. A man in a suit walked by and Franny followed him with her eyes, adding in a distracted manner, Closing the docks is one thing, but say what you like, it don’t seem right, closing the pictures.