An East End Girl Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Maggie Ford

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Will she ever be anything more than an East End girl?

  Cissy Farmer longs to escape her life in London’s Docklands where times are hard and money is tight. And when she meets the debonair Langley Makepeace, her dream seems within reach.

  But the price of belonging in Langley’s brittle, sophisticated world could be much higher than Cissy ever imagined. And torn between Langley and her gentle childhood sweetheart, Eddie Bennet, she is forced to gamble on her future chance of happiness, a decision that will change her life forever…

  About the Author

  Maggie Ford was born in the East End of London but at the age of six she moved to Essex, where she has lived ever since. After the death of her first husband, when she was only twenty-six, she went to work as a legal secretary until she remarried in 1968. She has a son and two daughters, all married; her second husband died in 1984.

  She has been writing short stories since the early 1970s.

  Also by Maggie Ford

  The Soldier’s Bride

  A Mother’s Love

  Call Nurse Jenny

  A Woman’s Place

  The Factory Girl

  A Girl in Wartime

  A Soldier’s Girl

  For my brother Harry Lord and his wife Christine

  Chapter One

  The Thames sweeping round the Isle of Dogs flowed smoothly. Deceptively smoothly. Tidal, the cold North Sea ebbing and flowing twice daily past Southend on the east Essex coast and Sheerness on the Kent side, the movement was noticeable right up to Teddington Lock seventy miles up.

  At low ebb, with tide-left mud and water-worn posts exposed, the river could have a drab look; it looked almost too inadequate to carry all the world’s trade up to the Pool of London – the hinged road of Tower Bridge opening up like a great steel and concrete butterfly flexing its wings to allow tall-funnelled freighters through.

  It was very different at flood tide; the sense of space and freedom took away a man’s breath, made him want to gulp in huge lungfuls of its fresh feel, made him proud to be part of it, proud to be a Londoner.

  Charlie Farmer stood gazing at it, enjoying the sight on this fine August evening. From his vantage point where Westferry Road became Manchester Road, Greenwich foot tunnel under the Thames not a mile away, from which he and Doris had emerged a little over half an hour ago, he could see clearly across to Greenwich Observatory where they’d spent the afternoon. Between him and Greenwich, the wide expanse of water, flowing smooth on the ebb, glowed translucent bronze in the liquid evening light. There were greater rivers in the world with mouths so wide that their banks were totally lost to sight. But this was his river. London’s artery. It was in his blood, flowed as his blood flowed – reliable, steady, tranquil.

  A smile wrinkled his broad, weathered face at the word tranquil. On the surface perhaps. To the eyes of a landsman perhaps. He knew from experience that beneath its sleek surface lurked undercurrents waiting to sweep away anyone silly enough to try swimming from one bank to the other – young men, full of drink, doing a dare, the white corpse popping up days later on the outside of a bend circling among the old rope and driftwood after the Thames had done playing with it. Only when you took a craft upstream against a falling tide did you appreciate its pull, traffic passing fast the other way; only when you squeezed between the abutments of arches of its many bridges, the current swirling in treacherous rips, could you truly know the brute strength of this old river.

  Charlie Farmer’s grin broadened. Like life in a way, hiding from eyes the turmoil that surged beneath a placid surface.

  Not that much surged beneath the surface of his life. He was proud of his family, his wife, Doris and their children: Cissy aged twenty, Robert, eighteen, May just fourteen, left school last month; then Sidney, ten, and Harry, eight. No more children now – he and Doris were past all that, hopefully.

  They’d never truly known poverty. Struggled a bit at times, but never starved. He’d always been able to provide. A Thames waterman and lighterman, a Freeman, balding a bit now, but strong as ever, he loved his life, loved his work – something few men could boast.

  ‘Ain’t no better life,’ he murmured, his gaze sweeping the wide expanse of water flowing smooth as silk.

  Doris, her waist thickened by childbearing, her fair hair going gently grey and her open features placid, tightened her hold on her shopping bag with its empty Thermos flask and sandwich wrappings.

  ‘Maybe not, but I’ve got supper to get when we get ’ome. And it’s turning chilly. It’ll take us an hour getting back, and I’ve got no big coat. Come on, Charlie, before we freeze to death.’

  It was an exaggeration. It had been a lovely sultry hot August Bank Holiday Monday, but a breeze had sprung up with the sun’s going, not cold, but compared to the earlier heat felt cooler than it was, and Doris’s fleshy bare arms had begun to show goose pimples.

  Charlie put an affectionate arm about her shoulders.

  ‘Right, ole gel, time to go ’ome. Me ole tum’s beginning to rumble a bit, I must admit. It’s been a lovely afternoon, without the kids.’

  It had been lovely. Away from the family for once, Cissy giving eye to the children, although not too happy about it. Arm in arm like a couple of youngsters, they’d made their way through the foot tunnel under the Thames, sat in Greenwich Park with other Bank Holiday families, the stewed tea from a Thermos flask tasting wonderful after plodding uphill, Doris puffing behind all the way, to where the shiny-domed Observatory stood. Once up there they had sat with their tea and sandwiches, enjoying the views of London basking in heat haze on the far side of the sleepy Thames.

  Trains bound for Southend and Margate for the day would have been standing only; Hyde Park, like all London parks on bank holiday, would have been crowded with hardly a pin being put between each group; the Serpentine a seething mass of bathers. But in Greenwich Park all had been peaceful, a breath of countryside.

  It was getting late. Tomorrow he’d be back on the river. Robert, too – in the boy’s case, taking orders, still learning the skill, next year to apply hopefully to be a Freeman of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames.

  Bobby, as Charlie called him, had been apprenticed for nearly four years, bound to him as he himself had been to his father some twenty-odd years ago around the turn of the century. Life was tougher then, Bobby didn’t know the half of it. Six years since the war had ended, dumb barges more often towed by tug now, in double lines of three, saving lightermen that hard row against the current.

  But he was a good
lad, was Bobby. Quick to learn, willing, doing well. One for the girls, of course, with his looks – but a good lad.

  ‘Coming then?’ Doris’s voice betrayed faint impatience. Charlie gave her a grin, nodded, and followed her away from the river wall.

  ‘I just ’ope Cissy ain’t ’ad much trouble from them kids of ours,’ she said as they made their way along Eastferry Road. ‘We’ve left it a bit later than we intended, starting back.’

  Charlie grinned down at her lesser height. A bit of a worrier was Doris. ‘Won’t take us long. Put our best foot forward, eh?’

  It was a longish walk back to Poplar. They started off at a brisk pace, her arm through his, she in her best blue crepe and her straw cloche hat with the cherries, he in his good suit and Sunday bowler. By East India Dock Road, their steps had slowed. A No. 67 tram took them the couple of stops to Canning Town and saved their feet, but it was still a plod the rest of the way to Fords Road and home, Doris sighing at her aching feet, Charlie moderating his pace to match her flagging one, lifting the arm she held to help take up her weight.

  ‘Soon be ’ome, old gel,’ he encouraged. ‘Not far now.’

  To which she sighed, ‘I can’t wait to put me feet up.’

  Compared to the bank holiday quiet of the river, the back-streets of Canning Town rang to the cries and laughter of children with minds on that last game before being called in for supper and bed.

  Charlie thought of the supper awaiting him. Boiled bacon and pease pudding – not butcher’s pease pudding but lovingly cooked by Doris herself. She’d left the small half hock to simmer in the same water as the potatoes she’d parboiled for yesterday’s Sunday dinner before going off to Greenwich, leaving Cissy to turn it off when done.

  They’d had a bit of lamb yesterday, enough left for cold tomorrow with bubble and squeak – leftover potatoes and cabbage mashed and fried together. Doris said the bacon and potato water would make a nice broth for another time. She was a thrifty woman and a dab hand at making the pennies stretch. All thanks to her they ate better than many of them around here. He often felt a little guilty for not praising her more.

  ‘We’re lucky you an’ me.’ He followed his train of thought. ‘Me comin’ through the war. Not like some – thousands ’n’ thousands – all gorn. Us gettin’ through that ’flu epidemic like we did. Remember that? Five, six years ago? Did away with ’ole families, that did. I reckon it’s your feeding keeps us so well, old gel.’

  Doris gave a whimsical smile as if to say, ‘Whatever brought that on?’ But she only said, ‘I just thank the good Lord for it.’

  He gave a deep rumbling laugh, ‘No, it’s thanks ter you, old gel. Supper for most of them kids’ll probably be bread and drip.’

  Perhaps with a bit of meat jelly in it which, as the week wore on, would degenerate to plain dripping. Few were able to afford meat enough for it, so dripping came mostly from the pork butchers: ’ap’orth without (jelly) or, if you were well off that week, a penn’orth with. Bring your own basin, large enough to last until next pay day, if your man was in work that was. Even if not, it was cheap on bread and filled hungry bellies.

  The man of the house might do better. As a special person, there was poached haddock for him bought, more often than not, by popping the family china into Uncles and making do with tin cups until it was redeemed. Bread dipped in the salty yellow liquid made a meal, the kids waiting for the earholes, the stringy flesh around the gills, to suck as a treat.

  ‘Bobby and Cissy working brings in a bit on top of me own wages,’ Charlie continued, still feeling for the less fortunate. ‘We’d be in queer streets without them, way costs’ve gone up since the war.’

  No one could call a lighterman’s job exactly steady. There were days when waiting around for something would bring bouts of concern, and other days when it all came in a rush, keeping a man so busy he wouldn’t see home for several days, loading, driving a craft (as barges were known), unloading, always the tide dictating the hours.

  Much of the time these days he was on tugs. A four-man crew, skipper, mate, engineer, fireman and a boy to look after them, doing all the deck work – the coiling and handing up of tow ropes, pulling down of the funnel to pass under the bridges, scrubbing out cabins, making everlasting cups of tea.

  They were long hours, he was up at four-thirty and seldom home before seven. Sometimes there were twenty-four-hour shifts on the more powerful tugs and the much larger craft they towed, covering greater distances, working the bridges up to Hammersmith and downriver to Canvey Island, even as far as the River Medway, to the Isle of Grain. But the lads, like the rest of them, whether on tug or craft, developed a love of the river, a feel for their work that few on shore had. Breathing in the clean morning air while others had to rely on the streets for air before dragging themselves off to offices, shops, factories, there was something that made a man feel of importance when working up or down along the river.

  There was compensation for those long shifts, a bit on the side to barter for baccy at Free Trade Wharf, the odd something rolling into a corner – perks of the job, mopping up the unclaimed – to exchange for a bit of something else. Kept life ticking over sweet, though it was a foolish man who let himself be carried away by greed.

  Discovery meant dismissal, your licence taken away; it meant becoming unemployable. Wasn’t worth it, and it wasn’t honesty that kept him from over-pilfering, as much as the risk of being caught. And then there was Doris, wont to get herself in a flap about things coming into the house that weren’t come by honestly.

  She had let go his arm to fish for the key in her purse among the empty sandwich wrappings in her shopping bag, but his own key was at the ready as they reached their door, one of a row of identical doors.

  ‘Got mine,’ he rumbled, inserting it into the keyhole.

  ‘Bin out fer the afternoon, Mrs Farmer?’ a voice crackled.

  Old Mrs Turpin, a few doors along, stood gripping a tatty coconut-fibre doormat.

  ‘Thought we’d take advantage of the weather,’ Doris obliged.

  ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Greenwich Park.’

  ‘Wish my old man’d take me out. All ’e ever does is snore ’is ’ead off.’ She began pounding the mat against the wall, raising puffs of dust with each collision. ‘Be nice ter go out now’n again.’

  With an offered nod of agreement, they stepped inside and closed the door on the lovely evening. It had grown dark enough to light the gas in the kitchen. Removing the single round glass bowl, Charlie carefully turned the key until the gas began to hiss. The mantle plopped as he applied a match. Its delicate chalky mesh gave forth a sickly hue but grew steadily incandescent with the glass shade replaced.

  Sinking down on one of the four kitchen chairs, Doris emitted a huge sigh. ‘My feet are killing me.’

  Charlie smiled, dropping the matchbox on the table and going to hang his coat on one of the cluttered hooks in the passage. ‘Don’t wonder at it. Bin on ’em all day,’ he called.

  ‘Just need to take the weight off me legs for a bit,’ she agreed, but as he returned, she was already up, going for the kettle to take it to the sink. Filling it noisily and transferring it to the stove, the gas lit with his box of matches, she announced: ‘A nice cup of tea,’ as if such activity could mean anything but that.

  Cissy had come from the front room. Her clear grey-blue eyes and pretty features bore a somewhat peeved look.

  ‘You’re home, then?’

  Compared to her parents’ flat Cockney vowels, hers were rounded, obviously and painfully studied. Cissy took elocution and deportment lessons from a one-time opera singer who boasted of having gone much further in her vocation than her pupils actually believed she had. Madam Noreah Addiscombe, who wore black velvet always – a dusty black victim-of-age velvet – beneath which her bosom bulged mightily from her past operatic exertions and looked like a pregnancy in the wrong place, taught singing too, at sixpence an hour. Cissy couldn’t afford to sing as
well, so only took the elocution and deportment.

  ‘Fat lot of good that’ll do you, working round ’ere,’ Charlie had said when he heard. But there wasn’t much he could do about it being as she paid for her lessons out of her own wages.

  Cissy was a machinist at Cohens just off Burdett Road. Piecework on dresses and skirts brought in good money if you were quick at it. And Cissy was quick at it. After giving Mum her keep, the rest was hers, and Dad’s views were – to coin one of Madam Noreah’s beautiful phrases – mere chaff blowing on the wind.

  What Cissy wanted most in this world was to escape, to flee this poverty-striken East End for ever. She dreamed of it constantly. But it was only a dream. Girls like her, for all the elocution lessons at a tanner a time, did not get to flee to any better life.

  Slim and upright, she stood in the doorway of the kitchen. For all Dad’s efforts at decorating it with layer upon layer of wallpaper to hide the outline of bare brickwork, the paper soon became stained from cooking, necessitating another layer. But even that did not stop the summer invasion of bugs from not too clean homes on either side, the bane of Mum’s life. Beyond, was the outside toilet and washhouse, the brickwork there well in evidence through the whitewash. How she loathed its miserable, mean look.

  ‘Did you have an enjoyable afternoon?’ she asked wearily.

  Dad was looking at her in the manner of one taking the rise. But it was done with humour, loving her dearly for all her foolish ideas.

  ‘Yes, we h-ad a very enjoyable h-afternoon,’ he mimicked.

  ‘Thanks for looking after the kids, luv,’ Mum said, gently guilty. ‘We wouldn’t’ve had time to go nowhere if you ’adn’t. Didn’t give you much trouble, did they?’ she added hopefully.

  Cissy gave a non-committal shrug. ‘Out playing most of the time. But had Daisy Evans called I’d have been unable to go out with her.’

  Her mother looked crestfallen. ‘You didn’t say you ’ad anything perticler to do today.’

  ‘I might have had. If she had come to ask me to go out with her.’