Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
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
Chapter Thirty
Read on
Copyright
Dedicated to Charles Titchen, my late husband and patient friend, and to my loving children, John, Janet and Clare
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781448176885
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First published as Stolen Years in 1994 by Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd
This edition published in 2013 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
Copyright © 1994 Maggie Ford
Extract from An East End Girl copyright © 2017 Maggie Ford
Maggie Ford has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner
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Letty Bancroft shivered deliciously, a tingle of anticipation briefly replacing tension. Not long now and she’d be wearing her new corset.
Stiffened with whalebone, strengthened with buckram, moulding her already narrow waist as near the rich and fashionable ‘S’ bend as its cheaper version allowed, it had cost twelve shillings and elevenpence.
‘How much?’ Mum had looked disparaging. ‘It’ll kill yer wearing a thing like that, trying to be something you ain’t.’ But Letty had been eighteen two weeks ago. Now she wanted to be transformed, to look rich and fashionable, even if she was only a bridesmaid. At least, when she could get into the bedroom to put the thing on and be transformed!
Letty, or as her dad insisted, Letitia, drew back her head from out of the open parlour window above his secondhand shop, the sash pushed up as far as it would go for a bit of fresh air, and glanced again at the clock on the mantelshelf. Eleven-thirty! She’d never be ready in time.
It was Saturday 15 June 1908. Her eldest sister, Vinny, was getting married at one-thirty at Holy Trinity church in Old Nichol Street. Letty and her other sister, Lucy, were bridesmaids.
From the bedroom along the passage came girlish voices, high with excitement. All right for them! Lucy was ready, Vinny almost. And here she stood, still in her old everyday frock, hair tumbled around her shoulders in an auburn mass, waiting for Lucy to comb it, pin it up and puff it out fashionably over cloth rats.
Her mother looked round the parlour door. ‘You orright, Letty, luv?’ The tone sounded weary, almost like a sigh.
Letitia looked at the thin face, flushed by the disease that afflicted so many in the East End; squalor, narrow back alleys, lack of fresh air, it was said, made a perfect breeding ground. Mum had contracted it about ten months ago but had been determined it wouldn’t spread to her three pretty daughters with all their lives ahead of them. She never kissed them now, which hurt a little; used a hanky for her smallest cough; had her own crockery, her own utensils, her own towel and face flannel, the family being just a bit better off than some who could hardly afford a towel between them at times. If Dad’s shop did only moderately well, at least it managed to keep their heads above water.
‘I’m orright, Mum,’ Letty answered her enquiry. ‘Just a bit fed up of waitin’, that’s all.’
‘Never mind, luv,’ Mabel Bancroft soothed. ‘Not much longer. It do take a bit of time fer a bride to get ready.’
‘Hmm!’ Letty pulled a face, the grimace in no way marring its looks. She got her retroussé nose, her firm oval chin and high brow from Dad; her tallness she’d inherited from both parents, rare in a Cockney.
Her wide green eyes could make any boy blush to the roots of his hair when she treated him to that sideways glance of hers, a natural action, but she could make the most of it when she wanted to. Trouble was, she seldom wanted to, certainly not with the class of boy round here. Oh, for a well off young man like Vinny had found. She envied Vinny her luck. It would never be hers.
‘Looks like I’ll still be dressin’ when everyone else is leaving,’ she mumbled sulkily. ‘I should of known I’d look a mess. Some bridesmaid I’ll make – me hair all over the place.’
‘It won’t be all over the place, luv,’ Mum said in a tired voice. ‘Lucy’ll do yer ’air lovely.’
The wan face withdrawn to save further argument, Letty turned back to the window and stuck her head out again. Her face framed by the heavy lace curtains, elbows folded on the soot-grimed sill for support, black-stockinged feet up on tiptoe, she peered down.
The street below was quiet. On Saturdays most people went to Brick Lane market a few streets away, the faint cries of the stallholders could be heard from here, above the rattle of trams on the main road. Tomorrow morning, however, would see the quiet street below erupt in a confusion of song birds, thousands of them, their concerted twittering like the sound of huge sheets of crisp tissue paper being vigorously rubbed together.
This was Club Row, London’s caged bird market. Running off from the Shoreditch end of Bethnal Green Road, its stalls spilling across into Sclater Street and Hare Street, people came here on Sunday mornings to buy pigeons, chickens, but mostly to look for a caged bird as a pet – a linnet, a goldfinch or a canary.
In summer London’s streets echoed to their sweet trills and warbles when new owners hung the tiny cages outside tenement windows. In winter the streets lay silent when the birds were taken indoors out of the cold, but even in winter Club Row had birdsong; cages stacked high in doorways, on stalls, each little captive singing as if to keep itself warm until someone bought it and took it home out of the cold.
Sunday morning the air would vibrate with the confused chatter of people buying, and stallholders yelling their heads off. The street would be a jostle of people milling between the fuliginous brick and dirty shop windows and the tatty awnings of stalls. Letty always loved looking down on the swirling river of hats; men’s faces hidden beneath greasy cloth caps or dusty bowlers, ladies’ beneath straw hats, plain sombre black or cream or yellow, banded with blue or red or brown ribbon; a few wide-brimmed hats decorated with wax fruit, half a yard of tulle, a feather or two, the poor of the East End aping the more opulent West End fashions.
This was still the same impoverished area Letty had known as a kid, but things were gradually changing. It was 1908. The well-to-do set the fashions, and every girl from scullery maid upward copied them. A girl could, with a paper pattern, a bit of cheap material and ribbon, make a dress for almost next to nothing and stroll in the park on Sunday looking quite the lady, even if she was in reality a mere factory worker.
Reminded sharply that shortly she too would look very much a lady in her bridesmaid’s dress, Letty drew her head back inside finding the room dim after the brilliance outside.
‘You two goin’ ter be much longer, Lucy?’ she yelled, petulance heightening the cockney accent Dad was always trying to curb in her.
‘Ooh, keep yer ’air on!’ Lucy’s reply came back in the same vernacular, forgetting that she had been practising rounding her vowels and sounding her aitches, because she was going out with a boy who did. ‘Nearly ready. Vinny looks a picture! Wait till you see ’er, Let.’
‘And oo’s Let, when she’s at ’ome?’ Dad’s voice came sharply from the bedroom across the passage; Dad, who tried to practise what he preached, sometimes didn’t do so well. ‘She’s got a name yet know. Letitia!’
‘What, Dad?’ Letty called back automatically, hearing her full name. Arthur Bancroft’s voice became even more irascible. ‘I wasn’t talkin’ to you!’
‘I thought you was.’
His narrow face with its bristling sandy-grey moustache came round the edge of the door, followed by his tall thin frame. At fifty, he still bore traces of the handsome man he’d once been.
‘Not so much of your lip, my girl! I was talking to Lucilla. And you, I ain’t ’aving you bawling out like some factory ’and. I brought you up to behave a bit better than that. Lucilla watches her words – or do sometimes.’ Lucy’s reply was still grating in his head. ‘And Lavinia is a proper lady since she met ’er Albert. So I ain’t ’aving you talking like that in front of ’er ’usband to be and his people. I ain’t havin’ you show us up.’
He looked agitated, even less ready than before he’d started dressing for the ceremony. In his shirt and braces, his Sunday best trousers even so held up by a belt, his stiff celluloid collar popped off its stud, protruded at right angles from his neck like a seagull’s broken wing. His hair, touched faintly with grey, parted in the centre and brushed flat as a natural wave allowed, shone with brilliantine to keep it so, except that one wave with its own ideas was sticking up like a cockscomb. The bane of his life, was his persistently wavy hair.
Letty smothered a giggle, kept her face straight. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ she said hastily, then tittered as he disappeared.
High ideals had Dad, bless him. With never quite the means to carry any of them out, he’d tried to disguise his own lack of education, his poor background, by concentrating on his daughters, insisting they behaved like ladies, tried to be a little better than he ever had been.
Even his choice of their names – Lavinia, Lucilla, Letitia – suited more to girls from Barnet than Bethnal Green, reflected that effort. Mum, more down to earth, had shortened them to Vinny, Lucy and Letty; neighbourhood mates went one better: Vin, Luce and Let. Dad gritted his teeth, and clung religiously to their original names.
From her sisters’ bedroom came a wail: ‘Be careful, Lucy. You’ll break my neck, pulling my hair like that!’
Far better spoken than any of them Vinny had become, since meeting Albert Worth whose people came from Hackney.
At twenty-one, the same age as Vinny, Albert looked older. Round-faced and, to Letty’s idea, a bit pompous, he was training as an accountant in his father’s firm. Vinny had met him last year when the three girls had gone to see the Boat Race at Putney. He had accompanied her home when she’d torn the frilled hem of her summer dress and had taken to calling on her every Sunday afterwards, not put off by her background. Vinny could put on the posh talk when she wanted. She had won his family over and finally become engaged to him in January.
Letty glanced again at the ornate ormolu clock on its marble stand where figures of a gallant and his lady posed decoratively on either side of the oval face under a huge glass dome. Tight-faced, she hurried to the parlour door.
Leaning out of it, she blared into the dim passage: ‘It’s five to twelve!’
‘Ooh, you are impatient!’ Lucy’s reply, yelled from the bedroom, was no panacea. ‘I’m doin’ me best!’
‘That don’t help me much though, do it?’ Letty yelled back. ‘I can’t even use me own bedroom with all Vinny’s stuff in it.’
A few stairs up were two tiny rooms, one hers, one full of Dad’s junk. Letty’s bedroom measured just six by eight. For weeks it had been full of Vinny’s wedding stuff with nowhere else to put it. Living space above the shop was in short supply. Besides the two tiny rooms at the top, there were just two slightly larger bedrooms, a kitchen and parlour, all of which opened on to a long dim passage with a flight of stairs down to the shop. The parlour was of a decent size if it hadn’t been crammed with Dad’s bric-a-brac and what had once belonged to Mum’s parents.
At one end, the top of the piano was home to several big Victorian vases with painted pastoral scenes, some sepia photographs of various relatives staring out with fixed expressions, and some smaller vases. The piano had belonged to Mum’s mother. So had the six tall-backed chairs and the round dining table with extensions that opened with a winder, its polished mahogany usually protected by a chenille cover with bobbled fringes, an aspidistra in an ornate pot in the centre. Today its extensions were fully out, covered with a snowy Irish linen cloth and Grandma’s best cutlery laid for the wedding breakfast. The two-tiered wedding cake stood in the middle, like a silent honoured guest, in place of the aspidistra.
At the other end of the parlour was a horsehair sofa with an armchair to match, the other one being wooden, with a padded back and padded wooden arms, such as Mum liked to use. ‘Keeps the back nice and straight,’ she maintained. ‘Floppy sitting makes a woman ungainly.’ She was still very Victorian in her ways, and it was too late to change her now. A lovely straight back she’d had once, a habit passed on to all three girls. It was sad to see how bent those shoulders had become over her slowly collapsing chest.
Letty wandered to the piano, lifting the lid with one hand and picking out two bars of ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ with the other. Mum used to play on Sunday evenings. They’d sing their favourite songs, Dad’s voice powerful, Mum’s sweet, the girls’ mostly indifferent. They’d not done it much since Mum had become so tired and worn. Letty closed the lid despondently.
What would Dad do if anything happened to Mum? She’d always had to push him, being a bit of a dreamer, always talking of what he’d do but never doing it. He wasn’t hard enough, more of a leaner really. Mum’s people had been metal merchants, brought up hard on business. Had she been a bit sterner with him, Arthur too might have been harder, made good money. But he was in love with beautiful things. He and Mum used to argue a lot once, over some fine piece he refused to resell after buying it off someone trying to raise a bit more cash than the pawn would give. He could be stubborn sometimes, Mum said, in a silly way. But they no longer argued, hadn’t for months.
A lot of his treasured finds graced the mantelpiece that reared above the fireplace like a mahogany monarch almost to the ceiling in whirls and scrolls and shelves on fluted columns, backed by small mirrors. Each piece reflected Dad’s passion for beautiful things.
Letty knew how he felt. She felt the same. She loved to wander around the shop touching the smoothness of polished wood, the silkiness of good china, looking at shapes, staring at pictures.
She heard Mum call out: ‘Time’s getting on, Lucy dear.’
And Lucy call back: ‘The church is only in the next street, Mum. We ain’t going all the way to Timbuctoo!’
‘I know, luv. But it’s time Vinny got herself sorted out, then ’as a cup of tea and a bit to eat. She ’as to sustain ’erself through the ceremony till we all get back ’ere for the wedding breakfast. Vinny, don’t you forget to wear yer gran’s garter … something old. An’ you’ll have to borrer something too. You got a clean ’anky, luv? Can I help?’
‘No!’ Lucy’s cry was just a little panicky. ‘Don’t come in ’till Vinny’s ready. It’ll spoil the surprise.’
Dad’s voice rasped irritably: ‘’Er name’s Lavinia! Damn this bloody collar! See if yer can fix it, Mum.’ He seldom called her Mabel.
A sudden outburst came from the bedroom. ‘Lucy – it’ll fall down, I know it will! Right in the middle of the service. My veil will pull it down. I shall feel such a lemon.’
‘It won’t fall down!’ Lucy’s voice was full of effrontery, her effort with Vinny’s hair being criticised. ‘It’s well pinned.’
‘If it falls down, I’ll blame you! I won’t get married. I’ll run out of the church, I will!’
‘Lucy! Vinny!’ Mum was making for their bedroom. ‘You’ll spoil yer pretty face, Vinny, if yer start crying.’
‘But just look at it, Mum!’ she was wailing. ‘It’s all floppy.’
Letty leapt into action, running in behind her mother, Dad following. There the bride stood in all her glory, except for a face creased in pique. Letty made her eyes grow wide with admiration. Not all in pretence either for Vinny was delicately pretty.
‘Luvaduck!’ she gasped. ‘I ain’t never seen anyone look so … so beautiful!’
Vinny’s grey-green eyes grew hopeful. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Think so? I think your Albert might faint away at the sight of you. I think the vicar might too. You look … you look as pretty as Carol McComas.’
She couldn’t have quoted a more apt example of loveliness. Carol McComas was Vinny’s favourite actress on whose swan neck, small perfectly balanced features, clear skin as delicately blushed as a peach, Vinny strived to model herself. In her high-necked, white satin wedding gown, its bodice a froth of lace, with more flaring at the elbows and the train, Vinny looked so like her, it took Letty’s breath away.
‘Your Albert don’t know just ’ow lucky he is,’ she sighed, wishing for a brief moment it was she who stood there.
Lavinia’s face sobered with uncertainty. ‘Oh, I do hope he’ll like the way I look.’
Mum put her hands to her lips and stood back to survey her. Letty felt with a searing of sadness that Mum would much rather have cuddled her eldest daughter, soon to leave her family to share a new life with her husband, but dare not let this beautiful girl catch what she had. ‘He won’t be able to ’elp himself, luv,’ she whispered, and her voice wavered.
The only man in a family of women, Arthur Bancroft risked a surreptitious wipe of one finger beneath his suddenly moist eyes. ‘You best make yerself scarce now, Lavinia. Before people start arriving,’ he said huskily. ‘Can’t ’ave ’em see yer before yer walk down that aisle.’
Master of himself again, he ushered his eldest daughter out of the bedroom to be safely hidden in her parents’ room until her entrance in church would take everyone’s breath away.
At last Letty was free to place herself in Lucy’s deft hands to be helped into her new undergarments and the dress that had been hanging behind the door under a sheet since being made up by Mum’s friend Mrs Hall, a widow who lived above the Knave of Clubs on the corner of Bethnal Green Road. The material had been bought at Debenham & Freebody’s departmental store just off Oxford Street – apple green crepe-de-chine – and went well with her auburn hair. Lucy’s dress was pale blue, and a wonderful job Mrs Hall had made of them both.
Not too fancy, all right for Sunday dresses afterwards: the bodices pintucked and frilled, with tiny bunches of tulle rosebuds, satin ribbon at the waists, skirts that flared to a small train. Mrs Hall had made the hats as well and they were a sight for sore eyes; a good twenty inches across, a mound of tulle bows with masses of tiny artificial flowers, to be anchored to the hair by huge pearl-headed hatpins.
Uncomplaining, Letty submitted herself to Lucy’s quick, sure hands. Lucy would have made a good lady assistant in one of those high-class departmental stores like Dickens & Jones, except Dad had never let any of them go out to work as girls of poorer families did. He didn’t seem to think that helping in the shop for just a bit of pocket money was work, and always made sure they never went short.
Lucy stepped back as far as the bed behind her allowed to view her handiwork just as the shop doorbell tinkled. The shop was closed, of course, a handwritten sign on the door stating the reason.
‘There!’ she breathed, satisfied with her accomplishment, as well she might be – for Letty, seeing herself in the mirror on the ancient chest of drawers, couldn’t have faulted her. They stood, the two of them, one eighteen, one twenty, both a dream in crepe-de-chine, beautiful hats, long gloves, waists elegantly slim, faces glowing with pride and excitement. ‘Just in time. Hope it’s none of Albert’s posh lot. After where they live, it will look so cluttered to them here.’
Lucy had suddenly acquired a much posher voice. Throwing a reluctant look at the cramped and narrow bedroom, she went to the window and glanced down to where the new arrivals stood waiting to be let in.
In an instant she had withdrawn her head, eyes brilliant, her face animated.
‘It’s him! It’s Jack! I thought he was going straight to the church but he’s come here first. Oh, Letty – pr’aps he intends to pop the question. D’you think he does?’
‘He’s been calling on you for the last seven months,’ Letty said, smiling at her excitement. ‘Time he did. Not this very minute though.’
But Lucy wasn’t even listening. ‘I know he’s been thinking about it, the way he talks. I’m sure he’ll get around to asking Dad soon.’
She’d met Jack Morecross when Vinny’s Albert had brought him one Sunday to meet her. Three years older than Lucy, he was a pleasant-looking, lanky young man with flat gingery hair and earnest blue eyes. He lived not far from Albert, his father having a small printing works inherited from his own father who had retired. A far better catch than the boys from around here, most of whom had no prospects and even less initiative, Lucy had lost no time in hooking handsome Jack.
Letty couldn’t help feeling a little envious and faintly put out that she wasn’t even walking out with a boy at the moment, not one she’d call halfway worth it anyway. The local boys hung around her hoping one day she’d ask one of them home to meet her dad, but she kept every one of them at arm’s length, her mind set on the Prince Charming who would one day sweep her off her feet. Some hopes of that!
‘You’ll meet a nice boy one day, with your looks,’ Mum would say, and immediately refer to Billy Beans whose parents had the grocer’s shop further along Club Row. Rudely handsome and thick-set, about her own age, he was always setting his cap at her, hanging around. Trouble was, she liked Billy but not his name. Fancy – Letty Beans!
Lucy was back at the window, peering down as Mum’s footsteps echoed on the narrow lino-covered stairs down to the shop.
‘He’s brought his friend, he said he would. Yoo-hoo, Jack!’ Leaning out, waving, Lucy’s joyous giggle told of her wave being returned. She withdrew her head as the shop door was opened to admit him. ‘His dad’s a friend of Jack’s dad. Jack and me thought he’d be company for you.’
Letty felt distinctly annoyed. ‘You thought … Honestly, Lucy, you do take a lot on yourself! I can find me own company, thank you.’
Lucy looked a little ruffled. ‘I thought you might like someone a bit more interesting than them around here. He’s ever so educated.’
‘I don’t care if he’s Tolstoy,’ retorted Letty, having once had War and Peace inflicted on her at school. ‘I don’t want someone I don’t know tagging around after me all day, telling me how educated he is. What do I say to ’im? I wish you hadn’t of done it.’
Lucy was pouting, her good intentions in ruins. ‘Well, better than the weeds around here. Jack says he’s ever so handsome. He’s got pots of money. His name’s David Baron. He’s twenty-eight and …’
‘Twenty-eight! I don’t want no twenty-eight …’
She broke off as the arrivals were shown into the parlour, but Lucy already had her by the hand, pulling her along, hurrying to welcome Jack. They reached the parlour as the doorbell tinkled once again, compelling Mum to go back downstairs.
Jack was standing self-consciously by the sofa, staring down at his hat held in both hands. His friend was also politely bare-headed, but if he felt at all ill at ease in a strange home, he didn’t show it. He was tall and dark-haired, and stood very still with his eyes steady. Dark eyes, Letty saw as Lucy dragged her into the room after her. He certainly did look well off, and so very mature in a well-cut charcoal grey suit that Letty felt her cheeks begin to burn, feeling even more angry with Lucy who left her standing to rush over and take Jack’s hand.
Someone coughed and Letty turned to the window. Dad stood there semi-obscured by the sunlight pouring through the thick lace curtains. Neither expecting nor approving of this invasion by his second daughter’s admirer and some complete stranger to boot, when both would have been better going straight to the church, he was busying himself filling his pipe to cover the resulting embarrassment.
Lucy’s hand was confidently on the stranger’s arm, drawing him towards her sister. ‘Letty,’ she began in her very nicest voice, ‘this is Mr David Baron, Jack’s friend. David, this is my sister, Letty …’
‘’Er name’s Letitia,’ came a deep rumble from behind the smokescreen of Dad’s now kindled pipe. A reek of Navy Cut had filled the room. ‘If yer goin’ er introduce people properly, Lucilla, then get their names right.’
Her aplomb shaken, Lucy threw him a look, but any hope of further introductions was stopped short by an invasion of relatives surging like the hordes of Gengis Khan through the door: Uncle Will, who was Mabel’s brother, his wife Hetty, and three adolescent cousins, Bert, George and Ethel; then Arthur’s sister Mildred, husband Charlie, and two more cousins, Violet and Emma, just coming up to adolescence. The room was suddenly a mass of people, with everyone kissing everyone else as if they’d all come together from the ends of the earth, when in fact all of them lived just a tram ride away, Uncle Charlie’s lot from Whitechapel and Uncle Will’s from Stepney.
‘We all met up at the door,’ Charlie of the constant ribald jokes explained jovially. ‘Thought we’d pop in instead of going straight to the church. Funny you thinkin’ the same thing, Will. So we all met up together at the door, didn’t we? Funny that. Funny coincidence.’
Mabel, out of breath, hid a cough with her handkerchief. Letty, her mind taken off Mr David Baron for the moment, saw her sink into her chair set between the sofa and the fireplace. She looked like a little ailing mouse, wanting only to crawl away into a hole, out of sight. Letty’s eyes tingled with sudden tears, the lining of her nose became acutely sensitive and her throat constricted. She fought the emotion, sniffed, bit on her lip. Couldn’t start dissolving into tears in front of everyone, especially in front of the self-assured stranger.
‘You all right, Mum?’ she said, knowing immediately she’d intruded on her privacy as all eyes turned to her.
Mabel smiled and got up out of her chair, her tone terse with the effort to sound unconcerned. ‘Them blessed stairs. Wear you out, them stairs do.’
She even managed a laugh, but not enough to allay embarrassment in those who knew that their arrival had put her to an inconvenience they could have avoided.
‘We’ve got ter start walking to the church in a few minutes,’ she went on quickly. ‘I’ll go and see how Vinny’s doin’. Her carriage’ll be ’ere soon. Arthur.’ She looked over to her husband, still puffing his pipe. ‘You stay with the bride and bridesmaids to wait for it. You ’ave ter be with the bride to give ’er away.’ She gave the company a broad smile. ‘Lot ter think about when it’s yer first.’
An outbreak of garbled conversation after a brief awkward silence following her departure. Making up their minds to get ready to leave, everyone began to draw together, face the door in a ragged group like a platoon of raw recruits, uncertain if they’d been given orders or not. Letty wanted to run after Mum with some odd idea of apologising, but Mum probably wouldn’t have had any idea why, so she stayed where she was on the far side of Lucy, away from David Baron.
She became aware of him watching her, his eyes softening with understanding. She felt he knew what was wrong with her mother, though no one could have told him. You didn’t talk about things like that, and if you did, only with family, and then only in a whisper, the word itself forbidding anything louder.
He seemed to know just how she was feeling too, but she hadn’t invited his sympathy and her reaction was to take immediate umbrage that a total stranger was seeing right into her soul. And because annoyance was an unreasonable reaction, she felt all the more put out, her face growing hot.
‘Who does he think he is?’ she hissed at Lucy, and heard her giggle. She risked a glance at him as her relations at last decided to jostle out through the doorway and down the stairs, her cheeks on fire when she saw he had come closer to her. Oh Gawd, what was he going to say to her? What could she say in answer? He probably spoke like a toff, and she … she’d probably make a real fool of herself …
She acted instinctively. Grabbing the arm of her fifteen-year-old cousin Bert, she gushed loudly, ‘Come on. Let’s go and tell Mum you’re all off now.’
Those guests intending to, finally left in the small hours, their footsteps echoing along a silent and deserted Club Row. Letty closed the door behind them.
‘I could kill you, Luce, honest I could,’ she hissed, bolting the door top and bottom, throwing the bolts home with fierce energy, taking her spite out on them instead of her sister. ‘Thank God he left early! I don’t know what he’d have thought, us ’aving a knees up. I would have died. That sort’s used ter sittin’ in a circle drinkin’ tea with his little finger stuck out, sipping champagne and nibblin’ lady’s fingers biscuits.’
She couldn’t imagine him bothering to come calling on her after tonight. She wouldn’t be seeing him again. Too much of a toff.
‘And been married an’ all!’
The sickly glimmer from the upstairs gas lamp guided them back through the cluttered shop that always smelled faintly musty. Lucy’s affronted gaze sought out Letty’s dim silhouette.
‘He’s not married now. It must ’ave been tragic, his wife dying, and him so young.’
Letty paused, her foot on the first stair. ‘What d’you mean, young? He was ten years older than me.’
Lucy paused too. ‘Well, he wouldn’t have been when he lost his wife, would he? It was four years ago. You make him sound like Methuselah. Ten years ain’t nothing. And he was ever so handsome.’
‘I didn’t think he was handsome,’ Letty retorted. ‘And what made you think I’d fancy someone second hand anyway? And his wife had a baby.’
‘Born dead!’ Lucy was rapidly becoming short-tempered. ‘Ain’t you got no feelings, Let? What he must’ve gone through, losing wife and baby all at the same time. And all you can think of is how you felt ’cos he’d been married and ten years older than you.’
To this Letty could find no reply. She’d been so busy trying to avoid David Baron when she’d discovered he’d been married once, the tragedy he must have endured had not really registered. Now, like a sudden thump in the chest, it did, and she felt so ashamed. But Lucy, overflowing with righteous anger, hadn’t noticed.
‘Ten years ain’t so awful. He had nice manners and talked nice like Jack. You don’t know what you want, that’s your trouble. Jack just mentioned he had this handsome friend, and I thought …’
‘All right!’ Letty cut in waspishly, and began mounting the stairs. ‘I should have been more sociable. But I wasn’t, so there!’ She slowed a little halfway up, Lucy coming up behind her. ‘Anyway, I don’t think he was that good-looking. His nose was too long, and he’d got lines at the corners of his eyes too.’
‘Laughter lines,’ Lucy interpreted.
‘Well, I never saw ’im laugh. All he did was look at me, all lah-di-dah like.’
At the top of the stairs, they paused to peer in at the men sitting around the parlour table at their game of pontoon.
Tense faces were lit by the ornamental oil lamp in the centre of the table, replacing the now demolished wedding cake; gone was the noise and laughter of an earlier game of Newmarket in which even the kids could take part, farthings given by parents to put on the four Kings, to be excitedly scooped up if they got as far as laying down a Queen of the corresponding suit. Now all that could be heard was the terse commands breaking an edgy silence. Buy one! Twist! Pay twenty-ones! Bust! And the chink of coins dropped on to a growing pile.
It had been a good wedding. Those who could play the piano taking their turn, everyone gathered around to join in the tunes. Uncle Will, maudlin drunk, had done several recitations, prompted at intervals by those who knew the words better than he did.
Uncle Charlie’s store of near the knuckle jokes had got everyone rolling about, Albert’s people looking a bit bewildered, Vinny going all red and flustered that they should hear such things, as if they were above it all. Aunt Elsie, Dad’s sister, had brought up the tone a bit, playing one or two classical pieces with more gusto than skill. A friend of Dad’s had sung, ‘We’ve bin tergevver now fer forty yers, an’ it don’ seem a day too much’, his eyes trained lovingly on his chubby wife as he continued, ‘there ain’t a lidy livin’ in the land as I’d swap fer me dear ole Dutch.’
One of the younger cousins had done a tiptoe dance, exacting sentimental sighs from the women; one even younger had recited a little poem to even greater sighs of appreciation; an older cousin with a very pleasing voice had la-la’d the tune from The Merry Widow and had been so well applauded that she’d sung some more from other musical shows until she’d become thoroughly boring, pleasing voice or not.
The happy pair finally leaving for their new home, a nice rented house in Victoria Park Road, Albert’s side departed not long after with Lucy’s Jack and Mr David Baron. Afterwards the party consisting of close family and friends had developed into a good booze-up.
Everyone had raised the roof in song, shaken the ceiling of the shop underneath to the stamp of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’, men’s boots pounding, women lifting their skirts, petticoats flying.
In the small hours, exhausted, they’d slumped down on chairs or the wooden planks set up on beer crates especially for this gathering. They’d gathered around the table to play Newmarket until those who could still walk home finally left, the rest staying until the trams resumed running on Sunday morning, the men to play Pontoon while the women went off to find a bed to fall on for the few remaining hours.
Lucy yawned as they moved past the smoky parlour. ‘All the fun’s over. I’m going to bed.’
‘If we can find one.’ Letty quietly pushed open their parents’ door, knowing exactly what she’d see there. Dresses draped over the chair, hung on the wardrobe doors and from the picture rail, aunts in chemise, petticoats and drawers lying dead to the world on the bed, only half under the counterpane on this warm night, limbs flung wide in the unladylike need for coolness, kids sprawled sound asleep across their legs.
‘Cheek!’ Lucy said as they closed the door on the second bedroom, just as crammed full of bodies. Mum, of course, had gone up to Letty’s little room to find a little peace away from the rest. ‘Our home and nowhere to sleep.’
She brightened. ‘There’s that mattress at the back of the shop. We could pinch a quilt. Gawd knows, I could sleep on a clothes line!’
Stretched out beside her sister, Letty’s sleepy thoughts drifted. In her head she could hear David Baron’s cultured voice. It had made her so conscious of her own that to protect herself she’d behaved like the brash Cockney she was. She’d laughed raucously, spoken too loudly, got her aitches mixed up, forgot to sound her ts, and all those East End colloquialisms she’d used without even thinking came echoing back to her, stark and hideous, hearing them as David Baron must have done.
He hadn’t batted an eyelid though. The perfect gentleman, behaving as if she was Lady Muck herself. It had made her all the more self-conscious, saying things she hadn’t meant to say. Like when he’d asked if she would like another glass of port, she’d shot back, ‘I can ’elp meself, thank you!’ Lordey – it had sounded awful.
‘Myself,’ she muttered into the darkness at the back of the shop, rectifying the error fruitlessly. ‘Help myself …’ Help …’
Beside her Lucy stirred in her sleep, murmuring, ‘What?’
Letty kept very still until she settled again, trying to obliterate her bruised pride in sleep, but David Baron kept getting in the way. Thanking Mum and Dad for their hospitality, turning to her: ‘Delighted to have made your acquaintance, Miss Bancroft,’ so formal she could have screamed. She had shrugged as if it hadn’t mattered a jot to her. But it had mattered. It hurt that he hadn’t asked to see her again. It was no compensation that his last glance had been for her; she interpreted it as one of reproach for the way she had shown herself up.
Furious with herself, she turned over. Facing away from Lucy, she stared into the darkness of the shop, its faint mustiness enveloping her. How could Lucy call him handsome? The boys around here were much better looking and far more robust. They spoke roughly but you knew how you stood with them. But David’s maturity had given him a certain attractiveness … Oh, well, too late now. She closed her eyes before the morning light became too strong to let her sleep.
‘I should have been nicer to ’im,’ said Letty, desultorily flicking a feather duster over the vases on the piano. The last of their guests had gone home, leaving the flat with a forsaken air, having been so full of people the night before.
Lucy had her mind more on Jack and when he’d get around to talking to Dad about their engagement. ‘Nothing you can do about it now,’ she murmured, disinterested, her arm working like a piston rod to bring up the dining table’s mahogany shine.
Letty gave the feather duster another listless flick. ‘He might be coming with your Jack this afternoon?’ she suggested hopefully.
Jack called every Sunday. He and Lucy usually took a tram to Victoria Park, the only bit of decent open space in the East End and a wonderful place for courting couples and family picnics. It had deer, a lake with a Chinese pagoda on an island in the centre, a huge ornate Victorian drinking fountain, lots of shrubberies and secluded walks, football fields, tennis courts. It extended all the way to Hackney Downs, almost like being in the country.
Lucy would return after kissing Jack goodbye, eyes sparkling, face glowing – and not all from the fresh air. Mum would give her a quick glance, then look away, and Dad’s face would bear an anxious expression.
Letty wished someone was taking her to Victoria Park so she could be looked at like that. ‘Don’t suppose I’ll see him again, anyway,’ she muttered.
‘Don’t suppose you will.’ Lucy’s tone was offhand. ‘You made it plain you didn’t want nothing to do with him.’
‘I didn’t make it that plain. I just didn’t want him thinkin’ I was chucking meself at him.’
She gave the vases a last flick and transferred her attention to the gilt frames of two large pictures hanging side by side on the wall by the door. They’d come out of Dad’s shop years ago, had been on the wall for as long as she could remember, hadn’t been moved for years, the wallpaper behind them still light while the rest had darkened.
One of them depicted a young woman with the classical softly round face and figure and fair abundant tresses beloved by the Victorians. She was clad in flowing diaphanous amber material. Her back to a low, seawashed obelisk, she was bound loosely by golden chains, wrists crossed upon her breast, a dramatic love-lorn gaze cast heavenwards. A green and angry sea foamed about her thighs and dark storm clouds rolled above her, split by the occasional patch of palest blue.
The other showed the same maiden, unchained and embracing the stone while the sea receded though her gaze was still cast heavenwards at the clouds and still wore the same forsaken expression. Letty had often wondered what story the pictures told, but no one could ever tell her.
Lucy had slid the chenille cover back in place and was starting on the piano.
‘All I can say,’ she went on, removing the vases one by one before polishing, ‘is that after my Jack put ’imself out to bring him, you could have been more civil to him. Anyway, it’s your lookout, not mine. Me and Jack’s got more serious things to talk about today.’
What she meant was, she was going to have to push him again to talk to Dad, though it was hard to see why Jack was so scared. Her father was a quiet man, a bit stubborn but never the argumentative sort, and he already looked on Jack as a very worthy young man, very suitable.
Jack always came about two o’clock, after Sunday dinner. Washing up done, Mum having her usual Sunday afternoon lie down with a glass of Guinness – to do her blood good, as she always said – Dad down in his shop, Lucy sat by the window in her Sunday best. Her bridesmaid’s dress still to be modified, she was in her dark blue suit and a high-necked cream blouse, her cream straw hat pinned to her hair. She looked a picture, her back stiff with anticipation as she waited for Jack.
Letty sat at the table, her weekly copy of Peg’s Paper under her elbows, her chin in her hands. She too was in her Sunday best, though she wasn’t going anywhere. But just in case.
It was another lovely sunny day. The sash window pushed up as far as it would go for some fresh air, was also admitting a musty taint of bird droppings from the cages stacked against the shop front next door. The voices of the dealers loading them on to barrows to cart away, the market having closed, seemed to be almost in the room.
‘I wish we didn’t have to live here.’ Lucy, her speech grown very cultured in preparation for Jack’s arrival, wrinkled her nose delicately. ‘It does stink sometimes. And I can smell the brewery.’
Her remark suddenly awoke Letty’s senses to odours that normally passed unnoticed, acclimatised as she was, having lived with them all her life: a compound of rotten cabbage leaves, sewage, horse manure, and the sour reek of Trueman’s Black Eagle Brewery in Brick Lane that hung in the air day and night, worse some days than others, especially when they cleaned out their vats. Today it wasn’t so bad, being Sunday, but Letty found herself suddenly embarrassed by the combination of odours.
If David Baron did appear with Lucy’s Jack, what on earth would he think, his nostrils assaulted by this stink of the East End, having to pass by the market traders, their language somewhat more than ripe at times? The market being closed yesterday, the street had been quiet. But today… For the first time in her life Letty too found herself wishing she lived in some more wholesome area.
‘Vinny’s lucky, moving out to Hackney,’ Lucy muttered petulantly, playing with her gloves and gazing out of the window.
‘Well, when you marry Jack, you’ll be leaving too,’ Letty said, but Lucy gave her a petulant look.
‘When he gets down to talking to Dad! You’d think he was an ogre or something. Jack don’t seem to have any courage sometimes.’
When he did arrive, he’d obviously found some degree of it. He didn’t come upstairs immediately as he usually did. To Lucy that meant only one thing, and her hopes were rising.
‘He’s talking to Dad about us.’
Unable to sit any longer, she began roaming the room, peeping out of the door, straining her ears. Hearing her prowling outside her bedroom, Mum got up, and came into the parlour, her rest having imparted a high colour to her parchment cheeks, giving her a deceptively healthy look.
‘Jack’s talking to Dad,’ Lucy told her, her own cheeks aglow with premature delight. ‘It must be about us!’
‘Now don’t get excited, luv.’ Mabel smiled tolerantly, but there was no holding Lucy who continued to pace the floor.
When Jack came upstairs he was with Dad. Arthur had opened a couple of bottles of brown ale, which was enough for Lucy. Her face radiant, she threw herself at Jack, all but upsetting his glass in the impact.
‘Jack! You did it! You did it!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, you did it!’
She and Jack went up West to buy her engagement ring, a band of three diamonds and two deep red rubies few boys around here could have afforded and which she flourished whenever anyone came near. She drove everyone half round the bend talking about her wedding.
‘We have planned the wedding for next April,’ she said, her speech almost on par with Vinny’s these days. ‘I shall be a spring bride.’
And: ‘Jack’s grandparents are buying us a house near where they live, in Chingford,’ she made a big thing of telling her elder sister. ‘It’s got a long garden and a proper bathroom and you pump hot water into the bath through pipes from a boiler in the kitchen. They’re ever so well off, Jack’s grandparents.’
The look on Vinny’s face was enough to pull shades down on, Letty thought; Vinny, who’d become so stuck up since marrying Albert, having her nose put out of joint!
Jack began coming for Sunday dinner, part of the family now, and Lucy’s cheeks glowed even brighter than usual when she and Jack came back from Victoria Park, enough to make Dad remark, ‘All I ’ope is they’re be’aving themselves. If she gets in trouble before she’s wed, I won’t be giving ’er away, yer can bet your last farthin’.’
Letty had given up wondering if Jack would ever bring his friend along with him. He wouldn’t now. It was obvious David Baron had found her tiresome company, had merely been polite in saying he’d been delighted to meet her. Well, he hadn’t been her type, anyway.
‘Don’t know as I’d fancy all that bother tryin’ to be someone I ain’t,’ she confessed to Mum. ‘I suppose I’ll end up with someone like Billy Beans or Bert Wilkins.’ She’d given up the effort to improve her speech, since as she said, she’d probably settle down with a local boy. ‘But it don’t seem fair, do it? Vinny movin’ away to a different area now she’s all toffee-nosed. And Lucy’ll get just like her when she goes to live in ’er posh Chingford. Never mind, Mum, I won’t leave you and Dad on your own. Billy Beans does like me. If I was ter marry him eventually, you’ll always ’ave me near you.’
‘You could do worse, luv,’ her mother said philosophically, but her face was that of one who feared she might never see another marriage take place. ‘Both of them lads is nice-looking and presentable. And that young Wilkins boy from Ebor Street ain’t exactly hard up, him working at Watney’s Brewery in Whitechapel Road where his dad’s foreman, he’ll soon get promotion. And Billy Beans’ people are trade like us. You wouldn’t ever ’ave ter scrimp and scrape. You ain’t been brought up to that. And young Billy’s always bin keen on you, luv.’
Billy with his bright shoe-button eyes, his broad smile on broad features, blond hair always neatly brilliantined down from a centre parting, was a better choice than sallow-faced Bert Wilkins, though Letty would never let on to Billy, mostly because it sort of spoiled the romance, imagining herself as Letty Beans. Letitia Baron would have