The Whitechapel Girl Read online

  The Whitechapel Girl

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART TWO

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART THREE

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  PART FOUR

  Postscript

  Copyright

  For Jem, Jel, Jeremy…

  Three names for one much loved son

  PART ONE

  May 1887

  ‘I’m telling yer, Maisie, I ain’t going home no more and that’s final. I ain’t never going back to that bloody dump again.’

  ‘Aw, Ett, yer always saying that,’ Maisie dismissed her lightly.

  ‘Well, I mean it this time,’ said Ettie solemnly. ‘Cos if that bastard touched me once more I’d have to stick a knife in his great fat belly. I swear to God I would.’

  ‘Can’t yer mum do nothing about him, Ett?’

  ‘Like what?’ Ettie Wilkins spoke to her friend, but she was staring, a hard challenging glare, at a mud-spattered, tanglehaired boy who was trying to edge his way nearer to the front of the queue. ‘Oi you, just watch it,’ she snapped at the boy. ‘We nearly broke our necks getting here for the show, and we don’t intend losing our place to no snot-nosed, raggy-arsed kid like you. See?’

  The boy slunk back to his position further back in the crowd, his progress followed by jeers from his equally filthy mates who had dared him to sneak forward in the first place.

  ‘I was saying,’ said Maisie, casting a haughty, threatening look towards the now giggling boys, ‘can’t yer mum do nothing about him – throw him out, or something?’

  Ettie braced her thin, bony arms, preparing to use her elbows against anyone else who dared try to move in front of them. ‘Yer all right saying that, May,’ she said, ‘but yer know what it’s like with her and her blokes.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Maisie, ‘and I also know he’ll be gone in a couple of days – like all the rest of them.’

  ‘Right, and as soon as he’s gone, she’ll go down the docks and find some other “uncle” to come and live with us.’ Ettie rearranged the rat-trimmed tippet which adorned her cape. ‘She has to have someone to keep her in gin, don’t she?’

  ‘I know Sarah likes her drop of Jacky, but it can’t be that bad.’ Maisie stepped neatly in front of the boy who was making another attempt to take over their position in the line. ‘Watch him, Ett, he’s back again. We’ll lose our place to the little sod if we ain’t careful.’

  Ettie shuffled forward with her friend, forming a solid wall against all comers. They had been waiting for over an hour already, and no one was going to get in front of them, not if she had anything to do with it.

  ‘May, to be honest,’ she went on, with a world-weary sigh far too knowing for her barely seventeen years, ‘yer don’t know the half of it. Mum’s really got worse, soon as she’s finished her half-bottle every night, she’s out for the count. Sparko.’

  ‘So what’s new about that?’

  ‘Well,’ she began hesitantly, ‘the last couple of blokes she’s brought home – this one in particular…’ Ettie nibbled her lip anxiously. ‘Let’s just say that nowadays she don’t give a monkey’s who’s got his hand down me drawers.’ She paused and turned her eyes from Maisie’s searching gaze. ‘It really has got worse lately,’ she added quietly, her mind racing with the unspeakable memories of the night before. Even though it was a warm spring night, Ettie felt as though iced water was trickling down her spine. She closed her eyes and shuddered.

  ‘Bugger off!’ Maisie’s sudden, raucous shout brought Ettie back to the blessed relief of the present. The unwilling object of Maisie’s attention was a haughty, top-hatted man who had made the momentary mistake of oggling her, eyeing her lecherously as he walked past the queue outside the penny gaff in the direction of the London Hospital.

  ‘Just who d’yer think yer looking at, yer ugly old goat?’ May called out in her harsh cockney growl.

  The infuriated, red-faced man tutted and walked along quickly towards the hospital steps, mumbling indignantly about how the young people of today could all do with some lessons in manners, and how the lower orders no longer knew their place.

  ‘See, Ett. All blokes, they’re all the bleed’n same. All they’re interested in is a bit of how’s-yer-father. Pig’s face!’ She yelled at the departing figure. Then May returned her attention to her friend, laughing loudly with an appealing, yet slightly alarming lack of inhibition which showed the remains of her cracked and broken teeth as she threw back her head. ‘It’s nothing new, yer know, Ettie Wilkins. Yer might be prettier than most, but that don’t mean nothing. They don’t care what yer look like. They’re all at it. Even posh old geezers like him.’ Maisie jerked her head in the direction of the hurrying man, making her tatty straw bonnet bob precariously on her tightly pinned hair.

  ‘I dunno why yer laughing, May. It ain’t funny,’ said Ettie, still shuddering at the thought of the repulsive touch of her mother’s lodger. ‘I know Mum’s brought home some right dirty bastards in her time, but this one’s the worst. Honest.’ She hesitated. ‘He’s different somehow.’ She lowered her voice, aware that the other members of the queue were glad of her story as an entertaining distraction while they waited for the next show to begin. ‘He wants me to do him all sorts of “little favours”, as he calls them.’ Ettie’s voice began to crack. ‘He’s vile, May. Really vile. And he stinks terrible from working in the slaughterhouse. Makes me feel ill. No, I ain’t having no more of it, and that really is final.’

  ‘He wants a kick right up the jacksie by the sound of it,’ said May indignantly.

  ‘And I’d usually be the one to do it and all, yer know me,’ said Ettie. Her face tightened into a worried frown. ‘But I’m really scared of this one, May.’

  ‘You, Ettie Wilkins? Scared? I don’t believe yer.’

  ‘It’s the truth, May. He really is different to any of the others.’ Maisie looked steadily into her friend’s eyes; she couldn’t find even the glimmer of a smile in the deep blue, which usually sparkled with laughter, or at least with the promise of a bit of mischief. ‘Blimey. Yer serious, girl, ain’t yer?’

  ‘Too right I am. I’ve been thinking about it for days now, and I know there’s no other way. I’m gonna have to get out of that hole for good.’

  ‘It’s all right you saying it, but how yer actually gonna do it?’ Maisie, never one to concentrate for long on anything that either didn’t make her laugh, or didn’t involve something to eat or drink, let her attention be drawn by a pretty fair-haired young woman rushing up the hospital steps,
calling out to the man who had earlier made the mistake of giving Maisie the glad eye. ‘I know. Yer can get yourself all poshed up like her over there.’ She nodded towards the expensively dressed young woman. ‘Then you can get yourself one of them rich blokes and live in luxury up West.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have nice things?’ murmured Ettie flatly, ignoring Maisie’s sarcasm.

  ‘Because you know the only way the likes of us’d get clobber like that. And you’d wind up getting stuck with a kid and a dose of the whatsit chucked in for free and all. That’s why.’

  ‘Going on the game can’t be the only way out for girls like us,’ said Ettie wretchedly.

  Maisie desperately tried to lighten what was becoming an unfamiliarly serious conversation. ‘You don’t half go on,’ she said, nudging Ettie in her usual heavy-handed yet affectionately meant way, hard in the ribs. ‘Right bloody dreamer ain’t yer, girl?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I dream, eh? Tell me that.’

  ‘Leave off, Ett. To hear you go on, yer’d think yer was the only one ever got touched up by a bloke.’ Maisie was beginning to sound impatient. ‘Anyway, he’ll be long gone, like all the rest, before yer even know it.’

  ‘I don’t wanna talk about him no more, May, and anyway, it’s time I was finding me own way in the world. I’m off, and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Well, there are other ways.’ Maisie laughed, surprisingly shyly for her. ‘Why don’t yer find yerself a husband, eh? And there’s no need to roll yer eyes at me, Ettie Wilkins. There’s one or two decent fellahs around, even in Whitechapel. Me mum keeps saying I should get married, yer know. She’d been married nearly two years by the time she was seventeen.’

  ‘And she already had two nippers and all. No thanks, May. I’ve had enough of all that. That dirty swine pressing himself up against me every night has put me right off.’ Ettie closed her eyes and flinched at the memory which had again invaded her mind. ‘Makes me feel sick just thinking about it. Hands all over yer. Horrible.’

  ‘What, even with someone like our Billy?’ said May craftily. ‘I thought yer fancied him rotten.’

  Ettie opened her mouth but didn’t get the chance to answer.

  ‘Oi, oi, girls! Let us in then. Go on, May, shove up.’ A boy, not unlike the rest of the dishevelled, ragged urchins in the queue, had appeared in front of them and was now bouncing up and down like an eager puppy hoping to have his ears tickled.

  ‘Hello, Tommy, what you doing here?’ Ettie asked, ruffling his dirty, straw-coloured hair, glad of the distraction from the subject of his older brother Billy.

  ‘He’s meant to be seeing what he can find behind the hospital,’ said May threateningly. ‘So why ain’t yer, Tommy, eh? Answer me that.’

  ‘There ain’t nothing there, May,’ he said, shrugging his rag-clad shoulders.

  Maisie narrowed her eyes doubtfully at her little brother.

  ‘Straight up,’ said Tommy, all injured innocence. ‘They ain’t thrown the scraps or dripping out yet. I have looked, honest. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘Well, you’d better get back over there and wait, hadn’t yer? Cos if them other kids get it all, Mum’ll give yer a right larruping when yer go home empty-handed.’

  ‘Aw, May, let’s go in with yer. Please. I’ve heard all about this geezer from me mates. Bleed’n amazing they reckon. Let us in the queue. Go on.’

  ‘Don’t yer start whining, yer little bugger, or I’ll give yer something to whine about.’

  Tommy pulled himself up tall. ‘You start on me, Maisie, and I’ll run home and tell Mum yer going in the penny gaff.’

  ‘You do, Tommy boy, and yer’ll never talk again.’

  Tommy’s face puckered as though he were about to cry.

  ‘Hold up, Tom, calm down. Look.’ Ettie reached under her skirt into the pocket of her grey woollen petticoat. ‘There’s a farthing, go and get yerself some stickjaw off the Indian toffee man.’

  ‘Cor, thanks, Ett,’ he beamed, all sign of tears banished from his face and, just like he’d seen the stall holders do, he bit on the copper coin to check its authenticity. ‘How about giving us a kiss and all then, eh?’

  ‘Gerroff.’ Ettie cuffed him playfully round the ear. ‘Yer can take too many liberties yer know, Tommy Bury.’

  ‘What, prefer fellahs yer own age do yer, Ett?’ said Tommy, resuming his bouncing round the girls. ‘Someone more like our Billy?’

  Ettie went to speak, then changed her mind. Instead, she raised her hand to him again – less playfully this time.

  With eyes widened and an expression as righteous as a cherub’s, Tommy treated his sister and her friend to a sweet, gap-toothed smile, and skipped away to peruse the food stalls which night and day lined the Whitechapel Road, intent on spending his spoils wisely.

  ‘Yer’ll break our Billy’s heart one day, Ettie Wilkins,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘yer just see if yer don’t.’

  ‘And don’t forget them scraps,’ bellowed Maisie after her rapidly retreating brother, ‘or Mum’ll have yer. She ain’t soft like us. And no jumping on no wagons for no rides neither. Do you hear me? That’s all I need, taking you home all squashed to bits.’ She kept watching her brother’s gleeful progress along the stalls and barrows, but she spoke to her friend. ‘Yer didn’t have to give him nothing, Ett. And, like yer say, he can be a right little liberty-taker that one.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t want him telling yer mum we was going in here, now did we?’

  Maisie laughed at the thought of her mum finding out that she’d been in a penny gaff; her mother knew all about the dangers of such places. On the promise of a free cup of tea and an almost fresh bun, Myrtle Bury had once attended a meeting in the local mission hut. While she was there she had learned to call the shows put on in the penny qaffs “lewd and immoral displays of depravity”. Everyone in the area already knew that the gaffs were the haunt of many of the most notorious young criminals in the neighbourhood, but the mission had confirmed for Mrs Bury that they were certainly no place for her youngsters. A little woman, who always kept herself astonishingly neat and clean, Myrtle governed her rowdy offspring with a ferociously maternal concern for their betterment in life. So, after the meeting, gaffs were put strictly out of bounds for the Bury family, as were the people who had anything to do with them. Maisie didn’t dare say so, but she considered her mum’s attitude a bit of a joke considering what her beloved boys got up to, especially their Alfie, the oldest of the Bury brood. And everyone knew that Tommy, the youngest, looked set to follow in his big brother’s footsteps. He was already involved in the petty crime and other dodgy dealings that were a way of life for so many of the boys around Whitechapel. But Mrs Bury was a real one for turning a blind eye when it suited her. Even if they did have to survive on scavenging the left-overs and scraping out the dripping pans from behind the London Hospital, they could still be decent. And who could tell, one day they might just be destined for better things than their old mum had had to put up with? Although Myrtle Bury was no fool, like Ettie and a lot of others from round Whitechapel, she could still dream that life might get better.

  ‘Yer still can’t afford to treat Tommy like that,’ said May to her friend. Her voice sounded harsh, but her expression was one of gratitude.

  ‘Maybe it’ll stop him diving into the Thames for ha’pennies,’ said Ettie.

  ‘Maybe.’ Maisie didn’t sound convinced. ‘But I don’t think so. Not when there’s them silly enough to chuck the money in for him.’ She tutted. ‘I wish he was more like Billy and less like our Alfie.’

  ‘Ne’mind, Maisie, yer only five once, aren’t yer? Yer might as well let him take his chances when they come and live it to the full.’

  ‘Yeah, yer right, I suppose,’ she said gloomily, but then suddenly brightened. ‘And talking about chances coming along,’ Maisie winked broadly at Ettie, ‘just look who’s coming along now. Our Billy boy. Talk of the devil and he’ll appear they say, but more like an angel in his cas
e. Wotcha, Bill.’

  Ettie’s throat blushed a bright scarlet, the flush creeping uncontrollably towards her cheeks.

  ‘Hallo, girls,’ said Bill, acting very casually, aware of all the nosy-parkers in the queue. ‘Gonna let me sit with yer in the gaff, then?’

  ‘If yer like,’ Ettie answered, swinging her shoulders from side to side as she did so, and studying the apparently fascinating toe of her scuffed brown boot.

  ‘Yer looking nice, Ett,’ said Billy. ‘That green colour suits yer.’

  ‘It’s only a bit of old ribbon I got down the market,’ said Ettie coyly, fiddling with the emerald velvet band she had fastened round her neck.

  ‘Here, we ain’t got time for all that soppy lark, Ett,’ hissed Maisie, shoving her friend hard in the ribs. ‘Go on, quick. Shift yerself. Here she comes.’

  The appearance from behind the doorway’s flapping canvas of Lou, a huge-bosomed woman dressed in a short spangled costume, was met by ribald yells of enthusiasm from the milling crowd. They had been waiting for almost an hour and a half to go in and see the delights of the penny gaff, and were more than ready for the show to begin. Their anticipation had been whipped up by the advertisements for the acts, which were gaudily painted on the canvas sheeting covering the disused shop front. They had been standing in their ragged line, not very patiently, since the first house had been admitted. But now their wait had been well rewarded: they gasped in appreciation as the startlingly costumed woman lifted her already saucily brief skirts and spanked her ample, stockinged thigh. They had not seen so much leg since, well, since the last time they had been to a gaff.

  ‘Them what wants tickets, have yer penny ready!’ bellowed Lou, flashing her thickly powdered dimples.

  ‘So it’s all right if I come in with you two girls then, is it?’ said Billy eagerly.

  Ettie turned round to look at him. She was taller than most girls of her age in the East End, but Maisie’s brother Billy was even taller. He seemed to be looming over her. He was also older than Ettie, nearly nineteen, and had good prospects for a lad from the slums. Unlike his older brother Alfie, who earned his living doing what he called ‘wheeling and dealing’ and ‘doing a bit of this and a bit of that’, Billy was getting himself a trade, learning to be a cabinet maker with a firm in Shoreditch. Being in the furniture game had been his mum’s idea, anything to get him away from the hard and unpredictable existence of being a casual down at the docks that had killed his old dad, or the life of crime that was getting hold of his big brother, Alf. And although he’d be the first to admit that, with his pale red hair and his open, plain face, he was no oil painting, he was definitely a grafter and he could make Ettie laugh.