The Whitechapel Girl Read online

  ‘Child, what are you doing?’ she demanded firmly.

  ‘What’s it gotta do with you?’

  Celia moved closer to the edge of her vantage point beneath the gaslight and looked more carefully. She could just make out the stunted, prematurely aged features of a malnourished boy of about seven years old.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said more gently. ‘I only want to know what you are doing.’

  ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘You want information – so how much is it worth to yer?’

  Celia couldn’t help herself, she laughed out loud at his audacity. ‘How much do you think?’

  The boy could hardly believe his luck. ‘Penny?’

  ‘How about tuppence?’ she said, desperately trying to control her ill-mannered amusement.

  The words had barely left her lips before the boy had clambered up the steps and was standing by her side. His bare feet and legs were covered in a layer of shiny grey river mud right up to his waist, dotted here and there with unidentifiable bits of detritus. The smell which radiated from him was equally indefinable, but probably resulted from a long-term combination of river water, effluent and the innumerable discarded sweepings of the metropolis.

  ‘Deal!’ he said in his serious little voice, spat on his palm, and held out his absurdly dirty hand for Celia to shake.

  With some difficulty, Celia overcame her reluctance and touched her gloved hand to his filthy fingertips. She would throw the gloves away at the first opportunity.

  ‘Now,’ he said, very businesslike, ‘what do yer wanna know?’

  ‘Well. Where do these steps lead, for a start?’

  ‘Waterman’s stairs, these are, lady. So’s the blokes can get up and down from their barges and that. Otherwise it’s a bleed’n long way to jump when the tide’s out.’ He let out a loud, spluttering, coughing laugh at his joke.

  ‘You have a chest complaint?’ asked Celia solicitously, making sure that she stood well back in case of infection – she had learnt some useful things from her father.

  ‘All of us mudlarks gets bad chests. It’s the damp, see. Ain’t so bad when it’s warm. We do a bit of penny-diving then and all.’

  ‘Penny-diving?’

  ‘Yeah, me and the other kids dive in the river for coppers what gentlemen and ladies like yourself throw in for us. Trouble is, when it is warm the whole place stinks something rotten. Worse than indoors then, it is, and that’s saying something. You should smell the pong in our room. Horrible!’ He laughed again, a racking, rattling wheeze that made him hug his sides with the pain.

  Celia put out a tentative hand of concern. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Never better, lady,’ he said, winking broadly as he kissed the two penny-pieces she had given him for his tale. ‘It’s the winter that’s the bugger. I’m glad that’s over. Freezes yer arse off that do, missus. Next time I’m planning to go into the House of Correction, I am: that’s me plan for this winter. Do something a bit naughty,’ he smiled cheekily, ‘if yer gets me drift, and I’ll be set up for the winter then, won’t I? Snug as a bug. A set of clothes and a bit of grub. What more could yer want?’

  ‘But how about your family?’

  ‘They’ll just have to manage without me, won’t they?’

  ‘You mean you help finance your family?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Ermm, nothing.’ Celia was confused. ‘Well, no. What I actually meant was, don’t your family support you?’

  ‘Yer’ve not been round here before, have yer?’ he said, his wide grin showing more gaps than teeth.

  ‘No. No I haven’t as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Well, lady, yer take me advice and don’t hang around here too long. It ain’t safe for the likes of you.’

  ‘Thank you for your concern.’

  ‘Any time!’ He kissed the pennies again and slipped them into a pouch hidden inside his ragged trousers. ‘Cheerio, missus,’ he called, and was back over the side and on to the muddy bank before she could stop him. ‘I’ve got to get on,’ his little voice called up in explanation. ‘The tide’ll be coming in soon.’

  Celia walked back along the alley towards the Highway, not sure where she was going, just walking. But when she reached the main road she turned on her heel and hurried back to the stairs. She called down into the gloomy shadows below. ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘No, I bleed’n don’t,’ came the reply. ‘I lives in Whitechapel, missus. Near Flower and Dean Street. I only comes down here for me work.’

  ‘Will you take me there?’ she asked the disembodied voice.

  ‘Do what?’ he asked, suddenly suspicious, wishing he’d never mentioned Flower and Dean Street. She might be one of them do- gooders that sometimes came round, ready to split you up from your little brothers and sisters and send you away to some horrible place in the country. He’d heard all about them from the other kids.

  ‘Please,’ she persisted. ‘Show me where you live.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll give you a shilling.’

  Almost immediately he was up the steps and had reappeared by her side. ‘Let’s see the colour of yer money first, then,’ he said, still sceptical.

  Celia handed him a shiny coin which he examined closely.

  ‘Seems all right, I suppose,’ he said paying her the same close attention as he had to the shilling piece. ‘Yer ain’t from no workhouse or orphanage or nothing are yer? Me mum’d kill me if yer was.’

  ‘I promise, I’m nothing to do with such a place.’

  ‘Yer’d better be telling the truth,’ he said firmly. ‘Or me mum’ll kill you and all,’ he warned. ‘With her bare hands. Yer ready, then?’

  ‘Do you think you might leave that here?’ she asked, indicating the grisly remains of some long-dead animal he was holding.

  ‘You bonkers? That’ll boil up lovely for a nice bit of stew.’

  ‘Would another shilling make you leave it here?’

  He looked at her with raised eyebrows, confounded by such profligacy. ‘If yer like.’ He took the money from her warily, not sure how to treat this obviously mad woman, and then carefully secreted the putrid haunch of meat by the steps. ‘I’ll come back for that tomorrow. If yer don’t mind, that is.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Celia said. ‘But won’t the rats get at it?‘

  ‘Probably,’ he said simply.

  Once they were away from the river, the scrawny child lost his fear that she was either going to kidnap him, bash him over the head, or do some other unspeakably horrible things to him. He actually became quite jaunty walking along by her side, his little body swaggering like a bantam cock strutting round its coop.

  ‘Joe’s the name, missus,’ he piped up suddenly. ‘Joe O’Meehan.’

  ‘How do you do, Joe. I’m Miss Tre… Celia,’ she corrected herself. Now it was she who was wary of being compromised.

  He led her through a maze of grim, narrow streets towards the place he called home. Now and then he’d burst forth into a flow of barely intelligible phrases. The language was English, but for Celia the speed and accent with which he spoke made the meaning almost incomprehensible.

  ‘Me granny saw someone hanged, yer know,’ he chirruped quite suddenly, with no reference to anything he’d said before, but obviously feeling that he had to entertain his paying companion.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Celia thought that she must have misheard the child.

  ‘At Newgit. Public hanging. Right lark that must’ve been. Wish I’d been there. She sold pies to toffs like yerself, something for them to nosh, see, while they watched. Earned a right few shillings she did and all. Told me all about it. That’s what yer have to do if yer wanna make a good living, boy, she always said to me: earn off the toffs. Hanged ’em, they did.’ He made a macabre pantomime of the act of execution. ‘Like that. By the neck till they was goners. There’s a good model of it on one of the stalls down the Whitechapel Road. I’l
l take yer to see it if yer like.’

  When they eventually crossed yet another wide and noisy thoroughfare, and entered yet another network of innumerable vile-smelling courtyards and alleyways, crammed full of cheap tenement lodgings, Joe became silent and watchful. The further they went into the labyrinth, the more sensitive he seemed to become to his surroundings and to the sporadic comments from passers-by about his strange companion. Not once since they had entered the world of ill-lit, insanitary byways, had anything like a proper road intersected their path.

  He suddenly indicated for her to duck down, and then scampered ahead of her into a brick tunnel, not three feet wide and barely five feet high. When she was finally able to raise her head again, she found herself in a cramped yard scarcely fifteen feet across, with a cracked gutter running its length, and incongruous dusty weeds flowering between the filthy cobbles.

  Bernsley’s Court, said the rusted metal street sign. All the doors to the houses which lined the four walls of the court were open to the world, the elements and the neighbours. But she could not make out anything of the interiors, as the hallways were far too dingy, although she was all too aware of the vermin which were everywhere. Only one corner of the court had anything other than a tenement: the side entrance to an alehouse. From its peeling door wafted the smell of stale beer; the sounds of an ill-tuned piano, accompanied by cracked, smoke-coarsened voices, drifted out on the thick, rank air.

  All the buildings had wooden shutters totally devoid of paint, most of which hung tipsily from their rusted hinges. What windows there were were mostly mended with paper or stuffed with rags. Plucking up her courage, Celia peered through one of the few remaining panes of glass in one of the windows.

  When her eyes grew accustomed to the shadows within, she let out an involuntary gasp. She could not believe it. It really was far worse than the pamphlets had even begun to suggest.

  ‘What the hell d’yer think yer doing?’ A gruff, tobacco-roughened voice snarled from inside the dark room.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Celia, devastated to be caught prying into the woman’s home. ‘This young lad brought me. I was hoping to speak to some of the women and girls who live here.’

  ‘What young lad?’ the disembodied voice wanted to know.

  Celia looked round the court. ‘He was here a moment ago.’

  ‘Aw yeah? Go on, get off with yer. Yer another one of them bleed’n missionaries, ain’t yer. All Bibles and hallelujahs. We want grub, not sodding God. Now go on, bugger off.’

  ‘No, please. You don’t understand. I only want to talk.’

  ‘What about?’ The woman’s voice now took on the suspicious tones Celia had heard earlier from her young guide.

  ‘About your lives here.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘As much as you feel able to tell me.’

  ‘No yer stupid cow, how much yer gonna pay me to talk to yer?’ Celia remembered her deal with Joe: she should have realised that it appeared to be the custom in these parts. ‘Oh, yes of course. What do you think?’ She still had a lot to learn about negotiating with East Enders.

  The woman turned to an invisible companion and whispered something. Her voice was kept low but she was hardly able to conceal her glee at having caught herself a real live one.

  ‘I’m Ada,’ the voice said suddenly, in what were now very friendly tones. ‘If yer take me and me mate Florrie here down the Frying Pan for a couple, then we’ll both talk to yer. How will that do?’

  ‘That will be perfect,’ said Celia, unsure as to exactly what the Frying Pan might be, and totally unaware of the interested crowd which was gathering behind her.

  The two women stepped into the court from the passageway to a mixture of derisive snorts and hollered comments. But Celia ignored all the noise: she was too taken aback by the sight of the two women. At first she could hardly take in what she was seeing. Their dull tangled hair was scragged back, exposing lined faces, deeply ingrained with dirt. They could have been any age from thirty to sixty. Or any other age for that matter. Each had a clay pipe stuck in the corner of her mouth.

  Florrie was wearing a crushed straw hat, which might once have been a black bonnet, with a wretched bent feather sticking up from the brim. Ada had on a man’s flat cap, pulled well down over her ears. Both wore shabby men’s boots laced up with string. Shawls that were more holes than wool were wrapped round their plump shoulders and crossed over their abundant chests.

  ‘Ready?’ the one with the flat cap asked. Then, without waiting for a reply, she continued, ‘I’m Ada and this here’s me mate Florrie. This way, dearie. Come on.’

  Celia walked out of the court flanked on either side by the women – they had no intention of letting such a potentially valuable source of gin escape them. Much to Celia’s relief, save for a few ribald remarks, her companions loftily ignored the cheye-eyeking of the women who were sitting in the evening air outside the court’s depressingly dark houses on old kitchen chairs.

  ‘So who’s yer fancy friend then, Flo?’ one of them yelled.

  ‘Look at the duchess with Ada and Florrie,’ another hollered. ‘Who’s she think she is, then?’

  Celia wasn’t so impressed when they turned out of the court into a maze of narrow streets, the women blithely choosing to ignore a street fight. A bulky brute of a man was viciously laying into a tall, wild-haired, bare-breasted woman.

  ‘Shouldn’t we do something?’ Celia asked frantically, all the time trying to avoid staring at the woman’s semi-nakedness. ‘Why doesn’t someone intervene?’

  ‘You don’t mess round with big Katie Nolan,’ said Ada, nodding wisely. ‘Specially when she has the drink in her.’

  ‘But that beast is taking off his belt to her.’ Celia flinched as visions of her father’s brutality crowded her thoughts.

  ‘Don’t yer worry yerself about Kate,’ grinned Florrie, her pipe bobbing as she laughed. ‘She’ll come off best. She always does.’

  As they rounded the corner and went down an almost pitch-dark alley, which led them into a court almost identical to the one they had just left, a howl of pain and rage was heard from behind.

  ‘Hark, that’ll be that old bugger getting what-for,’ Florrie added sagely.

  ‘Bleed’n good job and all,’ said Ada, with evident satisfaction at the outcome of the fight. Then she touched Celia’s arm, guiding her round a hole in the broken pathway. ‘Watch yerself on them stones. Now through here, girl, and here we are.’ She pointed to a pub across the road. ‘The Frying Pan. Our favourite, innit, darling?’ she said fondly to her friend Florrie. ‘Good for business and all,’ she added, tipping her a sly nod.

  The Frying Pan, standing at the corner of Brick Lane and Thrawl Street, was crowded with rowdy drinkers, both men and women. Some were standing alone, others were in noisy groups, shouting and laughing to one another across the cramped counter. In the big, mottled and cracked looking-glass behind the bar, Celia could see reflected a huddle of men standing in the corner, buying and selling goldfinches in tiny wooden cages.

  ‘Find us a table then, Ada,’ commanded Florrie. ‘We don’t wanna stand around all night, do we? The lady wants to talk to us, remember?’ She poked her friend hard in the ribs. ‘And she wants to buy us a little drink.’

  ‘I don’t think I could do that,’ said Celia, panicking at the idea of having to approach the bar with their order.

  Ada quickly came to the rescue. ‘Don’t worry yerself, dearie, I’ll do it.’ She turned haughtily to her friend. ‘And yon, Florrie. You can find us a table.’

  Unaware of the potential row which was brewing, Celia held up her bag and took out some coins. ‘How much do you need for drinks?’

  ‘That’ll do!’ said Ada, snatching a half-crown from Celia’s hand. She raised her eyebrows at Florrie in wonder and delight, and made her way over to the bar.

  Florrie glared at a quiet little man sitting inoffensively at one of the beer-stained tables. She stood there, hands on hips, staring
silently at him until he had no choice but to move, forced to do so by the sheer discomfort of being the object of her menacing attentions.

  ‘Sit yerself down, dear,’ Florrie instructed Celia, all smiles again.

  Ada came back from her errand at the bar and slid a glass in front of each of them. ‘Get that down yer neck!’

  Celia choked over the raw, unrefined gin. ‘Whatever is it?’ she gasped.

  ‘Satin. Jacky. Mother’s Ruin. They calls it all sorts,’ said Ada, sniffing loudly and wiping her mouth on her greasy sleeve. ‘But it makes no odds what they call it. It all tastes the same going down yer gobhole, don’t it?’

  The taste of the gin might have been appalling but it was less sickening to Celia than the air which swirled around her, thick with the sweaty stench of unwashed bodies, the pungent smoke from the clay pipes and the unbearable heat given off by the wood-fuelled fire which blazed in the grate. Good works were going to be considerably harder to carry out than she had imagined.

  * * *

  ‘You claim you all live in that one basement room? Your whole family?’ Celia said, still sipping at her first drink, while Flo and Ada swallowed their sixth – or was it seventh – shot of gin. She felt that she might be going mad. The rules which usually applied to the world were all being turned on their head.