Custard Tarts and Broken Hearts (24 page)

Lily was filling packets while at the same time sharing pasting and loading with Maggie Tyrell. Now Maggie shoved up, letting Nellie take her place at the trolley. Today it was Nellie’s turn to load.

‘I got carried away with the ironing!’ Nellie blew up a strand of hair from her forehead and tucked it up under her cap. Maggie gave her a sympathetic look. With six children to get ready in the morning, Maggie was always incurring late fines. Just as Nellie started loading the pile of waiting packets, Albert pounced like a stalking cat. She might have known it – he had a sixth sense where latecomers were concerned.

‘I’d about given up on you, Nellie Clark! You’ve been holding up the line! I can’t have you coming in late, Nellie, I won’t stand for it, d’ye hear me?’

Lily and Maggie dipped their heads and carried on working. Neither did Nellie pause; she carried on methodically loading and tamping down the packets. It wouldn’t do to stand idle, not even for a reprimand.

‘Sorry, Albert, it won’t happen again,’ she said, blushing with shame.

‘See it don’t!’ And he stalked off down the line, arms behind his back, stopping to pick up packets, checking chutes, while hands flew and bodies bent to their work under his scrutiny.

Ethel, who was filling at the next team, bent round to offer her opinion. ‘Bastard, ain’t he? I think it’s cos he’s so short, meself.’

‘Shhh, Ethel! Mouth Almighty!’ said Nellie. ‘I can’t afford to get on the wrong side of him!’

‘Sorry, love, I know I’ve got a gate on me, but I don’t like to see him bullying you. You’ve got enough on your plate with them poor children.’

Nellie was sorry now for speaking sharply to Ethel. She might be loud-mouthed, but she was large-hearted and always ready to defend the underdog. Ethel placed an empty packet under her chute, asking, ‘How’s things at home?’ The woman’s broad face was creased with concern. Pulling three packets off the bench, Nellie dumped them on to the trolley; it was nearly full.

‘Oh, we’re coping, Ethel.’ She couldn’t even manage a smile this morning; her brave face eluded her. She felt bone-tired and heavy-hearted.

Determined to push through her weariness, she hauled the trolley on to the tramlines that ran on a gradient the length of the room towards the lifts. She put all her weight behind it and shoved. Nothing happened. The gradient normally helped generate the necessary momentum to move the heavy trolleys. But today, however hard she pushed, she couldn’t get the thing moving.

‘Bugger it! Bloody trolley’s stuck,’ she blurted out, near to tears with the effort. In an instant Ethel was by her side.

‘Mind out.’ She almost lifted Nellie off her feet. ‘Let’s have a go.’ And with what seemed like the lightest of pushes, Ethel’s massive hands had the trolley rolling forward in seconds. Nellie took over with a grateful ‘Thanks, Ethel’, trundling the trolley the rest of the way herself. Once she’d returned to the bench, Lily moved aside.

‘Let’s swap. I’ll load today, eh?’ Lily offered.

‘But that’s not fair on you,’ Nellie protested, for they always split the various jobs equally over the week.

‘Don’t be stupid, Nell. You’re worn out already. You won’t last the day at this rate. Now get filling quick before he notices.’ Lily shot a look at Albert, standing further down the aisle of machines.

Nellie gave in; she had no energy to argue. As the morning progressed she hardly registered the banter around her, or the concerned looks from Lily. Her legs felt like water and she was beginning to doubt she’d have the strength to stand for another five hours. Perhaps she’d caught a chill while out on the penny-farthing? Soon she found herself back in the same loop of unanswerable questions about what she’d seen at London Bridge the other night. She wished to God she’d seen nothing at all.

She and Lily were making their way out at dinner time when Albert called her over. ‘You go on, Lil,’ she whispered. ‘I’m for it.’

Albert was studying a leather ledger, tallying up a list of figures. He stuck the pen behind his ear and lifted his round face to her. He didn’t look happy.

‘Do you know your team’s not done even half their quota this morning?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, it’s down to you.’

Her heart lurched.
Please God, don’t let him sack me
, she prayed silently.

‘And don’t think I haven’t noticed what’s been going on. You come in late, the girls are having to cover for you, and you’ve got the cheek to ask me for overtime!’

‘I’m sorry, Albert. I think I’m a bit under the weather.’

‘Well, under the weather or not, it’s not good enough. There’s plenty more’ll do the job if you can’t!’

She felt her legs trembling. ‘I really need the job, Albert. I’ll make sure our team catches up, I promise.’ Her hands were clasped behind her back, nails digging into her palms.

Suddenly he flung the ledger back on to the shelf in disgust. ‘Well, pull your socks up or you’re out.’

She took this as a dismissal, turned away, and walked as steadily as she could towards the double doors. Outside she practically fell over Lily and Ethel, who were both waiting for her. They had been eavesdropping.

‘Bastard!’ Ethel said, but this time Nellie didn’t tell her to be quiet.

For the rest of the week Nellie was preoccupied with keeping her job, and thoughts of Sam were relegated to those few drowsy minutes before falling into exhausted sleep at night. She was therefore surprised when he turned up at her door late on Saturday afternoon. He said he’d noticed the penny-farthing was missing a bolt, which he’d come to replace. She led him out to the yard, where he bent over the bike, quickly tightening the new bolt into position.

His face averted, still inspecting his work, he stammered, ‘It’s b-been playing on my mind, Nell, you know, what you saw the other night.’ He stood up to face her. ‘You said that it’s my business, and it is… but not the sort of business you think.’

Nellie sat down on the cart and motioned Sam to sit next to her. ‘Not your fancy woman, then?’ she said with a placating smile. But if not, then what had his guilty blushes meant the other night?

‘I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of, but there’s things I might not want known around here. People talk and I’ve still got a mother alive can be hurt by talk.’

When Nellie still looked puzzled, he went on. ‘Dirty laundry; you know what they’re like round here. If the front step’s not scrubbed, you’re a fallen woman. So what about having a sister who’s had two kids out of wedlock? How would that go down in Beatson Street, especially one that flaunts it.’

‘Your
sister
?’

As far as she knew, Sam had only one sister, and Matty was nowhere near childbearing age.

‘Matty’s not my only sister,’ he explained, interpreting her confusion. ‘The woman you saw me with at London Bridge was my elder sister. She goes by the name of James now, Eliza James.’

‘Madam Mecklenburgh’s your sister!’ Nellie had jumped up so suddenly that the trailer tipped up and Sam tumbled off the end. She offered him her hand and, brushing off his trouser seat, he shook his head.

‘I’m not proud of it, and to be honest I’m glad she changed her name to James. She broke my dad’s heart and I can’t forgive that. Don’t matter how much good work she’s done for others, she’s not done much good for her own family, Nell, I can tell you that.’

The revelation had stunned her, but so much of what she’d witnessed between Sam and Eliza now made sense. More than that, she now regretted letting Sam see how much she cared about his possible other attachment.

‘I’m sorry, Sam, about your dad, but we all make mistakes.’

For Nellie, Eliza James was still firmly on a pedestal and she couldn’t reconcile her heroine with this picture of a fallen woman and heartless sister, but Sam was immovable.

‘Mistakes? Once might have been a mistake, but twice! And it wouldn’t be so bad if she hadn’t palmed off her child. She had more important things to do, saving the world, didn’t she?’ he said bitterly.

‘She give it away?’

‘The first one, yeah, she give it away.’

He stopped abruptly and Nellie filled the awkward silence. ‘But the child I saw was just a babe in arms. Is she keeping it?’

Nellie was alarmed to see tears brimming in his eyes. He shook his head and sighed.

‘I’m not sure what she’ll do. She usually ends up doing whatever James wants, so I reckon it’ll be up to him.’

‘Ernest James is the father, then?’

Sam nodded, and Nellie had a flash of insight into her idol’s life as that man’s mistress. Ernest James had a reputation for being a tough champion of workers’ rights but a ferocious enemy. A man you would want on your side but never on the opposition.

‘He’s the type that usually gets his own way, I should think,’ she commented.

‘Eliza was only young when she went into service at Mecklenburgh Square. Dad always said she was James’s “project”. He was sure she’d come back to her family one day, but she never did. The strike was the first I’d seen of her in eight or nine years.’

‘But what’s she doing here? I thought they’d gone to Australia after the strike.’

‘She says she wanted to see us, but it’s a long way to come, seeing as she couldn’t cross the river to see us before! He’s not come back with her and reading between the lines, I don’t think he was pleased. But Mum looked on her last legs when Eliza last saw her; I think she wanted her to see the baby, in case…’

‘Anything should happen?’ Nellie finished for him.

‘That’s about it, yes.’

‘Is she going back to him?’

‘She never told me what her plans were, but now she’s seen Mum and the kids, I don’t expect we’ll see her for another nine years!’

‘So how did your poor mother take it?’

‘The thing you’ve got to remember about me mum is that she’s a lot stronger than she looks. I mean her health is bad, but her spirit, my God, Nell, she’s kept us going through everything and she’ll always speak her mind. You know what she said to Eliza, when she walked in? She said,
Oh, it’s you, I must be dying!
’

Nellie laughed. ‘Eliza probably gets her spirit from your mum, you know.’

‘I never thought of that before, but you’re right, she is like Mum in lots of ways. That’s probably why Dad idolized Eliza.’

‘Oh, Sam, I feel a bit sorry for your sister. It’s like she got herself caught in another world and couldn’t come back.’

Sam’s face hardened. ‘No, don’t make excuses for her. We all make our choices, don’t we?’

‘Yes, we do, and we all make our mistakes as well…’

Perhaps his thoughts now turned to her own big mistake, for he asked, ‘So have you heard from him – Bosher?’

‘No… but Lily has. You know he went to work on a Russian boat? Looks like he’s taken up with the Bolshies… and some Russian woman as well.’ Nellie felt that Sam was holding his breath, perhaps unsure what she wanted him to say, so she saved him the discomfort. ‘She’s welcome to him.’ And Nellie probed her heart to see if that were true. If she felt a twinge, she put it down to the memory of a feeling that would one day fade to nothing. But she had other mistakes on her mind. She paused. ‘Sam, you know Ted wasn’t the only mistake I made that year.’

‘No?’

‘I’m not talking about another feller. I wanted to talk to you about it when it happened, but there were so many things going on. Anyway, it wasn’t so much a mistake, more a promise…’

Her face was half-hidden in the twilight and she felt that made it easier to be honest. As dusk settled over the back yard, she uncovered the part of her heart that had been carrying the burden of that promise for almost two years. He listened quietly, till she had finished telling him how she’d been unable to disappoint his mother when she’d thought they were a couple, and had rashly made a promise to look after the children when Lizzie Gilbie was gone. How almost immediately she’d felt her mistake – that she would never be able to take on another family, without sacrificing her own – and how guilt had taken hold of her. When she fell silent, he lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

‘You’re a good girl, Nellie Clark,’ he said, ‘and I want you to remember what I said about Mum, how strong she is really. Nellie, I’m telling you, I gave her no reason to think we were walking out. I think she just had you pegged the minute you walked in our house for someone with a good heart. Her family comes first with her, Nell, never forget that. You walked in and she saw a way to make sure they’d be all right when she’s gone. She might be ill and frail, but she’ll use whatever comes to hand when it comes to her family. Listen, Nellie, make
me
a promise now, will you? You just get on with your life and be happy. You’re under no obligation. It’s my family and when Mum goes, I’ll be Mum, Dad, brother… everything to Matty and Charlie. You can trust me on that.’

He was letting her off! She waited for relief to flood her, yet all she felt was a sense of loss. It didn’t make any sense. Sam had given her back her future, handed it to her on a plate; all she had to do was reach out and take it.

19

Doing the Rounds

All that spring of 1913 and on into early summer, Nellie’s life was a round of constant toil. She and Alice woke at dawn to a couple of hours’ cleaning or laundry, before leaving for an eleven-hour day at Pearce Duff’s. The boys had learned to get themselves ready and off to school, but Nellie rushed home at midday to give them their dinner. In the evenings, after a tea of bread and dripping, they would all gather at the kitchen table, making matchboxes. Both girls worked on till late into the night, long after the boys were in bed. The future that Sam had handed back to Nellie was on hold, while she concentrated solely on their survival. But each week ended with the sickening knowledge that she was still three shillings short.

By now, she had sold or pawned everything of any value: her father’s best suit, her mother’s wedding ring, her own best woollen coat. She dreaded the inevitable day when Wicks would come knocking and there would be nothing to put into his loathsome outstretched hand. She could feel her strength draining away. Each week it got harder to cycle up to London Bridge and back with the matchboxes. Her clothes were starting to embarrass her. Not only were they old and darned, but they were much too big; she had been forced to cinch them in and sew in tucks. When she caught her reflection in the kitchen mirror, or passing a shop window, she now quickly looked away. She thought she looked a fright.