Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys (60 page)

After she and Alice had cleared away the tea things, she determined that she
would
go out that night. In the scullery as they washed and dried the plates she leaned over to whisper to Alice.

‘Can you get the boys ready for bed tonight? I don’t want to give him,’ she nodded towards the kitchen, where her father sat, ‘any excuse to stop me going out.’

Eleven-year-old Alice was Nellie’s confidante and staunchly loyal. When their mother died, it had been Nellie who’d taken the children into her arms and comforted them. Their father believed in managing grief, as he managed his family, with an iron rod. She couldn’t remember him shedding a tear. He’d just seemed to grow more stern, surrounding himself with armour plating. His upright, tight, buttoned-up figure, walking behind the hearse, had never bent or faltered and, as they’d stood sobbing at their mother’s grave, his only words had been, ‘Control yourselves, you’re showing me up.’ Sometimes Nellie thought he showed more affection to the horses he drove than he did to his own children.

Alice readily agreed to help with the boys and Nellie went upstairs to change. She dressed with some care, in her best blue skirt, cinched in at the waist with a wide belt, and her frilly white blouse with the leg o’mutton sleeves. Not her absolute best, but she didn’t want any awkward questions.

‘I’m just popping out to Lily’s for an hour, Dad. The boys are in bed.’ She leaned down to kiss his cheek. He nodded and carried on picking at his pipe. He let her get to the kitchen door.

‘Make sure you’re back by ten and don’t let that Ted turn your head.’

Nellie raised her eyes, before turning back to him. ‘I don’t expect Ted’ll be there.’

Her father began plugging the pipe with tobacco; he didn’t look up. ‘Oh, he’ll be there all right, don’t worry your head about that,’ he said impassively. ‘And remember what I said, no later ’n ten!’

Nellie sighed, then carefully closed the door behind her and pulled her little blue cape off the peg in the passage. Her sister was there, to see her off.

‘Don’t talk to no strangers.’

‘Oh, Al, there
are
no strangers in Bermondsey!’ Nellie laughed at the very idea that their world of poor streets, bounded by the Thames, girdled by docks, stuffed with factories, permeated by smoke, and plagued with noxious smells, should contain anything so unexpected as a stranger. Bermondsey might be situated at the heart of a great metropolis, but for those who lived there it had the familiarity of a village, a soot-covered one made of London brick and slate roofs, but a village none the less, where everyone knew each other and where no one had to face life’s trials alone. Nellie reflected that, in Bermondsey, a street was as good as a family. Her real family, at times, felt a little diminished, despite her efforts.

Nellie threw her arms round her sister and kissed her.

‘Well, just look after yourself. You look a treat,’ Alice said.

‘Thanks, Al.’ Nellie did not consider herself a great beauty, but her complexion was peachy and her bright blue eyes always drew attention. And this evening she’d spent a while on her glory, her long chestnut hair. But as she closed the door behind her, she found herself musing that tonight Ted would no doubt be far more interested in his important guest than in Nellie Clark from Vauban Street.

*

The little room at the back of the Labour Institute was full. About two dozen women, seated on rows of hard-backed chairs, filled the small space. In spite of the stiflingly warm night, they kept on their broad, decorated hats and wide capes, their leg o’mutton sleeves alone seeming to fill the room, which buzzed with their high-pitched chatter. Ted and two other dockers were the only men there. Nellie and Lily sat in the front row, waiting for Ted to introduce his guest. He’d been excited on the way round to the institute, and had rushed them all off from the Boshers’ house so that Nellie hadn’t even had time to say hello to Lily’s mum. But then Ted had been excited through all this sizzling summer of 1911; sometimes Nellie wondered if it was the ninety-degree heat that had got him into such a fervour. If the country was being set on fire, then it seemed Ted Bosher was in the middle of it, stoking the flames. She had read the newspaper headlines – the ‘Summer of Unrest’ they were calling it, and Ted was certainly restless. Every day, for weeks, he had been on at her and Lily to join the union, full of tales of workers striking all over the country. Eventually he’d worn them down and tonight they’d agreed to hear this mystery speaker, for he’d refused to tell them who she was.

‘She’s important in the movement,’ was all he would say. ‘Wait till you hear her, she’s a bloody inspiration, she is.’

Nellie noticed that his eyes were sparkling and felt a wave of disappointment wash over her that the light in them wasn’t for her.

‘Oh, the
movement
,’ she’d said in mockery and then regretted it when he turned on her.

‘It’s the likes of you that keep us lot under the thumb. Just listen tonight as though you were a grown-up, that’s all I ask.’

Now, looking up at the lady standing next to Ted, she felt tired and irritated. She had no patience with do-gooders who came to improve their lot. A woman sitting next to them leaned over and whispered, ‘Looks like the big guns are out tonight!’

‘Who is she?’ Nellie whispered back.

‘It’s “Madam Mecklenburgh”!’

When Nellie looked unimpressed, the woman went on, ‘Well, that’s what we call her behind her back. Her real name’s Eliza James, and, speak as you find, she’s done a lot for us girls.’ The woman nodded in approval. ‘She’s high up in the NFWW.’

Nellie didn’t like to show her ignorance by asking what the NFWW was, so instead she asked, ‘Why do you call her Madam Mecklenburgh?’

‘Only ’cause she lives in Mecklenburgh Square, that’s where the name come from, I reckon.’

‘So she’s not a proper lady then?’ Nellie was rather disappointed.

‘Well, she might
act
like one…’ The woman looked at her as though she would like to say more, but just then Eliza James moved forward to speak.

To Nellie’s eyes, she certainly looked like a proper lady, with her chiffon scarf, wide-brimmed hat and her velvet-trimmed pale grey suit; all very tasteful and not cheap. She had a long face, wavy auburn hair and deep-set dark, almost black eyes. She looked to Nellie vaguely familiar, but a woman like her would not be from Bermondsey. Nellie could tell; it was the clothes. But the voice, when it came, told a different story. It wasn’t the cut-glass accent Nellie had been expecting, and the vowels spoke of origins much humbler than Mecklenburgh Square. She could tell that the woman had smoothed out the rougher edges of her accent, carefully sounding her aitches.
No
, Nellie concluded to herself,
if you was born a lady, then I’m the Duchess of Duffs!

But just as Ted had promised, she was an inspiration. She introduced herself as a leader in the National Federation of Women Workers and then took a long look around the room, as though taking the measure of her audience. Then she launched into a powerful, passionate condemnation of the poor wages and inhuman conditions in the Bermondsey food factories, which soon had the little room full of clapping women. She drew Nellie in and made her feel as if she was the most important person in the room. Three-quarters of the way through her talk, she asked them each to say which factories they worked for.

‘Duff’s,’ shouted Nellie, and the others followed with calls of ‘Pink’s Jam’ and ‘Crosse & Blackwell’, ‘Shuttleworth’s’, ‘Peek Frean’s’. Most of the factories mentioned had large numbers of women workers and paid the lowest wages. Lady or not, Madam Mecklenburgh certainly knew what she was talking about, for when each of the factory names were called, she came back straight away with the exact wages paid.

‘Pink’s? Six shillings a week for you, double for the men.’

Then she pointed at Nellie. ‘How old are you, young lady?’

‘Sixteen, madam.’

The woman smiled, as though at some secret joke. ‘You work eleven hours a day, the same as boys your age, but you only get half the wage, five shillings a week. And that doesn’t pay the rent, does it?’

Nellie flushed, but was determined not to be over-awed. ‘No, it don’t even keep me dad in tobacca!’

The girls around her laughed in sympathy. She was not the only one who handed over all her pay packet on pay day and counted herself lucky to get sixpence back to spend on herself. When Eliza James laughed too, Nellie noticed Ted joining in. But the thought of her father suddenly gripped Nellie with a stab of fear. He would never condone what this woman was suggesting.

She remembered the day, two years earlier, when she’d been taken on at Duff’s. She’d considered herself lucky to get a job there, as a powder packer. It was one of hundreds of food factories clustered in Bermondsey – ‘London’s Larder’. As well as the famous custard powder, Duff’s turned out blancmanges, baking powders, sherberts and jellies. She’d known it would be hard work, but nothing had prepared her for the excruciating back pain, after eleven hours standing at her bench, or the monotony of filling and folding custard packets, hour after hour. But the thing she’d learned to hate most was that pervasive custard powder, invading every pore of her skin, seeping into the seams of her clothes, clogging up her lovely chestnut hair with its sticky matt coating. But Nellie’s father wasn’t interested in her likes and dislikes. For him, it was purely a matter of economics.

‘It’s a good job and we need that five shilling,’ he told her. ‘Work hard and don’t you dare come back home, one day, and tell me you’ve been laid off.’

What they had planned tonight was disapproved of by many working men, her father included.

‘Lily, what time is it, do you think?’ she whispered. ‘I can’t be late back. Dad’ll skin me.’

When Lily pointed to the clock at the back of the room, Nellie leaped from her seat and dashed out, without even saying goodbye to Ted. It was gone ten o’clock and she was in all sorts of trouble.

Ernest James had insisted on sending his car to take her to Bermondsey. Eliza James had wanted to take the omnibus from Mecklenburgh Square that afternoon, and she would have enjoyed the ride. Surely the best place to be on yet another fiercely hot day, in this unending furnace of a summer, was sitting on the top deck of a London omnibus. But Ernest wouldn’t hear of it, so instead, she had made do with rolling down the window. At least, that way, she could enjoy the delicious breeze as she was driven across London Bridge. The south London streets had been eerily quiet. Normally, they would have been full of traffic: horse and carts delivering to and from the docks, jostling for road space with hansoms and the ever-increasing number of motor taxis and cars. But with the dockers on strike and the wharves all closed, the dockside streets had a dead, dull, aimless air about them. The factories had not yet turned out and those pedestrians who had braved the searing summer heat were visibly wilting; men and boys sweated in thick wool jackets, totally unsuited to the weather. Dockers were hanging around in jovial gangs, holding up placards, engaging any passer-by who showed an interest in their demands in conversation. As the car cruised smoothly along Tooley Street, she had breathed in the Bermondsey air, made more pungent by the heat bouncing off the tar-block roads. It was an odd mixture of horse dung, petrol fumes, old bones from the glue works, leather from the tanneries and the all-pervading spice: cinnamon and ginger drifting up from the spice wharves on the river, mingling with sweet raspberry and vanilla from the jam and biscuit factories. It was the smell of home.

Now, at the end of a long day of planning and meetings, Ernest’s driver was waiting at a respectful distance while she said her goodbyes. This evening’s meeting had gone better than she’d hoped for and she didn’t doubt that the cells of women they’d persuaded, in each of the fifteen factories, would be enough to carry the rest with them. All it would take was a single spark and, in this tinder dry Summer of Unrest as it was being called, a spark was all that was needed. The factory women were burning with a suppressed rage that seemed to have no outlet. They knew it was wrong that they worked the same hours as a man, for half the wage; they knew it was wrong that they worked in unsanitary conditions, for hours on end, with no breaks. Tonight, she’d heard the story of one mother so frightened of losing her position that she had her baby brought to her by one of her own young children, nursed the baby at the factory gates, then went back in to work. There were no concessions made for mothers, or children, come to that. And what enraged Eliza James most was that the men resented their women’s presence in the factories anyway. A woman deprived a man of a job, or that was their short-sighted way of thinking.

But not all the men were of that opinion and with the dockers’ support, the women’s courage had got the final boost it needed. Ted Bosher was a useful man to have on the ground. He understood the women’s grievances. His own sister was working all hours as a powder packer, for a few shillings and grateful for it, by all accounts. Eliza was also conscious of the power of his undoubted charms, which he used to good effect, she had noticed, to draw in even the most apathetic of the women workers. That bold little thing, sitting next to his sister, certainly couldn’t take her eyes off him. His face had been aglow all evening, though whether that was a result of young Nellie’s attentions, or her own, she couldn’t be sure.

‘We’ll have them all out in August, I guarantee it,’ Ted Bosher said at the end of the meeting. ‘This lot will carry them. After that speech of yours, you’ve turned them into the firebrands that’ll light the fire!’

He had a pleasant voice, and an easy manner, but his eyes had an intensity that Eliza James had grown to recognize in her years as a union activist. Such burning anger as she had seen in them could be as much of a danger to their own cause as it could be to their adversaries. She preferred a more measured approach.

‘I hope they’ve seen the sense in my arguments too. Fifteen thousand women, walking out on one day, has got to make their bosses sit up and take notice. But I know it’s going to be hard for the women. They’ll get opposition at home, especially the younger ones.’