Farewell to the East End (21 page)

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Authors: Jennifer Worth

BOOK: Farewell to the East End
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They were both intelligent, but the gulf widened because they each had a different type of mind. His was entirely practical and instinctive, whilst hers was becoming increasingly academic. She would be doing her homework, and he would pick up a book and say ‘What’s this?’
‘Algebra.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A branch of mathematics.’
‘You mean arithmetic?’
‘Yes, if you like.’
‘Looks like a load of rubbish.’
‘Well it’s not. It’s beautiful.’
‘Beautiful! What do you mean?’
And so it went on. The publican spent just about all his time immersed in his business, and Julia spent all her time at school, in the public library, or doing her homework. Each of them, father and daughter, were locked into their own worlds of loneliness and unhappiness.
But the young can be perceptive beyond their years. Although she said little, or perhaps
because
she spoke little, Julia observed, absorbed and interpreted everything. She began to think that her father was not as indifferent as he appeared to be. She and her mother wrote to each other every week. Mrs Masterton never wrote to her husband, but every time a letter arrived from Skegness her father was eager to know the news.
‘How are the children, are they doin’ all right?’ and he grunted with satisfaction at the weekly good news. Once he shyly handed to Julia some pretty hair ribbons and a child’s bolero. ‘It’s Gillian’s birthday. Send this to her, will you? I hope it’s the right size.’ He kept on repeating, ‘I hope I got the size right. The woman in the shop said it would fit. It’s pretty, don’t you think? Do you think she’ll like it?’ Nervously he repeated the doubts and questions several times. When a picture done with coloured crayons and a letter in childish print arrived for him he seemed happier than Julia had ever seen him. She was surprised and saw her father with new eyes, but still she could not speak openly to him. Neither of them had ever shown any affection towards the other, and it was impossible now that he was so completely turned in on himself and his business, and she was verging on adulthood, expanding her mind and emotions to the world beyond the Master’s Arms.
 
Six months passed, and the boy seemed to be completely better after the summer at the seaside. The family returned home, and Mr Masterton had his little girl again.
Julia watched them together and was amazed at the liberties he allowed. Gillian would sit on his knee at breakfast and dip bread-and-butter soldiers into his boiled egg – something it would have been unthinkable for any of the other children to do. He brushed her hair and tied a ribbon in it. He seemed to notice the little boy more too, and was kind to him. ‘You did right,’ he said to his wife with grudging respect. ‘They are glowing with health.’
But tuberculosis is cruel. A person can contract the disease, and the bacillus will lie dormant for years, sometimes for a whole lifetime, and the host will not even know it is there. At other times it can strike and kill within months or even weeks – that sort used to be called galloping consumption. The little boy came home from school with a temperature. His mother put him straight to bed and called the doctor. He was transferred to the sanatorium and given all the treatment known at the time. But, three months later, the doctors advised that there was nothing more that could be done for him, and he would be happier if he came home to die.
Grief again gripped the family with cold, grey hands. The boy was laid out in the parlour, like his brothers before him, and family and friends came to pay their respects. ‘You’ve got your girls to comfort you,’ they said to the weeping mother. ‘It always strikes the boys first. It’s their constitution, see.’ Mrs Masterton did not ask her husband to close the pub; she knew it would be useless. ‘I’ll come to the funeral,’ he said, ‘In the meantime, business as usual.’ Daytimes were quiet enough, but each evening the racket started. ‘I hate the pub,’ said Mrs Masterton, who looked more like sixty than forty. ‘So do I,’ said Julia. ‘With all my heart, I hate it.’
Julia passed her School Certificate with Matriculation. She had but one longing – to leave home. But it was not easy for young girls in the 1930s. Britain was in the grip of the Great Depression, opportunities for girls were few, and wages were very low. She wanted to continue her studies, but could not do so without money. It should have been possible; the pub was profitable and her father was not hard up, but she did not feel she could ask him to finance a college course. She discussed it with her mother, who said, ‘You must ask your father,’ but so wide was the gulf between father and daughter that she could not bring herself to say a word. So, in the end, she applied to the Post Office for telegrapher’s training. She went to Leytonstone, which was more genteel than Poplar but less interesting, and lived in a hostel for girls.
She was lonely, very lonely. She never felt herself to be one of the girls. She always felt apart from them, separated by something inside her that she could not understand. She developed the habits of an observer, sitting on the outside of a group of giggling girls, watching, but quite unable to join in their light-hearted chatter. This was not popular. At different times several girls demanded, ‘What are you looking at us for?’ to which she had no answer. They proclaimed her stuck-up. She was friendly, in a superficial way, with several of the girls, but had no real friends. Once she did venture out with a crowd of girls, and afterwards vowed never again! The greatest part of her time, when she was not working, she spent in the public library, and she read everything available – history, novels, theology, travel, science fiction, poetry – literally anything she could lay her hands on. The world of books extended her mind and compensated for the dull routine of the telephone exchange. She dared not leave her job because in the depression of the 1930s she was lucky to have a job at all.
She did not really enjoy the work, either. She applied herself, but knew in her heart that, intellectually, it was beneath her. The superintendent was a bitch, and seemed to pick on Julia, perhaps because she was different, and tried to make her life a misery. It was not a happy time, but at least she was away from the foul atmosphere at home between her mother and father, away from the riotous revelry of the pub, and away from the figure of death that seemed to stalk every room. She would put up with anything rather than go back.
Each week mother and daughter corresponded. Neither of them had much to say in their letters, but it kept them in touch. The best news was always that Gillian was well, doing nicely at school, was friends with the vicar’s daughter, was going on a Sunday School outing, and so on. The mother said little about herself, and nothing about her husband.
Then came the terrible news that Gillian was unwell. The vicar was praying for her. The doctor had been called. A sanatorium was advised. The mother went with the child, and the husband rented a small cottage for his wife so that she could be near. The sanatorium came highly recommended, but then they heard that the air in Switzerland would be better. Santa Limogue in the Alps achieved a very good cure rate, it was said. So a place was booked, and Gillian and her mother crossed the Channel in the middle of winter by sea, then were conducted by train to the haven of miracle cures for tuberculosis. But the journey, lasting two days and nights, was too much for the child, and she died shortly after arrival.
Julia wept. Her family was cursed. She hid her tears under the bedclothes in the dormitory where she slept with twenty other girls, and during the day she was more silent than ever. She wrote a long, grieving letter to her mother, for the first time opening her heart to her, which to her surprise she found liberating. She wrote a brief letter to her father but could not think what to say. She remembered him with little Gillian on his knee, as she dipped soldiers into his boiled egg; she remembered the present of hair ribbons and a bolero. But still she could not think of what to say to him. So in the end she sent a few words on half a sheet of notepaper, to which he sent no reply.
The funeral took place in Switzerland. The mother returned home, but after a few months she left her husband to live with a sister in Essex. Correspondence continued between mother and daughter, and they met every so often and had a day out together. The father continued to run the pub, but they never corresponded, and Julia never visited. In spite of loneliness, which had become a way of life for Julia, she did not regret leaving home. The memories of drunken revelry repelled her, and thoughts of death haunted her.
No, she would never, she vowed, never go back to the Master’s Arms.
TUBERCULOSIS
 
Youth grows pale, and sceptre-thin, and dies.
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, by John Keats
 
 
Tuberculosis is as old as mankind. Evidence of the disease has been found in a Neolithic burial ground near Heidelberg, Germany and in mummies from Egyptian tombs 1000 years BC; and Hindu writings refer to ‘a consumption’. Hippocrates used the word
phthisis
to describe the cough, wasting, and ultimate destruction of the lungs. The disease is universal, and bears no relation to climate. It has been found in native tribes of North America, in primitive African tribes and amongst the Inuits of Alaska; China, Japan, Australia, Russia, Corsica, Malaya, Persia have all known it. There is probably no tribe or nation on earth that has been free from tuberculosis.
The disease has waxed and waned throughout recorded history, usually starting unnoticed, then reaching epidemic proportions, then waning as the population acquires collective immunity to the tubercle bacillus, over approximately a 200-year cycle. In Europe and North America it reached epidemic proportions between around 1650 to 1850 (varying somewhat from nation to nation), and it has been confidently concluded by medical scientists and historians that at the height of an epidemic 90 per cent of any population would have been infected. Of this number 10 per cent would have died. The lungs are the main focus of the bacillus, but they are not the only target; the meninges, bones, kidneys, liver, spine, skin, intestines, eyes – practically all human tissue and organs can be and have been destroyed by tuberculosis. It was called ‘the Great White Plague of Europe’.
Historically, the highest morbidity from tuberculosis occurred between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Throughout European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the tremendous creative outburst of the ‘Sturm and Drang’ writers and poets of the Romantic movement dominated the public imagination. Today we look back on their sickly characters, amazed at apparently healthy young women fainting and going into a terminal decline, or languorous youths too weak to do anything much except sit around looking pale and interesting and writing poetry. But this was no morbid fantasy. Lassitude, weakness, weariness, loss of weight and colour were common amongst the young, and they were early signs of infection, unrecognised by most people. By the time coughing, fever and lung haemorrhage occurred the condition was called consumption, and it was too late for effective treatment. The flower of youth was gathered in its prime.
From ancient times there has been a belief that some relationship exists between tuberculosis and genius. The intellectually gifted are the more likely to contract the disease, and the fire which consumes the body makes the mind burn more brightly. Throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea was fostered in the public imagination that consumption was the product of a sensitive nature and a creative imagination. Did not famous musicians, poets, painters and authors die from consumption? The tenuous connection was widely accepted with gratitude by those grieving the death of an only son or a beloved daughter. Grief needs an outward expression, and if a mother can interpret a few morbid poems written by her dying son as evidence of a genius snatched too soon from the world, she is somewhat comforted.
Indeed the immense creativity of this period of European history might have been an indirect product of tuberculosis. Opium was widely prescribed for the control of coughing, and it has been said that many consumptives who could afford it were addicted to opium. Many drugs are hallucinogenic, but not all arouse creativity as opium does.
 
Dwellers in the cold North assumed that grey skies, foggy winters and biting winds caused tuberculosis. Therefore the consumptive rich flocked in droves to Southern climates, trying to escape the cold North, but to little avail. They carried the seed of death with them and spread it amongst their hosts. In the South of France, Nice, once a pretty fishing village, suddenly became fashionable. Hotels were built, and filled with cadaverous consumptives, ghostly pale, with sunken features and haunted eyes. It was said that performances at the Opera House could not be heard above the sound of coughing and spitting! Rich Americans fled south to Florida and New Mexico to beg of the sun a last ray of hope. But the sun had no healing powers to cure advanced galloping consumption; in fact, exposure to the sun could have a negative effect.

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