What about us? (25 page)

Once we reached New Cross, we
stood on a bridge and watched a steam train pull in and then pull out of the
station.  It was belching smoke, but looked very solid and like nothing I’d
ever seen before.  Feeling like a child, I wanted to ride on it and toyed with
the idea of taking the train to London.

Grace laughed at me.  “Well
maybe if we can’t get a boat from this ‘Pool’ place you mentioned, we can get a
train to Dover.  ‘Cos mister, I won’t be walking back again!”

By mid-afternoon we found
ourselves on Borough High Street and I realised I was lost.  We were both
ravenous and after a bit of teasing each other, we found the courage to
approach a street pie seller.  He seemed popular, as there was a queue, but it
was hard to tell what type of pies they were.  I tried to guess what was in the
sludgy gravy, apart from gristle.

“You probably don’t want to
know.” Grace declared, pulling a face, but we finished them anyway.

Not long afterwards, she started
to perspire, despite the biting cold wind.  She tried to tell me she was
alright, but I could see that she wasn’t and I wasn’t sure how much further we
had to go.  On a corner was a general store, so I went in to ask for directions
to Tower Bridge.  As I was talking to the woman behind the counter, Grace
fainted.  We raced outside, but were too late to stop her from hitting the
cobbles.  I picked her up and the shopkeeper told me to take her inside, out of
the wind.  The woman brought a chair from the back room for Grace to sit on and
started rubbing her hands vigorously, calling to one of the children to bring
the smelling salts and a glass of something or other.  I just stood there,
totally useless.

“Seems to me you ought to get
her into a warm bed.  A winter sea crossing is not what she needs right now.” I
was told sternly.

The most terrible images
started filling my mind.  What was wrong with her?

“Is there a hotel or anything
hereabouts?” I asked, feeling completely lost and starting to panic. 

The woman laughed at me.  “Not
the sort of hotel people like you should be staying in!”

She looked me over carefully
and then came to a decision.  “There’s a house for rent, just up Napier Street
here.  Number 29, furnished like.  Mr Bloom lets it by the day, the week or the
month.  You’ll find him at number 27.  Best you go and see him.”

Unable to come up with a better
idea, I did as I was told.

“Tell him Winnie sent you...” she
called after me, as I strode off to find Mr Bloom, pleased to have something to
do that I might be able to accomplish.

Mr Bloom was very happy to let
me rent 29 Napier Street for a week and between us, Winnie and I got Grace to
the house and then upstairs.  Then she expertly undid the many tiny fastenings
to Grace’s dress and peeled it off her.  After she’d gone and just as I was
helping Grace get her boots off, a small boy knocked at the door.  The
wonderful woman had sent one of her lads round with firewood and some coal, so that
I could get a fire going.

I’d just got Grace into bed,
when she pointed and said one word with a terrible sense of urgency.

“Bucket...!”

I quickly tipped the coal onto
the floor and handed it to her just in time.

She was very ill and I really
didn’t know what to do.  Winnie came by an hour or so later and asked me what
she’d eaten.  When I told her, she nodded knowingly.

“That’s probably the culprit.  Them
pies always have a nasty effect on my old Mum.  Never touch ’em meself.  She’ll
be alright, just keep ’er warm.  I’ll send one of the boys up with some water,
the coolness will probably ’elp.”

While she was undoubtedly
right, alarm bells started sounding in my head.  I wasn’t going to let that
water anywhere near her until it had been boiled.

By early the next morning,
Grace had nothing more to throw up and finally she slept for around twenty four
hours.  It wasn’t always an easy sleep, but at least her temperature came down. 
Winnie was there with me as she woke up.

“Where am I?” she asked,
clearly dazed and confused.

“In bed, where you should
stay.” Winnie told her firmly.

“Who are you?” Grace asked,
locating the face of the strange voice.

“Winnie Blunt, we’re
neighbours.  Or at least for as long as you’re in Napier Street we are.”

I could see this made little
sense to Grace.

“Err, what day is it?” she
asked.

“Saturday.” Winnie said
promptly.

“Yes, but when? I mean the date. 
I mean...” she trailed off.

Thankfully, our kind neighbour
thought it was just a product of the fever and supplied the details quite
happily.

“22
^nd
December and
if you take my advice, you’ll postpone your crossing until the New Year.  I’m
sure France will be just the same in1889 as it is now.”

“Yes, I’m sure it will be.”
Grace said, before she drifted back off to sleep.

By the time she was well enough
to get up, it was almost Christmas.  It was perishing cold too and neither of
us fancied a sea journey just at that moment.

“The songs always say ‘Paris in
the springtime’.” she mused, as we were discussing what to do next.

“True.” I agreed, humming a few
bars of a song I appeared to know, but couldn’t name.  “We could stay here for
the winter, get the hang of things and go in May.”

“We could and that way we’d
learn more about how to be in this time and it won’t be so flippin’ cold.”

She was shivering,
so I wrapped the shawl around her a little tighter.

“We’ll go shopping tomorrow.  You
need warmer clothes.” I told her, pulling her closer to me.

“We need more than that; we
need food and coal, lots of both and some sheets would be nice too.” she said,
snuggling into my side.

Winnie came to our rescue once
again.  She told us where to go to have some clothes made at a reasonable price. 
She also suggested to Grace that she hadn’t put on enough of the undergarments,
which made us both laugh.

“What did you say to her?” I
asked.

“I said it’d been warmer when we
left home.  What else could I say? She seemed to think that it wasn’t a good
enough reason to be ‘half naked’, as she put it.”

Winnie also helped Grace sort
out what was needed to keep house, while I arranged a longer tenancy with a
very happy Mr Bloom.  Our very kind neighbour quickly came to the conclusion
that Grace had had servants, which was why she didn’t know what was needed.

“She said my hands had never
done any real hard work.” Grace told me, holding her hands up.

In my opinion she had lovely
hands.

“Funny really, at home I do
everything myself.” she said, trying to see what Winnie had seen, but giving up
after a while, clearly none the wiser.

Winnie also arranged for a
sullen girl called Sal Grundy to come and help Grace out.  Apparently she was only
fourteen, yet already a mother.  I learnt from her father that the master of
the house she’d worked in had got her ‘in the family way’ then turned her out
with not a penny more than she was due.  Her parents were understandably angry
with the injustice of it all, but could do nothing.  The money she earned would
come in useful and Mr Grundy always passed the time of day with me when we met.

Knowing her story went some way
to explaining why the girl wouldn’t meet my eyes or stay in the room with me
when Grace wasn’t there.  Once bitten, twice shy it seemed.  The child,
Charlie, was about six months old and sickly, but under Grace’s watchful eye
they both seemed to flourish, losing that bony malnourished look that too many
people had.

Despite Sal’s hard work and she
did work hard, I’ll give her that, Grace was always busy.  The only things
she’d let me help with was the beating of the rugs and the turning of the
mattress.  For the rest she’d shoo me away and wouldn’t hear of my suggestions
that we get someone else in to help.

“No Jack, that money is all we have. 
I’m just doing my bit and it’s not all drudgery.” she’d insist.  “We’re living
in history.  You go and get your fill, then come back and tell me what you
found out.”

So that was the pattern of our life
in that winter of 1889, seeing for myself what I’d previously only been able to
read about.  I saw the changes as they happened, as the industrial revolution
propelled mankind forward to a future it had never before considered possible. 
I found that I knew without any doubt that the trend to move away from the land
and into the ever growing cities would continue.  I also knew that over time,
the land would no longer be used primarily for food production.  I felt sad,
knowing that this era would bring an end to patience; everything would become
faster and more immediate.  As we moved off the land, we would lose our ability
to wait and to nurture.

 I had some kind of premonition
that this would eventually push mankind to the brink of extinction.  It seemed
that not only did I hear voices on odd occasions; I also seemed capable of
seeing the future.  But I was not comforted, as I didn’t know how or why.  I
didn’t share these visions with Grace because they frightened me and she would
know that and I didn’t want that fear to be between us. 

Sometimes after dinner and
especially on bath night or if the smog was too thick to venture out, we would
stay in and put what knowledge we had accumulated together so that it made
sense.  We started making copious notes and promised ourselves that one day it
would be a book.

“I bet you never thought you’d
be an eyewitness to history as it happened.” she often joked with me.

But a lot of what we witnessed
was no joke.  The price for the pace of modernity in 1889 was high and life was
both hard and short for a lot of people.

Grace settled into her life in
history remarkably quickly and with seemingly little effort.  She fought with
the range until it complied with her will and wow, could she cook! She cooked
everything: bread, pies, cakes, biscuits, she even learnt how to make butter. 
Her meals were a real pleasure and I looked forward to dinner every night, so
much so that there was no need for us to even try any of the inns or eateries
that sprang up and disappeared around the wharves with amazing regularity.

After her brush with food
poisoning, she wasn’t taking any chances with our health.  I didn’t seem to
suffer from anything, not even a smog induced sore throat, while she suffered
from small ailments, usually weather related and thankfully nothing too
serious.

She even looked forward to her
weekly ‘day out with the girls’ as she called the wash house and the
information she brought back from these outings really helped me put life in
the late nineteenth century into perspective.  As it turned out, Winnie Blunt
was a local force to be reckoned with.  She had status in the neighbourhood and
the fact that she took Grace under her wing meant that we were accepted very
quickly.  Through Winnie, Grace had immediate access to the people around us.  I
collected facts, but she made the people and their lives real in a way that I
never could, even though I was there living it with her.  She brought the
mundane to life and gave it colour, vibrancy and pathos.

She was horrified in a way that
I wasn’t, by many of the little details of people’s day to day lives; the
uncertainty, the violence and the drunkenness.  She described it as
carelessness and I knew she recognised too much of her own life in theirs.

“But mine was never ordinary.”
she’d say sadly.  “I know I wasn’t the only one, but the difference is that in
my time no one expected that kind of life, while here and now it’s not only
what many people expect, it’s what’s accepted.”

Some of the things we saw
really upset her, but other things just filled her with admiration at mankind’s
sheer determination to get through life.

“Some of these poor women just
have so many children, without really knowing how they are going to cope, or
what will happen to the family if they die giving birth to the next one.  Yet
they hope.  They really hope that one day, for one of their children or
grandchildren it’ll be different.” she’d say, shaking her head.  “I know
they’re right to think that, but they don’t know the future like I do.  So for
them I suppose it’s just an act of faith.”

While she made an effort to
understand the people and their lives I always felt somehow outside it all, as
if I were just an observer, not really taking part.  Only my time with Grace
made me feel anything and gave my life meaning.  Never, not for a single minute
do I ever regret having met and loved her.

Being actually ‘in’ history did
a lot to take my mind off the fact that in any time or place, I didn’t know who
I was.  The frustration of knowing things without understanding why or how
became part of my normal life, as did the many sensations of déjà-vu that I
experienced.  I really missed my discussions with Dr Green, but I didn’t want
to burden Grace with my worries or the ongoing irritation with myself and my
situation.  I tried not to let frustration get the better of me and whenever I
had a strong sense of knowing something, we would add it to whatever else I
knew, to see if we could build some kind of picture, but it was a painfully
slow process.