London - Edward Rutherfurd [547]
It had been hard for a single woman with a child in Whitechapel. Some had it worse: families with six or seven children and a father out of work. Thieving and prostitution were the only way for them, and disease and death usually followed soon. For Lucy, it had been keeping her little boy out of that condition that was the great struggle. His father had tried to help surreptitiously in the five more years he had lived, but after that she had been alone.
She had worked at a variety of menial occupations to feed herself and the child. She had managed to persuade the boy to attend a parish school, for which she had to pay a few pence. But he had grown bored, preferring to run about and find odd jobs. By the age of twelve, though he could read a little and write his name, young William was working most of the day at a boat-building yard where out of kindness the master had agreed to let the boy apprentice to the trade. But he would not stick at it and by sixteen he was seeking casual work at the docks. By nineteen, he had married the daughter of another docker. By twenty he had a son of his own who died at six months; then another; then a daughter followed by two more, both sickly, who died. Eight years ago he had lost his wife in childbirth. Such things happened; men married again. But William did not. He took to drinking instead. And so, at the age of sixty, Lucy had found herself, in effect, a mother again.
Whitechapel itself had changed significantly by this time. In the early 1880s in Eastern Europe a series of terrible pogroms forced a large section of the Jewish population to emigrate. Many were able to flee to the United States, but a large number, some tens of thousands, made their way to tolerant Britain; and many of these new refugees, like others before them, found their first home in the East End by the Port of London.
The transformation was astonishing. Some English and Irish stayed, others moved into neighbouring districts to make way, as street after street of Whitechapel became Jewish. The new arrivals were usually, like most refugees, very poor. They wore strange clothes and spoke Yiddish. “They keep themselves to themselves and they don’t give any trouble,” Lucy noted approvingly. But she moved into nearby Stepney with her neighbours all the same. And there, while her son sometimes worked, and sometimes remembered not to drink his meagre wages, she found work at a factory that made waterproof clothing and did her best to help two grandchildren to survive.
In one respect she did a little better. Since 1870 it had become compulsory for children to attend school, and even in the East End schools of some kind were now to be found in every parish. Not that it was possible as yet to enforce the law in practice. Few children attended more than sporadically and with the boy, Tom, she was forced to give up when he was ten. “You’ll end up like your father,” she warned him. “I ’spect I shall,” he would reply casually, and she recognized that there was nothing she could do for him. But his sister Jenny was quite another story. By the age of ten she was earning a few pence helping the master teach the other children how to read. Something good, Lucy prayed, might finally come out of the sacrifice she had made all those years ago, to keep her disappointing son. Jenny could yet be saved.
Five years ago, because her legs were weak, Lucy had been obliged to give up going out to work. But for a woman sitting at home in the East End of London, there were still ways of making a few pence, and the surest, though the most tedious, was making matchboxes. She only needed the materials, a table, and a paste brush to assemble a matchbox. She was given the raw materials except for the paste which she had to buy herself. The work was not difficult. Bryant and May paid her tuppence ha’penny for every gross