London - Edward Rutherfurd [575]
But then when you thought about it, things had always turned out all right for the cheerful cockney with the white flash in his hair. Even in the hard days in the East End, he had always seen the bright side. Take his father and his Auntie Jenny. “Your rich Auntie Jenny doesn’t want to know us any more. Never even invited us to her wedding,” his father would always say. It was a refrain he had heard a thousand times. But she used to send them Christmas presents and to Charlie her very existence was a sort of inspiration. If one of the family could get out of the East End and get on in the world, then so, he felt, could he.
He could understand why his father and most of the men he knew were bitter. There wasn’t enough regular employment in the docks and even when you got a job, you weren’t safe. One day his father had been sacked for just looking at a foreman. “What are you looking at me for?” the foreman had shouted. “You’re off!” And his father had never been able to work in that yard again. It was the same all over the docks and people heard that conditions in other industries, like the mines, were even harsher.
Of course, if you had a skill, life could be much better. His best friend when he was a boy had become a plasterer. He had an uncle in that trade who’d got him into a company where he’d served his apprenticeship. He’d done well and was living outside the East End now. But Charlie never quite had the patience for something like that. “I’ll take my chances in the docks,” he’d said. “You’ll never get out,” his friend had told him. But he was wrong there. “I got kicked out, and into a better life,” Charlie would declare cheerfully.
His marriage to Ruth – what a row there had been! It was one thing for his father to have Jewish friends in Whitechapel, but when he fell for Ruth, that was quite another matter. Some of his own friends warned him: “They’re still foreign, Charlie. They’re not like us.” But the real trouble came from Ruth’s father. He was a small, bald man with pale blue eyes, who had his own little business. He had always been friendly enough before, but now he would start shouting whenever he caught sight of Charlie. “‘A thief’ he called me,” Charlie reported. “Said I was stealing Ruth from her faith.”
“He’s right, actually,” his father had pointed out. “You’d better leave it alone, son. You’re meddling where you shouldn’t.”
“Doesn’t seem to worry Ruth,” Charlie replied.
When they had married, Ruth’s family had cut her off entirely. Even her childhood friends deserted her, and she had told him: “Charlie, I want to get out.” It was Charlie’s friend the plasterer who had come up with an acquaintance with lodgings in Battersea: three upstairs rooms in a house just below what had still, until a generation ago, been the open fields of Lavender Hill. Both of them had been nervous about the move. Charlie wasn’t sure what it would be like moving into an area where he wasn’t known and as for Ruth, she had never lived in a place which had no Jewish community, though as fair-haired, blue-eyed Mrs Charlie Dogget, she fitted in easily.
Once again, Charlie felt he’d fallen on his feet. While Ruth got a job at a piano factory nearby, he found work on the buses. And best of all, after a year or two, he managed to get them a nice little house to rent in the safest part of the area. The Shaftesbury Estate was a well-run community of workmen’s houses, set up by the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury for respectable workers and artisans. By the time their first child was born, things were looking up for Charlie.
In general, however, things were not all that much better for the working man. The Trades Unions had slowly improved things for working folk, and their representatives, the Labour Party, had become so numerous in Parliament that they could now be in a position to form a government. But in the difficult