Hopping

Strip and pinch, strip and pinch. See? There ain’t nothing more to it than that.

When the bine was stripped and the cones had accumulated in a dip in the sacking, he gathered them up and threw them into an upturned umbrella that sat between himself and the spot where his mother stood, pulling down the cut ends of bines from the high wire around which they were entwined, then he grabbed another bine and began to repeat the procedure.

Daisy picked up a bine of her own. The soft stem, still coiled clockwise, felt downy and wet. She moved her hand along it, reached a short stem from which a few cones hung, and pinched. The cones did not give way immediately and she was surprised at how hard she had to squeeze her fingers to maintain a purchase on the short stem. So this was where Billy had perfected his pinching technique. No wonder he was such a master at it. She carried on down the bine, stripping and pinching, until she reached the end, then, copying Billy, she lay the naked bine neatly down in the alley and reached for another. Franny sat beside her, playing at picking, but for every cone she removed from its stem, she picked a half-dozen leaves. The work wasn’t arduous exactly, but neither was it as simple as it had at first seemed. From time to time Billy took up the umbrella and emptied it into the basket at the top of the alley. Every so often a pole puller came round with a wooden pole on to which was bound a curved knife. With this hop dog, he sliced at the bines caught in the roof of the factory, and having cut them, he yanked each in turn until they tumbled to the ground. Over in one corner of the garden, a family had begun singing.

They are lovely hops

When the measurer comes round

Pick ’em up, pick ’em up off the ground

When he starts to measure, he don’t know when to stop

But we don’t care, we’ll pick some more

Cause they are lovely hops

Oh! Lovely hops they are

They are lovely hops.

Soon they were joined by others, until the song spread right out across the garden.

After an hour or so there was a great cry of Tally! from the top of the drift and Alfie shouted Hover up!, at which Billy Shaunessy dropped what he was doing and raced to the basket. By the time Daisy reached it, he was already elbow deep in the hop basket, pulling up twigs and leaves and turning over the hop cones so they sat lightly on one another and filled more of the basket.

Two men appeared at the top of the Shaunessys’ drift. One of them scooped out the cones into a smaller basket, then tipped them into a long, cylindrical sack, while the other handed Alfie a wooden tag and made notes in a book. A family followed behind, collecting up the cylindrical sacks, sealing them and heaving them up on to the same wagon that had brought their bags from the station.

Over the course of the next few hours, Daisy began to refine her technique, speeding up the pinching action until she was picking almost as fast as Billy. Before long, she realised that the bines were coated with tiny claws pointed in a downward direction. If you pushed your hands upwards, the claws pricked and the skin soon became very irritated and sore, but so long as you kept your hands moving towards where the root of the plant would have been, the claws didn’t bother you. Once she realised this, she noticed that Billy Shaunessy was meticulous about avoiding being pricked but had not bothered to warn her. Well, never mind. After a day or two’s practice, she would have perfected the art of pinching. Then he’d better watch. There was not much between hopping, she thought, and assembling flowers. Though the flowers were fiddlier, both required the same complex hand movements but demanded no particular mental effort, and pretty soon she found she was free to allow her mind to wander. She thought about her mother then, and how much she was already missing her father. At midday another bell rang and everyone immediately stopped picking and set about preparing lunch. While Mrs Shaunessy handed round slices of Dutch cheese and raw onions, wrapped in sacking to protect the food from the bitter tar now covering everyone’s hands, Joan put a kettle on the paraffin stove and made everyone a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk. Heated discussions broke out about the heaviness or lightness or houseyness of the cones, whether they were larger or smaller than usual, and whether they were softer or crisper, ripe or unripe. Half an hour later the bell rang to signal the end of lunch, and bit by bit the women and children vanished back down the green factory walls.

By mid-afternoon, the sun was beating down hard through the canopy of leaves and the gardens were sultry and filled with dappled light. A nearby family began a rendition of ‘Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’ and others joined in, some in rueful tones, but everyone seemed in good humour. At five o’clock, when Daisy’s arms and shoulders were aching and her hands were dark as fury and the fingers needly and stinging, the man on the chestnut horse rode by and called out No more bines and, a few moments later, Daisy found herself in the flow of women and children heading out of the green factory and back along the flinty lane towards Pheasant Field.

Lilly was waiting for her outside hop hut number 21.

So?

Daisy looked at her blackened hands.

Oh, that ain’t nothing to fuss over, Lilly said. Here, you wanna come blackberrying? Daisy glanced over at Franny but she seemed to be busy with some game, so she left her there.

The two girls started down Pheasant Field hand in tarry hand, washing themselves in the trough just beside the gate, then they continued on until they reached Featherbed Lane. Turning north, they marched along the flints, grabbing at delicate umbrels of cow parsley and scatters of pink bladder campion as they went, as far as Danecourt Bridge where the railway line formed steep shoulders lined with hazel and elderflower and brambles, stopping every so often to plant blackberries in their mouths, and by the time they returned to the huts, Pheasant Field was already bathed in twilight shadow. There were fires lit and some families had made torches from bulrushes, which gave off a magical, orange light. Someone was playing a piano accordion, and outside number 21 Alfie was cursing the wall-eye that left him unfit for duty and Mrs Shaunessy was talking about the letters she’d already had from Patrick. It wasn’t all rosy. Some of the letters the sweethearts sent to the soldiers made them laugh. In one, Patrick had said, a young wife had asked her husband how many times the soldiers had managed to get out to the pictures. Patrick Shaunessy was trying not to be too downhearted, though, because the war would be over soon. He was sorry not to be able to visit the hop that year, and he missed it, since to him the hop was the merry in England and the great in Britain all combined. Still, he said, Marie was to keep his place for him, because as sure as eggs is eggs, he’d be there next year.

Alfie said he’d drink to that and the adults all raised their mugs of tea and Mrs Shaunessy started up ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.

The following morning Daisy woke to a dewy dawn full of cobwebs and pink-tailed rabbits. At seven thirty she and Franny set off once more with the others through the oak gate towards the great green factory. Daisy picked quickly from the start now, methodically stripping and pinching until she had a rhythm going. After a lunch of bread and cold sausages, Mrs Shaunessy told Franny to go and play, and without the distraction of her sister, Daisy found she could work faster still, her fingers and hands knitting the delicate movements together with such proficiency that by the time the man on the chestnut horse had called No more bines, she was confident she had perfected her technique, and she sensed from the care Billy Shaunessy was taking with her that he knew it too. If nothing else, hopping had given her a pinch to be reckoned with.

That evening, Mrs Shaunessy told them to go off and play, so Lilly took Daisy to the old gravel pit where a colony of feral cats was chasing butterflies, and they gave each cat a name – Big Marmalade, Smuts and Ship’s Cat. Daisy noticed not only how many butterflies lived in the country, but also how many birds there were, so many that even if you rolled your index finger and thumb into a tiny circle and looked through the hole, there would always be birds trapped inside your fingers. They were returning back across the fields when they saw Billy coming towards them with a smirk on his face, saying Mrs Shaunessy wanted Daisy to return immediately to Pheasant Field. There they found a great hullabaloo of women, with Franny, red faced and weepy, at its centre.

What were you thinking? said Mrs Shaunessy, grabbing Daisy by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. Leaving your sister like that?

The little girl had been picked up by the carter, who had seen her dangling her legs over the platform at Selling station. When questioned, Franny had said she was waiting for the train to Poplar, but the carter, surmising from her accent that the little girl was an East End picker, had brought her back to Gushmere Farm.

She could have been killed, and then what’d I say to your poor ma what’s already lost her twinnies and ain’t all there in the head? Lord save me, Daisy Crommelin, if you shouldn’t be bleedin’ well shamed of yourself!

Daisy had never heard Mrs Shaunessy swear before. It was rather alarming. She felt rage and shame in equal measure. The injustice of it, when it was Mrs Shaunessy who’d told them to go and play! But she knew such thoughts were dangerous. It had been thoughts like these – like thinking she deserved a toffee apple flat and had a right to one – which had set off the train of events leading to Elsie’s absence and their current exile. Whatever happened, Franny was special, and it was Daisy’s responsibility to look after her, particularly now, when they were away from their mother and father.

Mrs Shaunessy never heard the full story behind Franny’s flight but Lilly heard it later from another girl and passed it on to Daisy. Billy Shaunessy had taken Franny to one side and told her that a giant lived at the top of the beanstalks in the hop garden waiting for little girls to eat. So terrified had she been by this news that she had run directly to the train station to wait for the next train home. It was only fortunate that no train had come, or Franny Crommelin might have found herself alone at London Bridge.

From then on, Daisy did her best to keep her sister in her sight. During the day, while she picked hops in the Shaunessy family drift, she had Franny stay beside her and play with some dolls Daisy had made for her from twigs and pieces of rag. At five every day all picking would cease. This was the time Daisy loved best, when the evening stretched out before her, plump with possibility. She would take Franny and with Lilly they would go blackberrying or swimming in the dank little pool the locals called Ghost Hole Pond, or they would sit at the rim of the chalk pit watching the antics of Big Marmalade and Ship’s Cat or the swallows diving for insects and dandelion clocks rising up on the summer thermals. At other times they would clamber across the downed oaks in Winterbourne Wood and climb to the top of Iron Hill and watch horses and carts and the occasional steam tractor or thresher lumbering along the Roman Road, and Franny would say Is that the tram? and Daisy would laugh and reply:

There ain’t no tram in the country, silly, and gazing out across the beamy hills and wooded nooks of the Kentish Downs, Daisy would comfort herself with the thought that here, where the horizon stretched out as far as the eye could see, the tumult of war and even her mother’s illness seemed so fantastically remote it was hard, sometimes, to remember them. She began to miss her old life less and less; Elsie, flower-making, Old Pigswill and sickly-coloured fogs. All she longed for was Joe, and his stories.

And so the weeks passed until, one day in September, it started raining. It rained so hard that the bines dripped with drowned insects and the hop cones softened and clung to their stalks; it rained on the huts until tiny ropes of water snaked along the walls and on to the palliasses and the cinder paths until they ran in muddy streams; it rained on the evening fires and on the washing put out to dry. And it rained the next day and the day that followed that. By the end of the third morning, Franny was coughing green phlegm and by the afternoon a fever had set in. The next day the hop doctor called, announcing himself, as he always did, with a cheery Bring out your dead!, but he had nothing to offer except to tell Mrs Shaunessy to keep the girl warm and dry, two things which, given the weather, had become impossible. Old Nell suggested taking the invalid to the vardoes for a Gypsy cure, and having no better idea herself except to pray, Mrs Shaunessy bundled the little girl into her hop cart and, with Daisy and Old Nell helping to push, trundled along Vicarage Lane towards Poppington Bungalow, where, scattered among the trees, were a dozen or more gaily painted caravans.

Franny was too ill to protest about the intrusions of the Gypsy women as they ruffled through her hair, pulled up her eyelids to inspect the eyes and prodded the tiny ribcage, and too ill to notice the taint of their herbs in the spoonfuls of treacle Mrs Shaunessy doled out to her. But whatever the Gypsies gave Franny it worked. By the following morning her fever had gone and she was no longer coughing up phlegm. By the end of the week she had never looked so healthy, and though she continued to complain about almost everything, she never again repeated her flight to Selling station, nor spoke much of going home.

As September drew to a close, the annual hop wound down. There was a party with jugs of beer and three whole roasted pigs. Bit by bit, women and children drifted back to the city, but the Shaunessy party stayed on to pick plums, apples and pears. The leaves began to turn, and each morning in the hop huts seemed a little colder than the last. In the first week of October Lilly left, and not long after that, a telegram arrived for Mrs Shaunessy. They were at the hop huts preparing breakfast when the man on the chestnut horse rode up. On hearing there was a telegram for Mrs Shaunessy, Old Nell and Joan came bustling over, with grave looks on their faces. Mrs Shaunessy took the telegram, read it and fell over. After Joan had picked her up, the man took Mrs Shaunessy back to the farmhouse on his horse. Nell looked after the two Crommelin girls and Billy Shaunessy for the remainder of the day, and burned the onion pud. The next day they heard that Patrick Shaunessy had lost both his legs and was being discharged, as a consequence of which Mrs Shaunessy would be returning to Poplar the following afternoon, taking her son and the Crommelin girls with her.

Though Daisy longed to see her father, she didn’t want to leave. She spent her last evening saying goodbye to Big Marmalade and Smuts and Ship’s Cat, to the hop gardens and to Ghost Hole Pond. At the pond she noticed something red lying in the water and, poking at it with a stick, saw that it was a Union Jack flag on a stick. She thought she could guess whose it was. That night, her last in hop hut number 21, she lay awake listening to the screech owls and the barks of the foxes, wondering how she could ever have found them strange or frightening. The next morning she woke early with a feeling of dread. The rabbits were out, and old Nell was fixing breakfast. In the six weeks she had been away, she realised that she hadn’t once thought about the Sandeman in The Deep, but now that she remembered them, she had no doubt that they were both still there, and that she was about to go back to them.

CHAPTER 3

Henry Baker began his working life in the West India Docks the year after the Great Dock Strike in 1890, at the age of twelve. He started by fetching and carrying ropes, winches, dockers’ hooks and whatever else the breaking gang he worked for needed shifting. Once the gang had broken up and cleared the cargo, young Henry would be lowered into the ship’s hold to sweep and clean, an experience that left him with an abiding horror of dark, enclosed spaces. At the age of fourteen he graduated to breaking, becoming one of a small team within the gang responsible for dividing the cargo, attaching rope strops to it and seeing it out of the hold. It was dangerous work. Cargo routinely loosened and shifted at sea, and even the most experienced breaker couldn’t tell exactly what he was dealing with until he was standing beside it in the hold, as a result of which barely a month went by without someone being crushed by a bale of rubber or a cord of timber. In common with most of the gangs working around the docks, Henry’s gang had set up a funeral savings club to which everyone contributed tuppence a week. Nothing shamed a docker more than the thought of a cheap funeral.

At the age of twenty-one Henry married May and took her out of domestic service. In short order they had a son, Jack, then, three years later, another, Harold. Jack was handsome and reckless and got himself into trouble from an early age for petty theft and dipping. Harold was his opposite, born small with an odd, enlarged head which stayed that way as he grew. Poverty added rickets, the disease of dark, sunless places which Jack had somehow been spared. The disease gave Harold bowed legs, knocked his knees and made half his teeth fall out. Yet despite these afflictions, young Harold was a remarkably upbeat, optimistic and stoical boy, with no trace of self-pity, so unlike the noisy, blustering, self-centred Jack that it was almost as though they had come from two different broods.

Growing up, the two boys saw very little of their father. Henry left the Baker family house in Gaselee Street at six thirty every morning in order to be at the docks in time for the seven o’clock bomp-on, when he would learn whether there was work for him that day. The Great Dock Strike had been in part a response to the casual cruelty of the bomp-on system, where men would have to compete – and sometimes even physically fight – one another for an hour or two’s work. Since dock work was both unpredictable and highly seasonal, some dockers would find themselves unemployed for months with no means of keeping their families from starvation. Henry’s father had been among these, and this had made Henry a staunch union man. After the strike, the bomp-on had been modified. Dockers were now required to register, it was no longer possible for shipowners to hire a man for less than four hours, and those dockers who were attached to gangs, like Henry, had at least some protection from the ravages of a casualised labour market.

When there was no work at the docks, Henry would offer his labour on the cheap to the nearby goods station, hydraulic works, timber store or knacker’s yard. If that failed, he’d spend the day in one of the dockers’ clubs. One way or another, he was rarely back until seven in the evening, when he’d bolt down the tea May Baker had prepared for him before going out to the pub or to the bare-knuckle fights at Wonderland in Whitechapel that were his weakness.

Despite the fact that he rarely saw them, or perhaps because of it, Henry remained the most powerful presence in his sons’ lives; more powerful certainly than May, who was a bitter, silent woman; more powerful too than the railway, which thumped and ticked all night beside the house in Gaselee Street where the Baker family lived; and more powerful even than the docks themselves, which stretched out broad and filthy not a minute’s walk away, their cranes so close that Harold would lie in the bed he shared with Jack and imagine them reaching through the window and plucking him up.

From the moment they were born, it was assumed that Henry’s sons would follow him to the docks. It was a matter of familial pride that they did so. In the East End, as elsewhere, docking ran in families. It wasn’t something you did, it was something you were. In 1914, at the age of fourteen, Jack followed convention and went into the West India with his father, but by then it was already clear that Harold would never join them. Four years before, in 1910, when he was seven, Harold had suffered an accident, and ever after he walked with a pronounced swagger brought on by one leg being much longer than the other and the shorter one being calipered.

While Harold and Jack were still at school together in Union Street, Jack protected his younger brother from the worst of the teasing from his schoolmates. Jack grew up tall and well built and with a reputation for toughness and recklessness. No one wanted to mess with him. Once Jack left for the docks, at the beginning of the Great War, Harold was considered fair game. By then, most of his schoolfellows had grown used to his limp and, knowing him to be a kind and decent boy, counted themselves as among his friends, but the arrival of Albie Bluston at the school changed all that. Albie’s father had been killed during the earliest days of the war, and an elder brother returned home burned the colour of a plum. Albie had been sent to live with his aunt while his mother nursed her older son back to some semblance of a life. To Albie, a boy who had come about his injury without having to fight was nothing short of a coward, and he immediately set on Harold with the specific intention of making his life a misery. All of a sudden, boys Harold had grown up with and considered friends began to trip him up or kick him down for the pleasure of watching him struggle to right himself. When that became a bore, they set wires to trip him up or rolled marbles under his feet, stumbling alongside him in exaggerated imitation of his gait, hurling highfalutin insults, with toffee-nosed expressions on their faces.

I say, look at that blundering blunderbuss.

How outré he is.

Shall we pulverise his bony arse anon?

Still, Harold being Harold, and as generous minded a boy as you are likely to come across, he held no grudges against his former friends, nor even against Albie. He accepted what had happened and, when he thought about the accident, realised he had brought his fate down on himself.

Having no friends to speak of any more, Harold vowed to make the most of the extra time being on his own afforded him. In 1916, Henry was called up, and in his absence, the family had trouble making ends meet. To please his mother and win the favour of his father on his return (for Henry had lost interest in his younger son the moment it became clear that he would never become a docker), Harold took to spending his free time selling second-hand programmes outside the Queen’s Theatre in Poplar. Hanging around the Queen’s, he soon picked up the words and melodies to most of the popular music hall songs of the time, and he’d sometimes sing one or two favourites to keep the people in the queue entertained and make a little more money. People felt sorry for a boy in a caliper. The song that always got the best response, particularly from the women, though Harold had no idea why, was:

I like pickled onions

I like piccalilli

Pickled cabbage is all right

With a bit of cold meat on Sunday night

I can go tomatoes

But what I do prefer

Is a little bit cu- cum- cu- cum- cu- cum

Little bit of cucumber.

Aside from an occasional attack from a Gotha or a Zeppelin visit and the inconvenience to everyone of air-raid warnings and gas alerts, the East End itself remained relatively unscathed during the Great War, and the event had had none of the terrible consequences for the Bakers that it did for many East End families. As white feathers began to appear in letterboxes, Jack Baker’s colour-blindness exempted him from the call-up and Henry was quickly invalided out of service and sent back to the docks. He never spoke about his injury, but it seemed to be of little hindrance to him. In fact, Henry’s spell in the army proved positively advantageous. Having served, he was immune from accusations of shirking or cowardice and, having seen what conditions were like and witnessed desperation and guessed at the lonely intimacy of trauma, he knew exactly how to anticipate the returning soldiers’ needs and soon saw an opportunity to supply some of them.