to write about it, a letter arrived from a man who had read Silvertown and knew of my grandparents. For the purposes of this story, I am calling this man Richie Baker. A relative of Richie’s had worked in my grandparents’ greasy spoon for a while, and his aunt, who I’m calling Daisy Crommelin, counted my grandmother, Jenny Fulcher, among her friends. At some point in the 1970s, Daisy and my grandmother stopped seeing one another. Whether they disagreed over something or the friendship simply ran its course, I don’t know. Jenny Fulcher outlived Daisy Crommelin but I’m pretty sure Jenny did not go to Daisy’s funeral; the friendship clearly died some considerable time before Daisy herself.
From such seemingly tenuous connections, Richie and I established a regular correspondence, during which Richie began to reveal, bit by bit, his family story.
Daisy and her husband Harold Baker, Richie’s uncle, led ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Using Richie’s letters and doing some research of my own, I began to piece together the story of their relationship. For Daisy, the annual hop was a kind of Oz, the place where life meted out most of its magic. It is no exaggeration to say that, along with her family, hop picking was one of the central pillars of Daisy’s life. Harold had other pleasures, as we shall see, but he was no less of a family man. On the surface, the marriage between Daisy and Harold could be seen as a pact between two people driven together by common wounds and a shared sense of fragility, the feeling that they were never more than a beat away from disaster. The contrast between the delicacy of their position and the harshness of the conditions in which they lived was one of the habitual ironies of survival in the East End in the first part of the twentieth century. As I dug around further and came to understand them more deeply, though, I realised that pain and practicality alone could not explain the bond these two people shared.
Theirs was, I believe, a great love affair, not in the Hollywood style, an explosive melange of sentimentality and sex, but in a much more profound and, perhaps, old-fashioned way. Harold and Daisy lived by the same principles. To survive and flourish in a place and at a time that offered little other than fellow travellers and almost nothing by way of second chances, they understood that happiness in life was to be found by making the most of whatever small, bright joys might flit by. For Harold and Daisy, as for many couples, the joys were not always to be had from the same things, but they tolerated each other’s small claims on happiness and thereby created much for themselves. Theirs was a marriage of affectionate solidarity. Like all couples, they made compromises, but unlike many, they kept each other’s confidences. They proved their love through unshakeable loyalty.
The story here belongs first and foremost to Daisy and Harold. They are not here to give their consent to my telling their story but, knowing their lives are worth the telling, I have taken the liberty of doing so. To protect their posthumous privacy I have changed their names and many others of people in this story. Like many people living in straitened circumstances in the East End of the twentieth century, Harold and Daisy did not leave a written record of their lives. There are no diaries or extensive correspondence, few official letters or documents. Richie knew them, of course, and there were others who remembered them and the events of their lives, but no two people’s recollection of any event is ever identical. My correspondence with Richie and subsequent investigations are the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. Had I stuck strictly to the knowable and verifiable facts, the lives of Daisy and Harold, and many of the other people in this story, would not have been recorded on paper. To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story. The lives Daisy and Harold led were in some ways emblematic; they were lives that, in their broad sweep, could have been lived by any number of hundreds of thousands of East Enders born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Their struggles and triumphs were, if not the same, then similar enough to countless others to allow Daisy and Harold in some way to stand in for those who left no records and who may already have been forgotten.
Harold Baker and Daisy Crommelin were good, ordinary people. They were not celebrities or champions of anything, they achieved nothing of public note and left little behind when they died. Their lives were the most ordinary, least likely kind of lives to be put down on paper. That is why I have chosen to record them.
Contents
Title Page Dedication Epigraph Preface Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Epilogue Acknowledgements Also By Melanie Mcgrath Copyright About the Publisher
It was on a Monday in the early winter of 1913 that ten-year-old Daisy Crommelin’s childhood came to an end. The day began ordinarily enough. At six or thereabouts, Daisy and her younger sister, Franny, were woken by their mother Elsie, and creeping from their bed so as not to disturb the lodger, Mrs Anderson, and her daughter, Maisie, who were sleeping beside them, the two girls threw on their overcoats and made their way down the rickety stairs to the scullery below. The room was dank and smelled of stewed trotters from the night before. Elsie had made their usual breakfast of mashed bread in milk and was now applying Union Jack corn paste to her feet and tutting over her chilblains. The girls’ father, Joe, Freeman of the River, was rinsing off his cut-throat razor in an enamel bowl beside the sink, singing to himself and trying to ignore his wife. Seeing Franny, of whom he was particularly fond, he said:
How’s me little princess?
Today, as always, Daisy tried not to mind her father’s favouritism. She told herself that you couldn’t expect to be loved as much when you weren’t the pretty one. In any case, her father might love Franny more, but she, Daisy, had loved him longer. She brought over the two bowls her mother had prepared and sat them on the table. Joe Crommelin finished up his task and sat himself down before the plate of fried bread and faggots Elsie had made for him. Franny clambered on to his lap and all three tucked into their food in contented silence. At a
