threw on his blue serge lighterman’s garb and kissed his daughters goodbye. As he reached the door, Franny called out:
Kiss me again, Dad, and Joe, delighted by the pretty little creature he had helped bring into the world, turned and said:
Dad’s gonna bring you something nice home.
Then he waved, went out of the front door and joined the general flow of men and women making their way towards the river.
Daisy watched her father go with the usual tug of pride. Just before she was born, so her mother said, a group of dockers had set on Joe on account of the free water clause which made it legal for ships to bypass the docks and unload directly into lighters. The dockers supposed that lightermen like Joe were taking their jobs. Joe had suffered horrible injuries, and the shock of it, so Elsie said, not only brought on Daisy’s birth too early but was in some indefinable way responsible for her oafish ears, her spindly neck and fuzzy brown hair.
With Joe gone, Elsie put the washing copper on to boil with a handful of carboxyl then fetched herself some Beecham’s Powders on account of it being a Monday and her nerves playing up. On Mondays, Elsie did the family laundry and took in neighbours’ washing and was usually rather grumpy, and the children knew better than to risk vexing her further. Daisy plaited her sister’s velvety hair and turned her attentions to the washing up. Just before eight, she laced her boots, which were too tight, rolled up the sleeves of her winter coat so she could see her hands, said goodbye to her mother and sister and went out into the rusty air of Bloomsbury Street.
At this moment in her life, Daisy Crommelin’s world – which she took to be all the world there was – comprised a huddle of streets, riverside factories, railway yards and docks about two miles long and a mile deep, flanked on the western side by the district of Limehouse and to the east by the River Lea. This was the parish of Poplar, five miles to the east of Tower Bridge, in London’s East End.
A few hundred years earlier Poplar had been a sybaritic little fishing settlement on the banks of the Thames. The river currents carved a natural deep basin on the eastern, seaward, side of Poplar at what is now Blackwall, and by the fifteenth century it had become an anchorage for the trading ships discharging their cargoes on to barges. Soon enough, a pier was built and named Brunswick after its chief financier, and in 1606 it was from this pier that the Virginia Settlers set sail to found the first permanent colony in North America. A company of shipbuilders set up shop nearby and continued to build ships at Blackwall for three centuries until the last remnant of the old business closed in 1980.
The settlement came to be called Poplar after a single tree which lay on the road leading east out of London towards the sea, and by the late eighteenth century it had a permanent population of 4,500 and was temporary home to thousands of sailors working on the tea clippers moored up on Brunswick Pier and Blackwall Wharf. To the west of the anchorage, a number of smart terraces went up, and at a polite distance from these the East India Company built almshouses for the seafaring poor. By then Poplar was a bustling, prosperous little place, growing plump on the proceeds of marine trades, its tarry turnings connected by a web of rope-walks. In 1802, anxious to protect its cargo from pilfering, the West India Company opened its first large inland dock in Poplar and added a new waterway, the City Canal, dug from marsh on the Isle of Dogs on Poplar’s southern side. The new West India Dock was a wonder of modern engineering, with space for 600 clippers, each up to 1,000 tonnes in size, and nine five-storey warehouses, protected by 20-foot-high walls and looming gates. Four years later, the East India Company followed suit, opening its own dock just a few miles east at Blackwall and building two new roads, the East India Dock Road and the Commercial Road, to connect the docks to the city.
Thousands of impoverished rush cutters and weavers from the dwindling Essex rush beds, eel fishermen and agricultural labourers flooded into the area to take up navvying jobs in the construction of the docks. Among these were Daisy’s ancestors on her mother’s side. Gradually, the shipowners and merchants of old Poplar slipped away to quieter, greener districts and their once grand houses were soon split into multi-occupancy lodgings. Speculators threw up tenements and turnings and dingy rents on the marshy ground and the place began, bit by bit, to accumulate the flotsam and jetsam of human desperation. Drinking and gambling dens appeared, brothels looked out on to open sewers, and poorhouses, missions, soup kitchens and charitable lodgings soon went up to serve the most basic needs of the fallen and destitute. The river became a dumping ground for sewage, industrial waste and the leavings of slaughterhouses.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the area changed again, when the North London and the Great Eastern railways arrived, chopped the little place in two and blanketed it in coal dust, smuts and grease. A giant gas works went up in the east, beside the River Lea, followed by sawmills, a jam factory, chemical works, a corn mill, a metallic cask works, breweries, a paint works and a factory making incandescent mantles. People joked that in a prevailing westerly wind, you could smell Poplar all the way to France.
Exiles from remote wars and famines and distant pogroms began pouring into Poplar, and by the time Daisy Crommelin was born, in 1903, the district was the poorest in London; 40 per cent of Poplar’s inhabitants lived with their families in a single room.
The Crommelins had escaped the worst of the poverty. Joe’s trade, piloting lighters across the Thames from ship to jetty, was protected by a guild and, though his wages were modest, they were regular. Elsie had been in domestic service until Joe had rescued her with his offer of marriage, and she now supplemented the family income by taking in laundry and assembling silk flowers. They occupied the scullery and the downstairs front room of number 7 Bloomsbury Street; the girls shared their bedroom with Mrs Anderson and Maisie and the second bedroom was rented to a distant cousin. There was a yard with a yard dog and a privy shared with next door. Modest thought it was, the Crommelins were proud of their home, knowing it to be several steps up from some of the rat-, child-and scandal-infested sinks in the street. Only two doors down lived Helen Reid. No one had ever seen a Mr Reid and one of ‘Mrs’ Reid’s four children was a half-breed. The Reids shared their house with old Flossie Lumin, who could regularly be seen out at night picking drunken fights with anyone who came by. Then there were the Greenbergs on the corner, not only Jewish, but anarchists too! Elsie had it that Bloomsbury Street got more common the farther down it you went. According to Elsie, the most distant end, which she called The Deep, was a hotbed of ruffians, criminals and loose women, and she forbade her two girls from going there or speaking to anyone who had. To distinguish her family from the residents of The Deep, Elsie spent much of her time scrubbing, whitening, blackening, polishing, mending, ironing, sweeping, dusting and bleaching. The Deep and the dirt were close bedfellows, she said. Respectable folk kept them both at bay.
In Elsie’s opinion, the only close neighbours who passed muster, despite being Irish, were the Shaunessys next door at number 5. Marie Shaunessy was a sweet-hearted, only mildly bossy woman who had married a hard-working French polisher called Patrick, and they had a son, Billy, who, unbeknown to Elsie, was a crybaby and a pincher. Billy Shaunessy would often wait for Daisy in a little alleyway a few blocks farther down the street then fire pieces of coal at her with his catapult, but when Daisy had once tried to wrest the catapult from him, he had pinched her then burst into tears in such an alarming manner that Daisy thought it better, on balance, to put up with the barrage of fired coals than risk Mrs Shaunessy finding out what a hopeless booby she had for a son, for Daisy loved Mrs Shaunessy. She and Franny would often go round to the Shaunessys’ while their mother recovered from one or other of her digestive and nervous complaints, and the two Crommelin girls viewed Mrs Shaunessy as a sort of maternal stand-in. Many were the nights that Daisy would lie in bed wishing that she and Franny could be Mrs Shaunessy’s daughters. Maybe their mother could have Billy in return. A year or two before Daisy was born, Elsie had birthed twin boys, but they had both died very shortly afterwards and, in accordance with East End custom, Elsie hadn’t attended the funeral.
If I’d only seen me twinnies laid in their boxes,
