the war, everything has become so expensive.
I ain’t gonna eat no Hun meat, Frenchie says. Not now.
Silence falls. The children bite their lips and stare at their laps.
Me neither, says John eventually, sliding away from the table.
Nor me, says Frances Maud.
And that is when Jane notices Frenchie’s eyes on her. Now she is sure that the whole business at Utz’s is her fault.
Sarah gets up from the bed and moves the headcheese over to her side of the table.
Oh you are silly billies. Go on, Edie, you take some, pet.
Edie shoots her mother a look then shakes her head. Me and Artie are going out to play now, she says, dragging her little brother out of the room and down the stairs.
Frenchie gets up from the table, goes to his chair by the fire and lights a cigarette and now there are only two people left sitting beside the table with the slab. Silly billies, repeats Sarah, slicing the slab in two. Here you go, Janey.
Jane sits there for a moment, thinking about the boy with the brick and the ugly words spilling from the crowd, and every part of her is saying no except the part that counts, and suddenly she can hear the headcheese saying, I know how badly you want me, Janey, and then it’s too late and her tongue is lapping around the jellied crust and her teeth are sinking into the pillow of blushing flesh.
Later, when she and Sarah are down at the yard tap washing the jam jars, and the headcheese is making grunting noises in her stomach, Jane says, How big is the war, Mum?
It’s the size of the world, pet, her mother says, poking at some greasy mark.
Does that mean it’s going on in Aldgate and Whitechapel?
Course it do!
Is the war going on in the Empire then?
Sarah Fulcher shakes the water off her hands. The concrete of the back yard is thick with city heat. It is too hot to work, too hot to think much. Even Bobs has excused himself from his ratting duties and is lying in the coolest corner of the yard, panting.
I wouldn’t know nothing about that, Janey dear, sighs Sarah, rubbing her moonish face with the damp on her hands.
Mum? says Jane.
Her mother sighs and tightens her lips.
Oh, you’re a right little Miss Why this evening. What is it now?
Don’t the sun never set on the war then?
They make their way up the stairs, avoiding the gaps in the banisters where someone has broken pieces off for firewood. Their room still smells faintly of the headcheese.
Well now, I don’t suppose it ever do, says Sarah.
Jane rescues a few hairs escaping from her plait. The war is a puzzle to her. If Britain rules the waves, then what is there to fight about? Why is Mr Utz bad now? They’ve been buying tripe off him for years and he wasn’t bad then. Has the badness got something to do with the brawn or has it got more to do with Utz himself, with the very name Utz maybe?
Mum, we ain’t foreigners, are we?
Janey, how can we be foreigners? Sarah returns to her sewing for a moment but Jane’s brow is so furrowed and her face so perplexed that even her mother, the most unobservant of women, is driven to wonder what kind of storm is collecting in the girl’s mind.
Ah I see, Sarah says, her lips squeezed round pins. Yer thinking about how yer dad come to be known as Frenchie, ain’t yer? French ain’t foreign, love. It’s on the same side as us, innit? Ask yer father when he comes home from the pub and he’ll tell yer.
She glances at her daughter momentarily.
Probly give yer a good clumping, though, an all.
There were anti-German protests all over the East End that week. In some parts things got so bad that traders with German-sounding names put up boards outside their shops saying ‘Lewis Hermann is English’ and the like, but still it went on. Utz returned but was run out of his shop; in Silvertown boys threw bottles at the houses of German glass blowers and there was much discussion about whether the Lithuanians who lived in the same street were really only Germans by another name. And then, after a few days, the whole thing blew over, because when it came down to it there were a great many foreigners in the East End and you couldn’t throw bottles at everyone, and in any case it would be a waste of the deposit on the bottles.
To Jane, the Great War had begun as an enigma and it stayed that way. On her way to the market she’d see women streaming from the munitions factories with faces yellow from picric acid, the local boys running after them shouting ‘Chinkie Chinkie Chinkie’. Policemen rode around the streets of Poplar on new bicycles with sandwich boards over their chests reading AIR RAID, TAKE COVER, but no one ever did because they were more interested in gawping at the bicycles. In the winter of 1917 she was woken by a dreadful thunder, throatier than any bomb and deeper than the sound of shelling. The sky went red, then green and the smell of burning flour came over. The Brunner Mond Munitions plant at Silvertown had blown itself to bits and taken half of Silvertown with it. Afterwards, she discovered that the blast had hurled metal across the Thames into East Greenwich, where it had ripped apart a gasholder and sent a blue flame jetting fifty feet into the sky. She recalled how odd it was that this news had left her cold and unmoved, with neither fear nor anticipation. Other memories had no particular feelings attached to them but remained with her all the same. She remembered a man slumped in the doorway of a pub, blood snaking down his chin. She remembered men returning from the front, their eyes and legs and arms bandaged and their faces closed. She recalled seeing an enemy aeroplane which had been at the People’s Palace in Mile End. But somehow these were abstract things.
The winter of 1915 is bitter cold, there never seems to be enough coal dust to keep dry and warm, and day after day the inhabitants of Poplar have to go about their lives in clammy undergarments with their socks half-frozen between their toes. Frenchie is working all hours at the boat yard. One particularly frosty day he is fitting out a barge with his docker’s neckerchief at his throat and his cap wedged down over his head and a cigarette bobbing up and down between his lips when a rattle starts up in his lungs. By seven o’clock his breath is as heavy as rock. All night Sarah simmers onions in milk and holds the warm halves to her husband’s chest but by morning he is worse, and his breath is like broken bellows and the children are afraid and begin to harbour a secret hope that by the time they come home from school he will have disappeared. Still, he insists on trudging to work, but just before midday a clerk’s assistant brings him back, staggering and incoherent. He ain’t no use, the clerk says. Had to carry ’im ’ere almost. Sarah makes sugared tea and puts her husband to bed, still wearing his neckerchief and protesting his fitness, but halfway through the night he wakes up afraid.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, not this, he cries. What’ll become?
Shh, says Sarah. You’ll be right as rain in a jiffy-jiff-jiff.
But Frenchie doesn’t get better in a jiffy-jiff, or anything like. When his foreman pays a visit to the house at Ullin Street three days later, Frenchie Fulcher is worse, the breath lathing off his lungs and his nightsweats so torrid that you can smell them from outside the room. His eyes are red bowls, his skin the colour of custard. When he coughs, greyish sputum veined with blood
