Frenchie knows things. He knows that London was once under the sea and there are shells embedded in the stones of Poplar Library. He knows where the plague pits and the bear-baiting dens used to be. He can point out where the Vikings thundered up the Thames in their longboats and where they got befuddled by the eddies and drifts at Bow Creek. He knows that the body of a whale was dug up out of the marsh at the West India. He’s witnessed dogfights. He knows where to find bare-knuckle fighters or nancy boys.
Jane Fulcher’s favourite story, one her father often tells, concerns two mastiffs and a cow. The cow had been left to graze on the marsh south of Poplar in the loop of the Thames. The dogs, whose job it was to protect the cow from hungry poachers, were chained to the animal’s feet. Every week a marshman came along and left meat for the dogs and between times they dug for worms and pounced on any small thing that crossed their path. But a mist came down as mists often did in the marsh and the cow, wandering about and unable to see its feet, stumbled on its chains and fell into a nearby bog, catapulting its unfortunate protectors into the quicksand. After a struggle the cow sank into the slime and died but, being lighter, the dogs remained on the surface for a while longer. For four days and nights the residents of Poplar heard a terrible wailing, but were too frightened to go down to the bog and see what was afoot. Rumours rushed around that the devil had landed in the marsh and was taunting them before making his move. When the marshman eventually returned to check on his charge he found two mastiff heads preserved in the marshy brine, their jaws open as if in a long, last howl of injustice. And that is how, Frenchie says, the Isle of Dogs got its name.
The stories have a fearful power. Whenever his children are defiant, Frenchie threatens to abandon them on barges that will carry them out on the tide beyond Southend to the Black Deep where their bodies will be consumed by whales and sea snakes.
Whales and sea snakes, nippers, whales and sea snakes.
Leonard Page’s early childhood is a good deal sketchier than my grandmother’s. It’s a matter of gathering what facts there are.
Len was born in Corbets Tey, a hamlet ten miles north of the Thames in southwest Essex. Today, the place is an undifferentiated huddle of suburban housing perched on the shoulder of the London orbital motorway as it dips down to the Thames at the Dartford Crossing. The land is flat and scoured by the wind that pours into East Anglia from the Urals. Hedges of stunted elderflowers and crabs give some respite, but nothing is strong enough to contain the eastern blasts. The frost is often hard. On a particularly brisk morning you can wander around the copses, picking up the bodies of dunnocks and other small birds which have succumbed to the cold during the night. Most often the sky is obscured by shapeless cloud. You can go from one week to the next and not see the outline of the sun. It is good farming country though, the soil sodden and alkaline, perfect for brassicas and grain, and where there are still fields they are neatly ploughed, the soil blooming from powder fertilisers. A chemical smell mixes with the stench of petrol fumes from the ceaseless flow of traffic, but a hundred years ago, when my grandfather was born, Corbets Tey was as remote and peaceful a place as you could find.
In 1903, the year of Len’s birth, Corbets was the smallest of the villages between the Ingrebourne River and the marshy edges of the Thames. To call it a village, even, is to grace it with a significance it did not have, for Corbets Tey was little more than a satellite of Upminster, which itself lay in the shadow of Romford, the nearest market town. You couldn’t miss it, exactly, but you could pass through and imagine you were still in Upminster because the two villages were only a mile or so apart, though there was in fact a world between them. In 1849 a railtrack was built through Upminster and Ockenden but it bypassed Corbets Tey, and by the time my grandfather was born the place had stagnated. The first bus to pass through the village in 1924 caused such a stir that children were let out of school to watch it trundle by.
From Upminster, the Corbets road swung south, slinking between the flint walls of Gaines’ Manor across a watercress stream from where it climbed a rare hill into Corbets itself. Just before the centre of the village, such as it was, the road bent east towards North Ockenden and a few paces further south there was a turning on the right, then called Green Lane. The lane meandered past Great Sunnings Farm to Sullens Farm from where it rejoined the Ockenden Road at a sharp bend known as Cabbage Corner. On either side of Cabbage Corner there were neat rows of workers’ cottages, weatherboarded against the rushing wind, and it is probable that Len Page was born in one of these.
It would be comforting to imagine Len Page playing along the reedy streams and among the bean fields, or hunting pheasants in the woods, wood pigeons in the fields, perch in Ingrebourne River and rabbits everywhere, the sky stretched over him as soft as a petal, his lungs filled with damp air. But the fact of the matter is he probably spent much of his early life wading through mud. There was a great deal of that in the lowlands. From November to March there was little else but wind and mud and spells of bitter cold when the roads turned to brown ice.
The name Page conjures images of books and education, but the Pages had none of either. They were illiterate agricultural labourers who worked the land at Emery’s Farm in North Upminster. Len’s father, Jim, was a stern and silent man who passed his days among the dumb rows of cabbages. He was happier alone with his plough horses – Suffolk Punches and Percherons – than he was around people. He had no appetite for idle chatter or gossip and preferred to listen to what the breeze had to say. He was fond enough of his wife, Emily Nottage, but she didn’t really interest him. After their marriage in 1895 he discovered that a woman’s world was convoluted and women themselves hard to please, so he stopped trying. His children did not rouse him either. He and Emily had four: Thomas, Leonard, and twins Emily Maria (known as Ria) and Daisy. As a matter of duty he provided for them, but since he didn’t own a farm to pass on to them they were incidentals in his life. It wasn’t that he disliked them, just that he preferred his Percherons.
The Nottages were labourers, too. They worked at Blush Farm in Chafford Heath and at Hawthorn Farm in Upminster. Emily’s father, Thomas Nottage, was as much a loner as her husband, and his wife, Jane, Emily’s mother, had learned to put up with it. Thomas and Jane had six children: Alfred, William, Thomas, Emily, Walter and Fred. As soon as they were old enough to pick up a shovel, the boys joined their father labouring, leaving Jane and Emily responsible for the endless domestic chores as well as the kitchen garden and the chickens.
Things were not easy for the Nottage family. They moved around a great deal, Thomas never staying at one farm for more than a few years and the whole family having to up sticks and trundle their belongings to the next place. The children, Emily included, grew up to be independent-minded and with a sense of the impermanence of things.
By all accounts, my great grandmother Emily made a disgruntled countrywoman. She chafed against the solitude and routine. Country life held no mystique for Emily. In her view, clouds were no more interesting than buckets of water and fields of wheat were simply unmade bread. Emily longed for the glamour of the town. She complained that there was nothing to do in Corbets Tey but work. He restlessness rubbed the family raw. Whenever she could she would dress in her best and take herself off to Romford Market. The market had been the social and trade hub of southern Essex since at least the mid-thirteenth century. Farmers from all over the area gathered at The Blucher’s Head in the market square to discuss the weather and the current state of their crops. On summer evenings men and women danced jigs together in the square. On May Day they ran around the May Pole, and that may well be how Jim and Emily first met.
On the opposite side of the square from The Blucher’s Head stood The Windmill and Bells. The Windmill was rather downmarket, its clientele the poachers and the labourers who worked for the farmers. At The Windmill they would trade news of labouring opportunities and ferrets. Jim Page bought and sold
