where there is an unimpeded view of the river water. Despite their reputation for being unsafe and swampy, the Gardens were generally crowded with women and children marking time while their men drank in the vast dockers’ pubs on the North Woolwich Road. Decades ago they had been famous for staging Monster Baby shows, where babies with swollen, scarlet heads, or three hands, or rows of nipples like pigs, were displayed for the edification of paying onlookers. The monster babies had long since gone when the Fulchers arrived, replaced by the fortune-tellers, jugglers and cardmen, but the Gardens still had a sinister reputation and there were rumours that they were haunted after dark by the souls of those who drowned nearby when the Princess Alice went down at Gallions Reach thirty years before.
Each spring and summer throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Princess Alice, a steam-driven pleasure boat, had ferried city-worn families to the pleasure gardens at Rosherville and Gravesend, stopping off at the Royal Victoria Gardens to pick up passengers on its journey eastwards. On a Tuesday in September 1878, at about teatime, the Alice left Sheerness as usual. Just after dusk the boat approached Tripcocks Point, at the northernmost crick of Gallions Reach. It was only as she turned the point that George Long, the Alice’s first mate, spotted the Bywell Castle, an 890-ton collier ship bound for Newcastle, heading towards them at speed and only 150 yards distant. There was nothing to be done but wait for the impact.
Within four minutes, seven hundred and fifty men, women and children were in the water just east of the Gardens’ jetty and almost directly on the spot where the Northern Outfall Sewer opened to discharge north London’s sewage into the Thames. It was only a few yards to shore but the Thames is fast at Gallions Reach and the sewage poisoned those desperately trying to reach land. Within twenty minutes, six hundred and fifty men, women and children had drowned, their soiled bodies drifting in at the Victoria Gardens. They were buried in Woolwich Old Cemetery but it was said that their ghosts still inhabited the waters at Gallions Reach and cast curses and spells on Silvertown and all those who had failed to save them.
The Fulchers aren’t thinking about the Alice on this day. They are too busy considering where they might eat the picnic they have brought and whether they will have ice creams or shrimps from one of the food stands afterwards. Finding an empty bench beside the rose garden (Sarah and Jane are especially fond of roses) the children settle themselves around their parents and fall on fish paste sandwiches made from yesterday’s bread and a bit of drip mixed in. They wash them down with cold, black, sweet tea from an old beer bottle with a ground glass top while Frenchie spins yarns about the baby monsters he remembers as a small child and how for months afterwards he would check himself on waking to make sure he hadn’t become one of them during the night. And when the business of eating is done, the girls skip off to inspect a crimson parrot tied to a post which bobs up and down and croaks ‘Daisy, Daisy’ in exchange for a penny, and the boys join the crowd gathering for a demonstration of a fire pump given by two smiling London firemen.
On their return Frenchie buys them all an ice cream from Delamura’s ice cart and they wander down to the river and wave at the pleasure boats passing by with the ice cream melting down their chins. Frenchie lifts the youngest two on to the Woolwich Free Ferry to gawp at the pauper children shouting ‘throw out your mouldies’ to the passengers on the steamers tied up at Woolwich Pier. They watch the scattering of coins from ship to shore, while Rosie, Frances Maud and Jane feed the pigeons on the pier.
The afternoon is hazy, the sun emerging every so often to flood the Gardens with its polished light. The youngest Fulcher children play hide and seek and grandmothers’ footsteps between the trees while their father smokes on a park bench by the river and reads his paper. Their mother dozes and the older children watch the passage of ships along the river, trying to guess their names. Then, much too soon, the sun begins to take cover behind the afternoon clouds and Frenchie Fulcher rises to signal it is time to start the long walk back home.
And that is the last really happy day any of them can remember. By the autumn the Great War has begun and by October the first German bomb has fallen on London.
A stifling afternoon in early September 1914 finds Jane Fulcher and Dora Trelling hiding behind a postbox on the East India Dock Road while several thousand men in uniform thump along the granite in the direction of the ships that will take them off to war. It is rather overwhelming, this column of marching men, and rather thrilling too, to two young girls who have never ventured from their birthplace and who cannot know what any war – let alone this one – will bring. All along the route, men and women are leaning from windows laced with bunting, waving and whistling. There’s a band playing rousing military tunes and everywhere people are fluttering little Union Jacks on sticks and clapping. A few, women mostly, are hurrying alongside the marchers, delaying the moment when their husband or brother or son will finally slip from sight. One or two are crying, but only one or two, because the papers say it will be the shortest of wars and how could anyone who has witnessed the ineluctable power of the great British Empire think otherwise.
Me dad says signing up is for the birds, says Dora.
The men continue to march by, their faces sombre and set in patterns suggestive of faraway thoughts.
D’you think they’ll be getting theirselfs killed, Dor? asks Jane.
Nah, no chance. It’s the Germs what’s getting theirselfs killed.
Dor, says Jane, you got some coinage on yer?
Dora shakes her head.
Nothing. Why?
Every week they go through the same routine. The answer is always the same. Jess thinkin ’bout sweets, is all.
They peer out from behind the postbox at the khaki-coloured column in the road.
When we win the war, do you think we’ll have more money, Dor?
Sure as eggs is eggs, Janey pet.
They make their way south then east to Bow Lane and find themselves in a small crowd outside number 278 – William Utz the butcher’s. This crowd is quite unlike the one waving on the soldiers. There is something ugly about it. One of them, a young man with a reddened face, has grabbed a brick and is looking as though he means to throw it at Utz’s shop window. Some of the crowd appear to be egging him on; others are standing back, shaking their heads.
What’s goin on, Dor? says Jane.
Don’t ask me, Janey girl.
I suppose he ain’t paid the tallyman.
I suppose that’s it, Janey.
The two girls pass through the crowd and out the other side, but the air has changed, as though a high wind had moved through the Poplar they knew and set everything at an unfamiliar angle.
Jane doesn’t mention the incident at home, partly because she doesn’t know what to say about it and partly – and this is the puzzling bit – because she feels somehow responsible. She hopes the thing – whatever it is – will go away, and for a few hours it does, until at tea that day when Sarah puts a glistening slab of headcheese on the table next to the customary bread and jam and marg.
I got it at Utz’s place, explains Sarah, settling herself on the bed next to her children. A chap was selling everythin’ off cheap right out at the front. He had a little trestle going there, with Utz’s meat piled up, bits of glass all over everything but nuffink you couldn’t pick out. I dunno where Utz was but when things is going off cheap you don’t ask questions.
The family stares at the headcheese sitting on the plate, glowing in pink loveliness, with its little jewels of brain, ear, cheek and snout meat. How long is it since
