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SUMMER 1888, LONDON’S EAST END 1 I was too angry, Mother said. I never stopped fuming. I raged about everything, every waking moment, from dawn to dusk. I even did it in my sleep, according to Mother. She said she could hear me through the floorboards. I’d lie in the makeshift bed I shared with my sisters and my brother and mumble over and over, “It ain’t right. It ain’t right.” But it wasn’t right! None of it! Working all hours yet we’d struggle to pay the rent every single week. We never, ever had enough to eat. We were always teetering on the brink of ruin. How could anyone live the way we did, see the things we saw, hear the things we heard and not be angry? If you weren’t fuming, you just weren’t paying attention. Mother said I was wasting my time fretting. But then Mother was a devoted Christian. She said everything that happened was God’s will. He moved in mysterious ways and we had to accept it with good grace. But I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. I had a list as long as my arm of all the things I thought were wrong with the world. No, even longer. The list was as long as both my arms. And my legs. Right at the top of the list was Mrs Jones who lived next door. She had phossy jaw and was dying slowly and horribly. I didn’t much like the woman, but I wouldn’t have wished that disease on my very worst enemy. Phossy jaw – an illness that started with toothache and ended by rotting your face from the inside out. It was common down our way. Two, three women in each street had it. First you lost your teeth. Then you got ulcers, filled with stinking pus. Your face swelled up and rearranged itself into something your own mother wouldn’t recognise. If you were lucky, your face got deformed. If you were unlucky, like Mrs Jones, it would eventually kill you. She was already smelling so bad that no one could bear to go sit with her. And how did you get phossy jaw? It was easy as pie if you worked in the match factory. You got it from the phosphorus used to make the matches. It hung in the factory air where Mrs Jones had worked all her life, covering everything with a fine dust. Phosphorus was pure poison. But phossy jaw was just one of those things. The danger of getting it came with the job. Same as if you were a docker, like Father, you risked getting injured or drowning in the river every day. Working was dangerous and you had to put up with it. Working was better than starving, and that was the only alternative for the likes of us. Mother did piece work at home. She got paid by the gross – tuppence for every 144 matchboxes she finished. Me and my sister Nell both had jobs at the match factory. We worked twelve hours a day in winter, fourteen in summer, and we were on our feet the whole time. And there was no getting away from the phosphorus. We breathed it in. We swallowed it down with our dinner. The disease loomed over both of us. We lived in the shadow of phossy jaw, terrified we’d be next. So why didn’t Mr George Arthur Wilkinson do anything about it? The owner of the match factory was a fine upstanding gentleman after all. Didn’t he care that he was killing his workers? Those are very fair questions. Truth was, we hardly ever got to see the boss. Mr George Arthur Wilkinson would come to the factory maybe once a month for a board meeting or to meet his shareholders. He’d stride past the Prime Minister’s statue just outside the gates and come in carrying a silver‑topped cane as if it was a truncheon and he knew how to use it. He always had a great big dog with him – a mastiff that looked like it would tear the throat out of anyone who got too close. Mr George Arthur Wilkinson never spoke to any of us and we never spoke to him. Oh, there had been rumblings and grumblings about phossy jaw from time to time. Once a newspaperman from up west had come to ask him about the disease. But Mr Wilkinson had sworn blind that all his workers were healthy. He said phossy jaw simply didn’t exist in his factory. And he was right in a way. Because if anyone got a toothache, the foreman, Mr Fettler, was under orders to say it was a dental problem. And if you had a dental problem, why then of course you’d have to have your teeth pulled. If the disease got worse, Mr Fettler would find any old excuse to kick you out. He’d say a girl was a lazy good‑for‑nothing, or a troublemaker stirring things up, and she’d get the sack. That was how Mr George Arthur Wilkinson kept his factory “clean and free of the disease”. How could anyone not be angry about that? But Mother said I needed to calm down. I’d be wanting to get married in a couple of years or so, but what man would ever want me as a wife? “A husband needs peace and quiet, Eliza,” Mother told me. “He needs to be looked after, to feel like he’s lord and master in his own home – even if that’s just one room in a place like this. A husband will look elsewhere if he can’t find comfort with his wife.” It was a useless piece of advice! Even if Mother had crawled on her hands and knees from one end of Bow Road to the other and begged Father to stay home, he’d still have had his other women. Father had an easy charm, a playful smile and a wandering eye. He could tell a fine tale and dance a merry jig. Women loved him. And he could never resist a pretty face. Every time Father got caught out with some other woman, he’d come home and beg Mother to forgive him. She’d cry herself dry and then they’d make up and be as happy as honeymooners. Until the next time. Now, at the ripe old age of fourteen, I’d worked out that Father would have loved Mother more if she’d loved him less. It was a strange lesson to learn. But at least he didn’t drink all his wages on a Saturday night and come home reeling, like some of the men in our street. Father didn’t beat Mother up and he never laid a hand on his children apart from Jimmy sometimes – and to be fair, Jimmy always deserved it. I was their first child. Nell had come along a year and a half later. Then there were three boys who all died before they were a year old. After that, Jimmy was born, and he was a barrow load of trouble from the moment he saw the light of day. He got into one scrape after another – he was always up to something. He just couldn’t help himself. Then there were three more girls born one after the other in such rapid succession that they got all lumped together as “the little ones”. If they’d ever had names of their own, they never got called by them. I grew up watching Mother tear herself apart with love and loss and worry. She was worn as thin as a thread by the time I was old enough to start working at the factory. In lots of ways I was an ignorant, uneducated girl. I could barely read or write. Adding and subtracting numbers made me sweat hot and cold all over. But I knew one thing for certain: I did not want to follow in my mother’s footsteps. If I was too angry, if my boiling rage put men off? Then good. If I lived and died all alone without a husband and family around me? The peace and quiet would be a blessed relief.
