Ten Bells Street

Book 1: The Spitalfields Sagas

by Mary Collins

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

The East End of London, 1930. Work is scarce, food is in short supply and there is political unrest on the streets. But in the face of all this hardship, there's always friendship.

Becky, Bernie and Rose - three best friends from very different backgrounds - are working hard to establish themselves in prewar Spitalfields. Becky, the daughter of a Jewish tailor, wants to become a nurse, but her father has more traditional plans for her. Aching to leave the East End and travel the world, Bernie feels trapped by her vast family of poor Irish dock workers. And then there is Rose. Tiny and thin, she lives with her drunken mother and a revolving selection of surrogate fathers who exploit and brutalise them both.

But at least the girls have each other, and as Europe begins to drift towards another war, their friendships become ever more crucial as each one of them fights for their place in an ever-changing, frightening new world. One way or another, love will pull them through....

Release date: May 3, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

1 August 1930

Spitalfields, London

Bernie knew that her grotto was the best. Marie’s had been a pile of mud with some leaves and a shell on top. The boys’ effort was even worse. Of course Mammy had said they were all nice, but then Mammy wanted them out of the way so she could work. By the time they got in for their tea, the whole flat would be wreathed in steam and the lines in the yard would be full of other people’s washing. Mammy would be worn out but she’d still have to cook for them all and then she had a sewing job on for Mr Sassoon.

‘Remember the grotto!’ Bernie said to a passer-by.

The old Jewish man looked at her, shook his head and walked on. Her daddy had told her the Jews didn’t believe in grottos. Bernie didn’t understand it. You didn’t have to believe in grottos to like them. Grottos were beautiful. Well, Bernie’s was.

She’d taken a board from the yard and covered it in moss to start with. A bit of broken mirror became a pond, then she’d put a Holy Card she’d got for good attendance at school on the edge of the glass. It showed her namesake, St Bernadette, praying to Our Lady of Lourdes, to thank her for all the miracles of healing she’d performed. Bernie had surrounded this with flowers ‘borrowed’ from Christ Church graveyard. Mammy would’ve killed her if she’d found out. She would’ve double killed her if she’d known that the little sparkles glittering between the flowers were the hatpins she’d inherited from Great-nanny Burke. One of them was a proper stone, which went into Uncle’s every time the rent was due. To prop up the picture, Bernie had used one of Aggie’s dolls’ chairs. Bernadette had asked her little sister. Aggie was too young to answer, but Bernie had asked.

Her brothers and Dermot’s pal little Chrissy Dolan had taken their grotto up the pub. That was the best pitch. People didn’t know what money they had left when they came out, and cared even less. The odd farthing might even fall from a limp, tipsy hand by mistake. The boys’d be on it like starving rats. Marie and her friend Doris had disappeared down towards Liverpool Street Station with their messy old wreck.

Bernie pressed herself up against the wall next to Kipper’s Bananas. The fruit and veg market was also a good pitch for a skinny kid with a pretty grotto. Flat-cap-wearing costers with fags hanging out of their mouths could be good for a farthing or two – or else a few cauliflower leaves. The old girls with their headscarves and mourning jewellery might tell her to ‘Get out of it!’, but Bernie knew to ignore them. They didn’t like ‘Irish’. Her mammy always said to turn her nose up at such ignorant women.

But on this bright morning in August, even the blokes were ignoring her. Maybe her grotto just wasn’t big or good enough?
Or maybe it was as her daddy kept saying and no one had any money? Bernie wished she was with the boys. Seven-year-old Paddy had nicked a handful of bread and dripping from underneath their mammy’s nose and Bernie’s stomach was rumbling at the thought of it.

‘What’s that you have there?’

When she looked up to see where the voice had come from, Bernie expected its owner to be a grown-up woman – and a posh one at that. But it was a girl who had spoken to her.

‘What?’

In fact it was the girl who lived across the road. Her dad was rich, so Bernie’s mammy said. A tailor by trade, he wore a little cap like a bishop’s and a thick overcoat even in the summer. Like most people on Fournier Street, this family were Jews and worshipped at the big Synagogue there. Bernie and the rest of her family had to drag themselves all the way almost to the Tower of London to go to Mass. Them Jews, her mammy said, had it easy.

‘What is it?’ asked the girl again.

She pointed at the grotto. It was then that Bernie saw the Jewish girl wasn’t alone. Two massive green eyes, set deep in the tiniest, dirtiest face in Spitalfields, peeped over the tailor’s daughter’s smartly dressed shoulder.

‘It’s a grotto,’ the green-eyed child whispered.

Smelly Ellie. Now Bernie knew her.

‘How’d you know that?’ she said, curious. ‘You don’t go to school or nuffing.’

‘Me dad telled me. And I do go to school. Sometimes.’

‘Don’t lie! You ain’t got no dad, Ellie.’

‘Me name’s not Ellie.’

The child’s name was Rose and she too lived on Fournier Street. But not in a house like the Jewish girl or even in a small
flat like the one Bernie lived in with her family. Rose and her mother and a revolving selection of men lived in two basement box rooms.

‘Anyway, that’s a grotto,’ Rose said to the Jewish girl. ‘You make ’em new every year and ask people to “remember” them. Then they give you money.’

‘What for?’

‘To remember the grotto!’ Bernie said. ‘It’s like a saint’s miracle or the Virgin Mary, me daddy said.’

‘So did me mum,’ Rose agreed.

Bernie’s patience snapped then. Everyone knew what Smelly Ellie’s mum was. She wouldn’t have that old brass compared to her daddy!

‘Shut up, Ellie,’ she said. ‘Your mum don’t know nuffing. Anyway, thought your “dad” told ya?’

‘He did.’

Bernie looked at the tailor’s daughter. ‘What you doing going about with Smelly Ellie? You know she don’t wear knickers, don’t ya?’

The girl put a hand in the pocket of her smart blue dress and took out a ha’penny.

‘That for the grotto?’ Bernie asked, quick as a flash.

‘You can have it if you don’t call my friend here rude names,’ the Jewish girl replied.

Bernie didn’t like being told what to do even by her mammy. She said, ‘Well, what do you call her then?’

‘Rose. And I’m Rebekah,’ the girl said. ‘Rose is my friend.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since she taught me how to swing off lamp-posts.’

‘Anyone can do that.’

Bernie had been hooking old bits of rope around the tops of lamp-posts and making swings all her life.

No one said anything. Bernie looked at the coin in Rebekah’s hand. Eventually Rose said, ‘How old are you?’

Bernie didn’t know whether she or Rebekah was being addressed but said, ‘I’m ten. You’re younger though, ain’t ya? You’re the same age as our Marie.’

‘Eight.’

‘I’m ten,’ Rebekah said.

Bernie wanted to ask her what she was doing playing with a kid two years younger, but she didn’t. She wanted that ha’penny and she was going to get it. She already had sixpence from when she’d found old Peg-leg Dooley’s dog down by Wapping Stairs back in June. Her brother Joey had taken the mutt for a laugh, but Peg-leg didn’t know that. It was then, just after the old man had given her the tanner, that Bernie had seen The Photographs.

Old Mr Katz had run the paper and string shop on Brick Lane for donkey’s years. But no one had known he had a brother until he had turned up and started working in the shop at the beginning of the year. People said he came from Germany. Bernie didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t know anything about this man, Walter Katz, until her mammy sent her into the shop to buy some string.

The usual Mr Katz had been out and so his brother had served her. While he cut the string to the length she needed, Walter Katz said that if she wanted, she could look at some photographs of his country. They lay on the counter and they were beautiful. There were pictures of castles that looked like they came from fairy tales, of pretty, clean little villages, the houses covered in flowers, and of men and boys proudly wearing very smart uniforms and shiny boots. Bernie asked Walter Katz how he’d got the photographs and he said that he had taken them himself. ‘That was my job, being a photographer,’ he’d told her, ‘until those men with the shiny boots told me to stop.’

He’d not told her why they’d asked him to stop and Bernie hadn’t enquired. It was rude to ask grown-ups too many questions, so her mammy said. But then he’d shown her his camera and she’d asked more questions than her mother could have imagined. A sleek black-and-chrome Leica, it was nothing like the huge camera that Mr Cohen the photographer had in his studio. It took both Mr Cohen and his wife to move that. But Mr Katz’s camera was so small, it could go anywhere. Even, Bernie had daydreamed, to Egypt where the Pyramids were, which was where she was going to become an explorer when she grew up. She knew all there was to know about the Pyramids because Sister Joan at school had let her read about them in a book.

Then Mr Katz had told her what his camera would cost. He’d said, ‘Maybe one day when you’re older you can have one.’ Bernie had run home then and cried. Ten pounds was an impossible amount! But then she’d remembered her tanner and thought, Well, it’s a start!

And now here was a rich girl who had made friends with Smelly Ellie. If this Rebekah could make friends with someone like Ellie, she could make friends with anyone!

‘Well, if you’re ten then and you can swing on lamp-posts, you should learn to ride a bike,’ Bernie told her.

‘A bike? Papa wouldn’t like that,’ Rebekah said immediately.

‘Does he like you swinging on lamp-posts?’

‘He doesn’t know about it. Anyway I couldn’t ride a bike because I don’t know how.’

‘Me brother Dermot made himself one,’ Bernie told her. ‘He lets me ride it. I can teach you.’

‘Can you teach me too?’ Rose asked.

‘That would be nice. If we could all ride the bike,’ Rebekah said. ‘I see people on them all the time. I’ve always wanted to try.’

Bernie looked at Smelly Ellie’s ragged clothes and tangled, filthy black hair. Mammy said that Rose and her mum were gypsies. She always said that her own kids should keep away from that family in case they got cursed. But then if Smelly Ellie was with this Rebekah, she’d make sure she didn’t do anything magic, wouldn’t she?

‘I seen your Dermot’s bike,’ Rose said. ‘I won’t bust it. Honest.’

Bernie pretended to think for a moment and then she said, ‘You can if you put on knickers.’

Rose trembled with excitement. ‘I will!’

Rebekah put her ha’penny down in front of the grotto.

It took every ounce of self-control Bernie had not to snatch it up immediately and put it in her pocket. Instead she said, ‘Daddy says that if you remember the grotto you’ll be happy all year.’

‘Because it’s magic,’ Rose said.

Just very quickly, Bernie shuddered.

A farthing a lesson seemed about right – except that Rebekah learned fast and anyway Dermot nicked the coin off Bernie when he found it. Well, it was his bike.

As it happened he did his sister a favour because as the long hot days of the summer holidays passed, Bernie began to like ‘Becky’ more and more. She was even able to put up with Rose, provided she didn’t pick her nose too much and kept the smell down. But Bernie continued to steer clear of Rose’s mother, Nell.

The latest man in Nell Larkin’s life was, like the one before him, a drunken bully. When he wasn’t in the Ten Bells at the bottom of the road, boozing, he was lying drunk in those tiny stinking rooms they all shared, or smacking Nell about. Not that she couldn’t give as good as she got. One afternoon when Bernie and Becky went to meet Rose they heard her mother yell, ‘Next time I’ll fuckin’ kill ya!’

Rose had said, ‘Me dad’s had a skinful again.’ And then laughed nervously.

But to tell the truth Bernie was actually more afraid of Becky’s dad than she was of Rose’s mum. Nell Larkin was a mad gypsy woman and so of course she was scary. Becky’s dad was just odd.

One day when they were all out in Bernie’s mammy and daddy’s back yard, skipping, Bernie said to Becky, ‘Why don’t your dad go out?’

Moritz Shapiro, Rebekah’s father, was always busy. But so were all the tailors in Spitalfields. In spite of this, they were seen on the streets most days, with the exception of Moritz. He went to the Great Synagogue and came home and that was it. Occasionally his elderly, disapproving face would be seen at one of the windows of his dark, ancient house on Fournier Street, but he would never utter a word to his gentile neighbours.

All Becky ever said about him was, ‘He’s been like that since my mama died.’

But that had been years ago. Becky had been five at the time. Since then the only women who ever went into the Shapiros’ house were Moritz’s maiden sister Rivka, who came to prepare and share the Shabbos meal with her brother and his daughter every Friday night, and a woman who came to do the washing and cleaning on a Monday.

After they’d all first met at the fruit and veg market, Bernie had heaved her grotto about for a while and made another tuppence. She’d told her daddy, because unlike most daddies she knew, she could tell him anything. But she didn’t tell her mammy. Money had a way of disappearing Mammy’s way if she knew about it.

As Patrick Lynch had taken his boots off that night he had whispered to his daughter, ‘Not bad for the first day of the oyster season.’

‘The oyster season?’

‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘That’s what grotto day’s about, my little duck, to celebrate the first oysters of the year.’

‘Not about the saints?’

‘Not really, no. I just say that so your mum won’t tell you off.’ Then he’d coughed. He’d started to make an awful hacking noise in recent times that made her mammy frown.

He’d tucked Bernie up in bed and kissed her. And she’d said, ‘Daddy, what’s oysters?’

Patrick Lynch laughed softly so as not to wake his other five children or his exhausted wife.

‘Oh, they’re sort of fish,’ he’d said. ‘Used to be poor men’s food, did oysters. When me granddad Lynch first arrived in England, everybody ate ’em. But now only the rich can afford them. Maybe one day, when you grow up, you can go to a nice, posh restaurant up the West End and try some.’

‘When I’m an explorer with a camera?’ Bernie had said then.

Patrick smiled. ‘When you’re famous all round the world, including Egypt,’ he’d said.

Then he’d coughed his way off to bed, leaving Bernie and all the other Lynch children to try and get some rest. It wasn’t easy. Little Aggie’s hair was full of nits again and so she scratched and cried for much of the night. Marie had a cough like her daddy’s and the boys groaned in their sleep because they were hungry. Dermot in particular was growing fast. Bernie hoped that she’d be tall too when she got older. She didn’t want to be a shrimp like Smelly Ellie. But then her mammy said that the poor girl didn’t eat. Any money her mum got went on the drink. Bernie was really lucky compared with her. But not with her new friend, Becky.

Becky had nice clothes and clean hair and her face was pleasantly plump – not all greasy and fat like that of old Mrs Healey, Father Reynolds’ housekeeper. Becky’s cheeks were smooth and red and made her look like a pretty china doll. She was clever too. When she grew up she wanted to be a doctor. Bernie had no doubt she’d do it too. That was, unless her scary ‘papa’ stopped her.

Like the fog that came off the Thames in thin grey rolls, thick yellow sheets and wisps of white like ghosts, Spitalfields was about layers. Layers of people and layers of time. Just beyond the walls of the ancient City of London, the area had been home to outsiders for centuries.

In the eighteenth century Huguenot refugees from France had settled there. Silk weavers by trade, they hadn’t been allowed to work inside the City, where local British weavers lived and did business, and so had created an industrious and, at the time, elegant quarter of their own in Spitalfields. They built tall, handsome houses, vast airy churches and, it was said, made the best silk clothing in the world. As they became wealthy and established in England, though, they moved out to other, more rural parts of the country where they integrated with the local population. Their formerly fine East End houses and public buildings emptied out, only to be rapidly colonised by the families of Irish immigrants, refugees from the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century.

By this time the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and the Irish were soon joined by people from all over the British Isles, attracted to London by the prospect of work in the flourishing docks, which handled departing goods and cargoes arriving from every part of the globe. But the docks could employ only so many. In London, some unfortunate newcomers discovered further grinding poverty instead of higher wages. The old Huguenot houses became rat-infested slums where upwards of twenty people would live to a room. And the overcrowding kept getting worse.

In the 1880s another group of immigrants arrived. These were Jews escaping the persecution imposed on them by the Russian Tsar. They came from Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, bringing with them their strange, to British eyes, religion and customs. They brought few possessions and very little money, but in time established themselves. They worked for their community as kosher butchers, bakers or in Yiddish theatre, and for the wider population as tailors, jewellers and cabinet-makers. In 1898 what had once been a Huguenot church at the end of Fournier Street became the Great Synagogue where, amongst others, Moritz Shapiro would go to pray.

The evening light was fading as he looked through the cracked window of his house onto the filthy street beyond. At one end stood the Synagogue, at the other a church and the Ten Bells public house. His gentile neighbours went there to drink and have fights. He even knew of a few Jews who slipped in from time to time – those so-called actors at the Yiddish theatre. No one he associated with would stoop so low. Acting was lying and Moritz had no time for that, or for any other sinful pursuit.

The sounds of glass breaking and intoxicated laughter rang out in the street and Moritz went up to his daughter’s bedroom to make sure she wasn’t frightened. But Rebekah was asleep. She’d grown accustomed to such sounds, unlike her mother.

When she was alive, Moritz’s wife, Chani, had always been afraid of the pub. She’d told him, ‘You know, I’ve heard the goyim say it’s cursed. That a long time ago a terrible killer called Jack took women from that pub and cut them to pieces! And, Moritz, he has never been caught.’

To which he’d replied soothingly, ‘And yet the gentiles still go there, Chani. There’s nothing to fear.’

When he’d first arrived in Spitalfields with his parents and sisters, Moritz had heard all about Jack the Ripper. He had to have died a long time ago now. What a pity others like him hadn’t perished too. If only they had, his Chani would not have been stabbed to death in their own home while he had been out taking Rebekah to see his sister on Hanbury Street.

But then Moritz knew that it wasn’t really a man or men who had killed his wife, so much as the poverty that surrounded them. Spitalfields had that in abundance. Whoever had killed Chani had also taken all the money they’d had in the house at that time. All ten shillings of it …

Fog took hold of Fournier Street then and obscured even the filth in the gutter from Moritz’s view.

Winter 1934

‘Oi! Leave him alone!’

Dermot Lynch pulled the bigger lad off his puny mate and pushed him to the ground.

The boy, who was twice the size of Dermot’s friend Chrissy Dolan, promptly got up and punched Dermot in the face.

‘He’s my bruvver so you can keep out of it, Lynch, you bastard!’

Dermot punched him back. This time, Chrissy’s brother Ernie stayed down.

Wiping his bloodied nose on his shirt-sleeve, Dermot grabbed hold of Chrissy’s arm and pulled him along Fournier Street towards the Lynches’ two-roomed flat.

‘I never done nothing, Der,’ Chrissy said. ‘He just started on me!’

Dermot believed him. Poor Chrissy, who was in the same class as him at school, was always getting beaten up by someone. And that included his six brothers and even his dad.

Dermot dragged his friend down the steps that led to the Lynches’ basement flat, yanked him through the open door then locked it behind them.

‘Ernie’ll get me when I go ‘ome,’ Chrissy said as he stood in the middle of the crowded room, looking pitiful in his ragged shorts and filthy shirt.

All the Lynch kids as well as their dad, Pat, were at home. Bernie, the eldest girl, ran over to Chrissy and brought him to the range to warm himself. She sat him down on an old cushion and said, ‘You wanna thump him back, Chrissy.’

The boy, though two years older than Bernie, was a good head shorter. Like her brother Dermot, Bernie Lynch was tall.

‘Ah, they all gang up on him. It’s because he always gets the girls.’ Dermot was smiling as he teased his red-haired friend.

Chrissy looked down at the floor in embarrassment.

‘They’re just jealous, boy,’ Pat Lynch joshed him. ‘I was a bit of a devil for the girls meself before I met my Kitty. Had to fight me corner more than once, I can tell you.’

Bernie looked up at her dad and smiled. He coughed, bending almost double under the onslaught, his face turning purple. Bernie shuddered. Her daddy was more off work than he was on, now he had that cough all the time. She’d heard one of her mammy’s sisters say she thought it might be consumption, the disease so many here had and died from.

‘I like girls and they like me,’ Chrissy said miserably. ‘What can I do about it?’

‘You can punch them jealous little blighters back!’ Pat said. ‘Because that’s all it is, Chrissy, jealousy.’

Dermot agreed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They’re just jealous.’

But he saw his elder brother Joey’s smirk. He wasn’t going to help boost Chrissy’s damaged confidence. Like Chrissy’s own brothers, Joey gave the little boy constant grief about always hanging around with the girls at school. Called him a ‘poof’; said that if Dermot carried on being pals with Chrissy, people’d think he was queer too. Dermot ignored him. Ever since he’d left school and gone to work in the docks, like their dad, Joey had become arrogant and hard in a way Pat Lynch had never been. But then a lot of the blokes who worked in the docks were like that. Sometimes Dermot wondered how his gentle father had survived there.

Chrissy stayed with the Lynches for the rest of the day, joining the family, along with little Rosie from next door, for tea. Dermot’s mammy had been able to get hold of some meat from somewhere and so they’d all shared a big stew that was, in reality, more spuds and onions than lamb. But no one complained. Out on the streets of Spitalfields, those his dad called ‘the poor’ sat in gutters and shop doorways without so much as a crust to keep them going. To be without work was to die and Dermot knew that if his dad got much sicker he’d have to give up his docker’s hook and pass it on to his second son. Then Dermot would have to leave school and assume a man’s responsibilities. Just the thought of it made him sad. He promised himself he’d go to Mass in the morning and pray it didn’t happen any time soon.

There were two of them: one a great big lump of a young man, and the other slim, dark and with the look of an Arabian hero about him. Just like Rudolph Valentino.

‘What’s that say?’ Rose asked, pointing to some words scrawled on the wall of the pie shop.

Becky pulled her coat close around her freezing body and answered, ‘It says: “Yids go home”.’

‘Does that mean you? But you are home,’ Rose answered in bewilderment.

The handsome young man who, Becky now noticed, had a long Roman nose and full red lips, said, ‘Work of the fascists, darling. They want us out.’

‘Us?’

‘Jewish people, Rosie,’ Becky said. ‘Not you.’

‘Oh, they won’t stop at us Jews,’ the young man said. ‘They. . .