A Rare Ruby

 
 
 

 
A Rare Ruby

 

 
DEE WILLIAMS

 
 
headline

 
Copyright © 2002 Dee Williams

 

 
The right of Dee Williams to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 

 
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2009

 

 
All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.

 

eISBN : 978 0 7553 7303 1

 

 
This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

 

 
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
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Table of Contents

 

 

Dee Williams was born and brought up in Rotherhithe in East London where her father worked as a stevedore in Surrey Docks. Dee left school at fourteen, met her husband at sixteen and was married at twenty. After living abroad for some years, Dee moved to Hampshire to be close to her family. A RARE RUBY is her twelfth novel, following eleven hugely popular previous sagas set in Rotherhithe.

Thanks have to go to Carol and Diane, who work at our wonderful Horndean library. They are always willing to help find books for me, which have been invaluable for finding out about laundries and bagwash in the 1900s and 1920s.

 

I would like to thank Ron Brown of our local
Evening News
for his interesting article about laundries which planted the seed for this book. Ron, I have used the bits you couldn’t.

 

This is also for Chris Lloyd of Tower Hamlets Research Library for finding me photographs of the working conditions that some of the girls and women had to put up with.

 

I would also like to use this opportunity to thank Christine for the beautiful prom dress she made for my granddaughter Emma. She looked lovely. There will be another to make in two years’ time for Samantha.

 

Many thanks, everybody.

Ruby Jenkins pushed the kitchen door open with her bottom and dragged the heavy bundle of dirty laundry tied up in a sheet through the doorway. The smell of boiling washing filled the house. She took off her coat and beret and flicked her dark hair away from her eyes. She would have to get her mother to cut her wild hair soon - it was getting out of control. Ruby stood for a moment or two looking at her father sitting hunched in the chair next to the fire. Every time she looked at him, she couldn’t believe this was the man who’d gone off to be a soldier just five years ago, 10 September 1914. Thomas Jenkins had been so proud when he came home from work and told them he had joined the army. He had taken the King’s shilling. He was going to fight for his King and country. The reason she remembered it so well was because it was the day after her ninth birthday.

Her father looked up. ‘Hello, love.’ He grinned. ‘All right then?’

Tears filled her brown-speckled eyes and she nodded. He used to be a tall, upright man; now he was broken and sad.

‘I’m cold,’ he said, pulling the old blanket he always had wrapped round his shoulders tighter.

‘That you, our Ruby? You got that washing?’ yelled her mother from the washhouse at the back of the house.

‘Yes, Mum.’ She smiled when her mother called her ‘our Ruby’; it made her feel very precious. ‘Mum, Mrs Barton said could she have it back be Friday.’

Mary Jenkins came into the kitchen. She pushed back her damp hair and wiped the beads of perspiration from her forehead with the bottom of her overall. ‘Well, let’s hope the weather stays fine. It looks a bit like rain - that’ll be all I need.’

It was almost the end of October; Ruby’s fourteenth birthday had come and gone. There hadn’t been any celebrations and she had wanted to find work immediately, but her mother told her she would be more use at home; she needed her help doing the washing and collecting and delivering it. Ruby would have loved some money to spend on herself. She never had any as every penny had to go to help the household. They weren’t the only ones suffering. As she walked round the streets in Rotherhithe it upset her to see the many sad men, who once must have had good jobs, standing with trays hanging round their necks, selling matches, bootlaces and the like. Worst of all were the cripples sitting on the pavement with a cardboard sign next to them saying: ‘Kitchener needed me. Now I need you’ that made her turn away. Ruby had nothing to put in the cloth cap in front of them. And she knew things would get worse for everybody now the weather was beginning to turn wintry.

She stood in the kitchen and took in all the poverty they now had to endure. So much of their home had finished up in the pawnshop with no hope of it ever being redeemed. All they owned was a table and four chairs, none of them matching, and two very tatty brown brocade armchairs that Ruby and her younger brother Tom had found in a derelict house. They had laughed and giggled as they dragged them home but it wasn’t really funny when the horsehair stuffing constantly spilt out when anyone sat on them. She looked at the cracked mirror over the fireplace, which came from another of her and Tom’s scavenging expeditions. Even her mother’s prized possession, the brass fender that had ‘Waste Not Want Not’ written on it, had long since been sold. Only a solitary clock stood on the mantelpiece; there were no ornaments.

In one room, Ruby and Tom slept on a thick feather mattress. There was no bed and only one blanket: they used coats to cover them. Last winter had been bitter and they had had to huddle together to keep warm. Ruby had hated scraping the frost off the inside of the window every morning. She remembered the chilblains she’d had on her hands and feet and said a silent, desperate prayer:
Don’t let it be so cold this year
.

Her mother and father shared the other room. Her mother had determined to keep her bed, she said it reminded her of happier times. Ruby recalled the day she came to this house with her mother to look at the rooms. Mr Cox, the old man who lived there, said he would be prepared to move upstairs and let them have the downstairs for a minimal rent, just two shillings a week. That was a lot less than the five shillings her mother had struggled to find each week when they lived further up the road at number sixty Hill Street. Mr Cox was a bachelor and lived alone, and as part of the agreement her mother had to do his washing and cooking, as there weren’t any facilities upstairs.

Ruby didn’t like him. He was short and fat, and smelt of beer and stale pee. She hated it when he threw his dirty washing down the stairs. She would pick up his dirty underpants and socks as if they were about to bite her. If she came out of the closet and found him standing there, she always wondered whether he had been watching her through the knotholes in the wooden door. Sometimes, when he came down and sat at the table with them, Ruby found his eyes were on her. Thankfully most of the time he ate upstairs alone. Once she had told her mother her worries, but Mary had dismissed them as being silly.

‘Why would he be interested in a slip of a girl like you? He’s been good to us and he sits and talks to your father. So don’t you go upsetting him with your childish notions.’

Ruby was shocked when she found out from the girls at school what men wanted from young girls. Was it just childish notions?

She particularly hated it when her mother was cooking something special Mr Cox had bought for himself, which her family would not be sharing. The succulent smell of meat or fish would almost make her mouth water.

Every time Ruby passed her old house a lump would come to her throat and she’d give a little smile at her fond memories. The front room with its lace curtains always gave out the lovely scent of lavender polish when the door was opened. Her mother used to polish the brown leather three-piece suite with so much pride. The front doorstep was religiously whitened every morning. Gawd help you if you stepped on it and left a dirty footprint, you’d end up with a clip round the ear. Now all that had gone. Ruby looked down at her black button boots. They were scruffy, dirty and too small for her, they hurt as they rubbed the many darns in her lisle stockings. She remembered when her boots were new; now the soles were worn through and there was only cardboard stuffed inside between her feet and the ground. The thought of the winter and wet feet made her shudder. Before the war her father had worked in the biscuit factory. He’d had a good job and they hadn’t gone hungry and her mother hadn’t had to do other people’s washing - and, best of all, she’d gone to school. One at a time she gently ran her boot up the back of her legs to try to bring the shine back.

‘Ruby, bring that load out here and sort through it,’ her mother interrupted her thoughts. Mary Jenkins was a proud hard-working woman who kept the two rooms and kitchen with its range for cooking, plus the washhouse, which had running water and a boiler, as clean as she could. They were lucky they only had to share the outside closet with the old man, not like some round their way. Sometimes as many as six families had to share. Her mother fed them as best as the pittance she got for taking in washing allowed, making sure Mr Cox upstairs always had the best of whatever they had.

Ruby smoothed down her grey frock. It had once belonged to her mother and fitted her well enough, but now her bosoms were developing it was getting tight and cutting under her arms. How she wished for some new clothes. Tom was now wearing a pair of his father’s trousers that her mother had cut down to fit him. They were much too big and the legs hung down well below his knees. She said he would grow into them. Tom hadn’t complained, he said they would help to keep his knees warm in the winter. As far as Ruby could see things were never going to get any better. She sighed as she pushed and heaved the bundle into the washhouse. Even though it was cold outside the heat and steam in the small room was overpowering.

Her mother, a thin wiry woman, was at the sink scrubbing shirt collars and cuffs up and down the wooden washboard. Her straight grey hair always escaped from its hairclip and fell round her face. She tucked the offending hair behind her ear. ‘Somehow that woman always manages to get a navy sock in her load. It’s not the first time that everything’s gone blue and I’ve had to wash that load all over again. I’ve nearly finished here, so when you’ve done that you can help me take that lot out of the copper and put it through the mangle,’ she said over her shoulder.