Never Look Back (3 page)

But as she watched, Matilda stood up and moved right into the bows. She bent over, one hand supporting herself on the rail, while with the other she appeared to be fumbling under her coat.

Fanny didn’t draw her father’s attention to this, thinking perhaps Matilda was adjusting her stockings. But suddenly there was something small and bright red in the woman’s hand. She brought it up to her lips, appeared to kiss it and murmur something to it. Then, lifting her arm, she threw it into the sea.

As Matilda sat down again, Fanny slipped out of the wheel-house and looked over the side of the tug. The small red article was bobbing along on the surface of the water. Not a handkerchief or scarf, as she’d expected, but a red satin garter!

Fanny knew it must have some special significance to the old lady, perhaps a memento of her first love. She would give anything to know the full story.

Chapter One

London 1842

As Matilda Jennings wearily turned into Finders Court at seven in the evening, she caught a fleeting glimpse of a tuft of flame-red hair as its owner bobbed down behind a handcart. No one but her two half-brothers had such fiery hair, and if they were hiding from her it meant they’d been up to mischief.

‘Luke! George! Come ’ere at once, if you know’s what’s good fer you,’ she yelled.

Matilda was sixteen and a flower-seller. She was dirty and exhausted from a long day which had started at four that morning in Covent Garden market, yet despite having walked London’s streets all day hawking her wares, she still managed to exude a defiant air of robust vitality.

Her blue dress was ragged, muck-splattered from filthy streets, her calico pinafore heavily stained. But her thick, butter-coloured hair was neatly braided beneath a mob-cap, her cheeks were rosy, and when she gave one of her ready smiles her bright blue eyes sparkled.

Most of the people who bought Matilda’s flowers probably assumed she was a country girl, perhaps selling produce from her own garden. They wouldn’t know the pink cheeks were caused by wind burn, or that the merry smile was just part of her salesmanship. There was a bony, malnourished body beneath the voluminous dress and petticoat, her shawl hid her shoulders invariably stooped from the cold, and once her basket was empty she hobbled home painfully in worn-out boots to the kind of tenement that would make her flower-buying customers shudder.

Finders Court was ten two- and three-storey ramshackle houses leaning drunkenly on each other around a tiny squalid yard. The upper windows, many of them boarded up with bits
of wood and rags, almost touched the ones opposite. Each house had some ten or twelve small rooms, and most of these were occupied by more than one family. It was just off Rosemary Lane, London’s largest second-hand clothes market, and just a few minutes’ walk from the Tower of London and the river Thames.

At dusk on a chilly March evening, as always the court was teeming with noisy activity, costermongers trying to entice the frowzy women in grubby caps leaning out from upper windows to come down and buy the remaining goods on their handcarts, groups of dirt-smeared dock workers discussing the day’s work, or the lack of it. Old men and women were flopped down on doorsteps, taking a rest before staggering up the stairs with their sacks laden with the proceeds of a day’s scavenging work. Ragged children manned the water pump, filling their buckets and jugs, while younger siblings fought and played around them.

With only one privy shared by upwards of five or six hundred people, slop pails emptied along with rotting rubbish from windows, the stench was overpowering. Donkeys and horses were tethered overnight and it was quite a common occurrence for a pig to be rooting around in the yard too.

As the owner of the red hair remained hidden behind the cart, Matilda yelled again, louder this time, in a strident tone which reminded her uncomfortably of the boys’ mother, Peggie. Perhaps they heard the similarity too, and knew Matilda was just as capable of giving them a good hiding, for this time both boys emerged somewhat nervously.

‘’Ow many times ’ave I told you to get up ’ome and set the fire afore I get back?’ she yelled, side-stepping other children in her path and grabbing Luke, the older boy, by the ear. She would have caught George too, but she was hampered by her basket. ‘Your father will be ’ome soon for his supper and he wants a cuppa tea before he goes out again.’

Luke was ten, George eight. Skinny, foxy-faced little runts with nothing in common with their older sister but identical bright blue eyes. Matilda had looked after them from birth, but since Peggie died four years ago she had taken on the role of mother. She had loathed Peggie, and often she disliked her brats too, but for her father’s sake she did her best for them.

As she hauled Luke closer to her, the smell of him made her gag. ‘Whatcha bin up to?’ she gasped.

He didn’t need to admit it. The stench was unmistakable. ‘You dirty little sod, you’ve bin collecting pure again!’ she exclaimed in horror.

‘Pure’ was dog’s excrement. The lowest of the low collected it up and sold it to the tanners to treat their leather. There were a great many disgusting ways for poor people to make a living in London, but this one was the worst in her book.

Putting down her basket, she dragged both boys by the ears to the pump where a simple-minded lad from across the court was filling a bucket. She commanded him to continue pumping and pushed Luke right under the stream. Grasping his hair firmly with one hand, and using a rag she kept in the pocket of her pinafore, she scrubbed him down, hair, face, body, right down to his filthy bare feet.

‘It’s freezin’,’ he wailed, his teeth chattering as she finally let him go to grab George and give him the same treatment. Luke’s thin worn shirt and ragged breeches were stuck to his scrawny frame and he shook himself like a dog, showering her with water. ‘We only did it for you, Matty. We got a whole sixpence.’

If that explanation had come from almost any other child Matilda might have been touched. But Luke was a habitual liar and already an incorrigible rogue. She knew that if she hadn’t spotted him, he and his brother would have nipped off to spend the money on themselves, probably waiting until she’d fallen asleep before crawling into the bed beside her in their stinking condition.

As so many people were watching and listening, Matilda didn’t make any reply until she’d got both boys, still dripping and shivering, up the rickety stairs to their room at the top of the house.

‘Take your clothes off and put your night-shirts on,’ she said curtly as she closed the door. ‘I’ll deal with you in a minute when I’ve got the fire going. And don’t even think of running out or you’ll be sorry.’

The room was very dark because one of the two small windows was broken and had been replaced with a piece of wood. There was little furniture: an iron bed in which she and the boys slept – Lucas, their father, had a makeshift one, a flour sack filled with
straw – a bench, a rough wood cupboard and a small table were all there was apart from their father’s chair. It was solid oak with arms and seat smooth with years of constant use and Lucas jokingly called it the Bosun’s chair. It was the only thing of any value they owned.

Matilda lit the candle first, then, taking it over to the fireplace, she raked the old ashes to one side, hastily dipped a bit of rag into the oil pot, and lit it from the candle, laying a few twigs over it. She didn’t look round at the boys behind her, but she guessed by their silence they were signalling to one another, trying vainly to work out some plan to get out again tonight. But even they wouldn’t dare run out in their ragged night-shirts which barely covered their bony bottoms, and they hadn’t another change of clothes.

In a few minutes she’d got the fire going well, slowly adding more dry wood, then small pieces of coal. She held her icy hands to the blaze while she prepared what she was going to say to her brothers.

Appalling as Finders Court would be to someone from the upper classes, Matilda took some comfort in knowing it was one of the better tenements in the neighbourhood. At least here no one operated a penny-a-night shelter for the absolute down-and-outs. She knew of courts where there were as many as thirty people huddled in one filthy room, without even a blanket to cover themselves. In those, runaway children and orphans as young as five or six slept alongside criminals, prostitutes, beggars and the feeble-minded, and their corruption began from their first night in such places.

Matilda was an intelligent and sensitive girl. Spending her days in the better areas of London, she had observed every aspect of the huge divide between rich and poor. It wasn’t just that the rich had grand houses, servants and ate well; their children were protected.

Most of London’s poor relinquished all responsibility for their children long before they even reached Luke’s age, turning them out and expecting them to find work to keep themselves. While Matilda wasn’t against Luke or George working – after all, she’d started as a flower girl at ten – both she and her father believed it was their duty to hold the boys close to them in a family home until such time as they were mature
enough to cope alone with the temptations and dangers of London.

With this in the forefront of her mind she turned to them. With their faces clean for once and shivering violently, they looked pitiful. Matilda pulled up the bench to the fire and ordered them to sit down.

‘Jennings have never collected pure,’ she said firmly, taking up a position at the side of the fire, her hands on her hips. ‘Jennings have always been watermen. Being a waterman is a respected craft, like being a carpenter or a builder, and it’s been passed down from father to son for five or six generations. So what do you think Father will do when I tells ’im what ’is sons ’ave been doing?’

‘’E’ll strap us,’ George snivelled, his eyes wide with fear.

‘That’s what you deserve,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘But it will break ’is ’eart, that’s what. Collecting pure is a job for beggars. It’s worse than scavenging in the sewers, as nasty as pickin’ pockets. We ain’t got much, but us Jennings ’ave always ’ad pride. That’s why we don’t share this room with no other family. We pays our three and sixpence each week and we ’olds our ’eads up. There’s folks in this court what thinks we is ’oity-toity, but that’s because they’re jealous of us. You go out grubbing around picking up that stinking stuff, and you shame our family name.’

‘But we was only thinking of you,’ Luke whined, his red hair and white face suddenly very vulnerable and angelic-looking in the glow from the fire. ‘We knows you needs the money.’

‘Your father and me earn enough to keep us,’ she said, softening a little and reminding herself they were only little boys. ‘What we want is for you to go to Miss Agnew’s every day, so you learns to read and write like me. That way you can get a proper trade when you’re older.’

‘Reading and writing ain’t got you nuffin but sellin’ flowers,’ Luke retorted with some belligerence. ‘You could do that if you was a blind cripple.’

‘Maybe it’s all I can do now, but at least I ain’t selling meself like some of the girls around ’ere,’ Matilda retorted angrily. Luke was a cruel little swine, he always had a knack of answering back with something that would hurt her. ‘I goes to smart places,
it’s clean work and the flowers smell nice. Ladies and gentlemen buys them off me.’

Luke merely sneered, his sharp features so very like the rats which scuttled up and down the stairways. He had the mentality of a rat too. Quick, sly and vicious. He didn’t seem to have inherited anything from his honest and kindly father. He didn’t even show any interest in following the family trade.

‘I don’t like school,’ George said, his eyes filling with tears. ‘I can’t do it and Miss Agnew beats us around the ‘ead.’

Matilda sighed deeply. George was slow in comparison to his older brother, and she felt for him. There were no real schools for the children of the very poor, though she’d heard it rumoured there were men in the Government who believed there should be. All there was were dame schools, where women like Miss Agnew passed on their knowledge of the rudiments of reading, writing and sums, in one tiny room, to any child who turned up with the required ha’penny a day. Matilda had been taught by Miss Agnew herself and knew how cruel she could be, but to her it had been worth it. She read anything she could get her hands on, usually only religious tracts or news sheets she found in the streets, because real books were too expensive, but only last week she’d bought the first instalment of
Oliver Twist
by Mr Charles Dickens, and she could hardly wait to get the second part.

She could write a good hand, add up and multiply – if she could just get a job in a shop she’d be made for life. The trouble was that looking the way she did now, with her ragged dress and boots with holes in them, no one would take her on, not even as a scullery maid. She was on a treadmill, and until she found a way of earning enough to buy some decent clothes, she knew she couldn’t get off it.

‘If you try ‘arder Miss Agnew won’t beat you,’ she said wearily. ‘Now, promise me you’ll go to ’er tomorrow? Or I’ll tell Father what you’ve bin up to.’

They gave their promise, but she knew it was an empty one. They could see nothing in learning for them, earning a few pennies was far more satisfying. They might not collect pure again in a hurry, but they’d be down with the other mudlarks in the Thames in a day or two, scavenging for anything they could
sell to the marine shops – nails, rivets, bones and bits of timber. She might as well talk to the wall.

She filled the kettle with water her father had drawn from the pump before he’d left for the river, then put it on the fire. Out of her basket she pulled the four mutton pies she’d bought on the way home. They were usually a penny each, but she’d got all four for tuppence as the pie man had a lot left unsold. With a nice thick slice of bread and a juicy orange each it was a good supper by Finders Court standards.

‘Give us the sixpence then,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘And while you’re finding it, bring the wet clothes over ’ere and I’ll ’ang ’em up to dry. You ain’t goin’ anywhere else tonight.’