Elizabeth and Lily Read online

  ELIZABETH

  AND LILY

  Hilary Bailey

  Contents

  Opening

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty–One

  Chapter Twenty–Two

  Chapter Twenty–Three

  Chapter Twenty–Four

  Chapter Twenty–Five

  Chapter Twenty–Six

  Chapter Twenty–Seven

  Chapter Twenty–Eight

  Chapter Twenty–Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty–One

  Chapter Thirty–Two

  Chapter Thirty–Three

  Chapter Thirty–Four

  Chapter Thirty–Five

  Chapter Thirty–Six

  Chapter Thirty–Seven

  Chapter Thirty–Eight

  Chapter Thirty–Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty–One

  Chapter Forty–Two

  A Note on the Author

  Opening

  1902

  Lights – and one great, blinding limelight in which she stood, making obeisance to the cheers, to a thousand pairs of hands, applauding, an enormous wave of applause reaching her like the sounds of the sea. She was a diminutive figure in a glittering scarlet dress which shimmered and moved with every step or movement of her body. She came forward, smiling sank into a deep curtsey, gazed across the stalls, slowly lifted her eyes to the upper circle, then higher, to the gallery. As her eyes reached every section, each man and woman in the audience thought that she looked at only him, or her. The cheering went on. She raised up, then turning, and smiling more broadly, sank into an even deeper curtsey towards the big portly figure in evening dress, surrounded by the black and white of other courtly figures in the Royal Box. In his turn King Edward VII, monarch of Great Britain, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith, stood up slowly and bowed to her. Dazzled by the lights, she felt, rather than saw, the smile on his face. There was a further wave of sound as the audience began to get to their feet, standing now, applauding and cheering.

  This was the Royal Command performance at the London Palladium. The curtains closed, then opened again on the small figure, bowing now, arms outstretched. A page with a vast bouquet pushed through the crowd of friends and theatre stars standing in the wings. Bouquets began to heap up at Lily’s feet, and the cheering went on and on…

  Chapter One

  1886

  Lily Strugnell was born, the oldest child of what was to be a family of four, in Bethnal Green, one of the poorest areas of London, in July 1886. She came into the world in the small bedroom of a two-room flat – the kitchen-living-room being the other. It was in cramped rooms like this that her parents, Charlie and Queenie Strugnell, lived at that time, and it was in exactly such places that, as the family increased, they were to go on living for the next fourteen years – until Lily began to make her fortune on the stages of music halls all over Britain.

  Charlie Strugnell was a carpenter specialising in shopfitting; Queenie, his wife, a pretty girl, had worked in a West End hat shop until courtship and marriage with Charlie. This marriage she often referred to either as a comedown or the beginning of a life of toil and trouble.

  Lily’s birth was followed by Edward’s – Eddie’s – a year later, and, a year later still, by Rose’s. Trade was not good. Charlie was often out of work. He would have done anything, but there was not always anything to do, for a great slump gripped the country. Queenie, married at eighteen, and the mother of three children by the time she was twenty-two, was worn out and unhappy. At that time they had been for two years in rooms on the ground floor at Guy Street, paying ten shillings a week for a kitchen with access to the yard beyond and a back bedroom with a window on the street. But whatever her later successes, Lily could never forget Guy Street.

  ‘Oh my Lord, Martha, I never knew it could be like this,’ the exhausted Queenie said to Martha Barrington, over a cup of tea at the kitchen table. Martha was thirty-six and lived upstairs. ‘How many more kids can I have before I break down completely?’ It was a hot day. Baby Rose was asleep on the bed in the kitchen, her head a mass of sweaty dark curls. Lily, now three, knickerless in a skimpy dress, was in the yard, trying to reach up to the mangle. Little Eddie, aged two, was in the corner by two rabbit hutches belonging to Martha’s husband, Henry.

  Even as Queenie spoke, Eddie stuck his little finger through the wire mesh covering one of the cages, and a rabbit inside bit his finger. He howled, and Queenie jumped to her feet. ‘Lily,’ she shouted from the open window, ‘look after your brother.’

  ‘The rabbit’s bit him, Ma,’ called Lily’s little voice.

  ‘Well, stick his hand under the pump,’ cried the irritable Queenie, who then sat down again at the kitchen table and passed a weary hand over her brow. She was thin now. She was wearing the same blue dress which she had, four years before, starched and pressed and put on to go out, courting Charlie. Above it she’d worn a straw hat, a matching cornflower tucked into the ribbon. Now her face was very pale, and her fair hair was straggly at the back, where the pins had fallen out. ‘What can you do?’ she asked as Eddie howled in the yard. ‘For once little Rose is asleep, and still no peace.’

  ‘You’d better not have any more of them,’ Martha told her. She herself was the mother of only two children, twin boys, red-headed and now in the first class of St Benedict’s Infant School in Ware Road, where they were trying to make Christians out of James and John, with only partial success so far.

  ‘That’s easier said than done,’ Queenie said despondently.

  Martha coughed, and bent her head towards her friend. ‘I’m surprised you don’t know…’ she began.

  Out in the yard, Lily sat by the mangle, comforting her sobbing brother. ‘’S only a little bite, Eddie. Look – it’s nearly not bleeding!’

  ‘Hurts,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll go off in a minute.’

  They were both very fair-haired and pale-skinned, but while Lily was robust, Eddie was not. He had already suffered almost every childhood ailment – croup, measles, mumps, chicken pox. He had constant colds all winter, one taking over where the other left off, and the colds often turned to bronchitis, which left him coughing and wheezing.

  Charlie Strugnell didn’t know what to make of a situation where his oldest child grew like a weed and his only son was always ill. Queenie was vexed with constantly attending a sick child – and Martha Barrington privately thought that the Strugnells would be lucky to rear the boy. It was hard for the poor to bring their children up at the best of times, but Martha, a countrywoman, knew that the bad air of the East End didn’t help. There were tanneries, breweries, factories of every kind, as well as the smoke from the railways. The houses were too close together. There were no open spaces. Martha, like everybody, knew that small families were best for poor people. It meant more money for each and a mother not too exhausted to look after them. So she told Queenie what to do to avoid more pregnancies.

  Martha’s advice did not improve the Strugnell marriage, since it consisted only of employing the withdrawal method, which Charlie did not enjoy and could not always manage. This led to
more tension. Other things went wrong, too. Charlie and Henry Barrington were workmates in Carr’s, a small firm of shopfitters. It was while putting in a new set of cabinets in an umbrella shop in Regent Street that Charlie’s hand slipped. A sharp chisel drove into his thigh, making a deep cut, which festered. After a week his upper leg was twice its normal size, red, swollen and throbbing. He could no longer haul himself to work, and Henry had to complete the job alone. Charlie was in for a long spell off work. Dr Webber, when Charlie finally hobbled to his surgery with Queenie supporting him on one side, said he must go to the London Hospital. The wound would need draining for several days. Charlie blanched but told the doctor he would attend. On the way home, though, he vowed to Queenie that he would not go to hospital – he was sure they would amputate his leg. But Henry and Queenie finally persuaded him, and late the same night, with Charlie in agony and well primed with rum, they hauled him on to a tram and got him to the hospital. Martha watched over the Strugnell children downstairs. She knew that Lily believed Charlie had gone to hospital to die, and was unable categorically to deny this. People dreaded hospitals and went only as a last resort, when their condition was often grave or incurable. Thus, many did die in hospital. Martha told Lily that the doctors were going to cure Charlie, but Lily, a bright child, spotted her lack of conviction.

  When Queenie returned, having been fortified by a couple of glasses of port wine on the way back, she was in an odd frame of mind. ‘Well, he’s in now and they’re doing their worst,’ she told Martha. Then she laughed. ‘Charlie’s in God’s hands, but God knows, God don’t care.’

  ‘I’ll be sending up a prayer for him tonight, even so,’ Martha responded. Then she had to go back to Henry and her own boys. Lily and little Eddie lay in their bed in the corner of the kitchen, while for hours Queenie paced the room, sighing, and lamenting. ‘Just as we were getting on our feet again. Just as we were getting a bit saved up. Oh God, what am I going to do? What if Charlie dies? Oh God, Lily, what if your dad dies? Where’ll we be then? The workhouse – the workhouse. Oh God, Lily, I’m an unlucky woman, born under a bad star, that’s for sure.’ Lily, terrified, tried not to listen, until at one point Queenie fell down beside the bed, weeping, and saying, ‘Oh Lily – Lily love, you’ll have to look after your poor mum now.’

  Lily brushed her mother’s hair with her little hand, and said, ‘It’s all right, Ma. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of us.’ She was terrified, even more frightened because what she said appeared to console her mother. Bewildered, she wondered what she was supposed to do. Mercifully, Rose, asleep in her parents’ bed, cried out, and Queenie retreated to see what the matter was. Lily lay awake for some time, fearing her mother’s return, then, gratefully, went to sleep.

  Happily, Charlie recovered, after a week of painful treatment in hospital. He returned weak, the wound still troubling him, and later, when he asked Mr Carr for his job back, it was not available. Carr’s order book was thin, he did not need another carpenter. Their savings almost exhausted, the Strugnells moved upstairs, above the Barringtons, to the house’s one attic room. It was there, in that overcrowded room under the eaves, during a grim winter, that Eddie became ill again. It began with a cold, not helped by draughts and small fires and the meagre diet of broth, bread and potatoes which was all that Queenie, who held the purse strings, could afford. So Eddie coughed and coughed, and grew weaker. At first he had a fever every night, and then all day as well.

  ‘Take him to the doctor,’ said Charlie one day. ‘Look at him. He’s too weak to get up.’

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ Queenie told him.

  That night Charlie attacked again: ‘Take him to the doctor.’

  ‘Take him yourself,’ she said. ‘He’s got a cold, that’s all. We can’t afford the doctor.’

  ‘Carry him to the hospital then.’

  ‘If you want to take a boy with a simple cold to the hospital, don’t let me stop you,’ Queenie retorted. The row went on for hours, as Lily, in the same bed as her brother, murmured to the feverish boy, fetched him water, and gazed from face to face as her parents argued. At one point she said, ‘Dad – I’ll help you carry Eddie to the hospital. Auntie Martha will come—’

  ‘Shut up!’ shouted Queenie. ‘Shut up, the lot of you. Haven’t I got enough to put up with?’ And she flung out, slamming the door.

  Charlie opened it and called to her retreating figure, ‘That won’t help, will it? Running away? Running away from a sick child.’ He sat down on the other bed in the room. Eddie lay with his face turned to the ceiling, dirty curls clinging round his head, seeming unaware, now, of where he was. Yet he still coughed, a racking, monotonous cough.

  ‘Where’s Mum gone?’ Lily asked.

  ‘God alone knows,’ Charlie said. ‘Round to sit in some woman’s kitchen, bemoaning her fate, I expect.’ He sighed heavily, then went to the mantelpiece and got a nearly empty bottle of ink and the steel pen which stood beside it. ‘Run down and ask your Auntie Martha for the loan of a bit of paper,’ he said, and when Lily had fetched it he laboriously wrote a note, saying, as he did so, ‘Beg – that’s all the poor can do – beg. That it had to come to this.’

  ‘What are you doing, Dad?’ asked Lily.

  ‘It’s a note to the doctor,’ was all her father said.

  Lily did not understand half of what was happening. She knew that Dr Webber, who lived in a corner house two streets away and sometimes had vases of flowers on his windowsills, must come and see Eddie, to make his cough better. She knew that Queenie said they could not pay for the visit, or Eddie’s medicines, that her mother and father had argued and Queenie had run off in a rage. That much was clear. But as her father told her about the note he was writing, there was a terrible, bitter hopelessness in his tone which frightened her. She just sat silently beside Eddie as he coughed, not daring to say anything in case it was wrong and got her into trouble.

  Later that night, Dr Webber came. He had agreed to give the Strugnells credit for coming to treat the little boy, though he said to Charlie, ‘This must be between you and me, Strugnell. If you let it out that I’m prepared to wait for payment, I’ll be besieged by non-paying patients. I can’t have that.’

  And Charlie humbly nodded and said, ‘Yes, Dr Webber. Thank you, Dr Webber,’ and of course agreed to say nothing. None of that mattered to him at the moment anyway. What pierced him was the doctor’s grave face as he bent over the boy, his increasingly serious expression as he listened through the stethoscope he put to Eddie’s chest. When he straightened up, rearranging the blanket over Eddie, he looked at Charlie sympathetically, and shook his head. ‘Where is your wife?’ was all he asked. ‘Perhaps you should fetch her.’ Charlie bowed his head to his breast, and gave a sob.

  During the long night that followed, Queenie returned. Rose and Lily lay in their parents’ bed on one side of the room. Lily was awake. Her head turned on her pillow, she silently watched her parents leaning over Eddie’s little bed. Just before dawn, he died. And Lily saw her parents cry, but she herself only wept secretly.

  Next morning Eddie was still in his bed, laid out in his best shirt, his eyes closed and his arms crossed on his narrow chest. Queenie said, ‘Your brother’s gone to heaven.’

  Rose, only a year old, frowned. Lily, who could see that Eddie had not gone anywhere, said, ‘He hasn’t gone. He’s asleep.’

  ‘He’ll never wake up now,’ Charlie said.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Queenie, and fell, sobbing violently, across the bed.

  Lily now cried aloud, fully realising what a terrible thing had happened. When, that morning, they came with Eddie’s small, cheap coffin, she became hysterical and shouted, ‘Don’t put him in the box! Don’t put him in the box. He won’t be able to see.’

  Charlie snatched her up and carried her downstairs to the Barringtons, where she continued to cry out, ‘Where’s Eddie? Where’s Eddie? I want Eddie.’

  ‘You should have brought her down here earlier, Charlie,’ Martha
said pityingly, clutching the kicking, screaming Lily.

  ‘I know,’ Charlie said. ‘We didn’t think – what with the other thing.’

  There was a silence between the adults as Lily sobbed, pleading, ‘Eddie, please let me go and see Eddie.’ But her voice was doubtful. She was already beginning to understand that Eddie might be gone.

  ‘She won’t forget this, poor little girl,’ Martha said.

  There was a sudden ferocity in Charlie’s voice as he said, ‘I don’t suppose she will. But perhaps it’s never too soon to see what life’s all about.’

  Then he turned and went back upstairs.

  No, Lily Strugnell never forgot Guy Street.

  The winter continued badly. While Charlie’s leg healed, Queenie cried for her only son, and Lily learned not to ask where Eddie had gone and when he would be coming back. She became silent and listless, and would not play with Rose. Dark circles appeared under her eyes.

  Yet by May, things were better. Charlie got work with a local builder, who had a contract to put up several good-quality houses in south London. They moved to the ground floor of a house in French Street, some way off. Queenie cried less at home. Lily’s cheeks filled out and she began to look more healthy.

  However, the death of little Eddie, by then lying in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the churchyard – the Strugnells were too poor to give him a proper burial – left a legacy behind. Charlie grew silent. He began to be the kind of man who seemed to think a lot but say little. It was partly his grief for his child, and partly his feeling of responsibility for the death. If he had not injured himself at work, he reasoned, if he had been getting wages at the time, perhaps Eddie would not have been so ill in the first place, and even if he had been, the doctor would have been sent for sooner.

  Charlie could not talk to Queenie about this, for she was finding her own, different way out of the grief of Eddie’s death, becoming plangent and violently grieving, telling hosts of local women how cruel it was, how Eddie had looked as he grew iller and iller, and when dead, ‘so peaceful, as if trouble had never touched his little life’, often concluding her threnodies with the words, ‘Maybe he’s best off out of this wicked world. He was too good for it, my little Edward, and that’s a fact.’