The Cry from Street to Street Read online

  THE CRY FROM STREET TO STREET

  Hilary Bailey

  For Emma Tennant

  Contents

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  The harlot’s cry from street to street

  Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.

  William Blake Auguries of Innocence

  The murderer known as Jack the Ripper killed six women in one square mile of East London between 7 August and 9 November 1888. These women were Martha Tabram, or Turner, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes – and Mary Kelly. The cry from street to street is the imagined story of this last victim, who was never properly identified.

  Part I

  I began my journey back to England, after an absence of eight years, on the SS England which sailed from New York on 22 August 1888. I was not going on holiday – I had never had a holiday in my life and would not have known what to do with one if I had. Nevertheless, although my visit to Britain was no pleasure trip, I certainly did not anticipate, as we entered open sea on that fresh day, anything like the events which took place during the first three months I spent in London.

  I had a nice pair of staterooms aboard ship, a bedroom and a sitting-room, all brightly polished wood and brass. I took my own things with me and set up a pair of small silver vases, a framed photograph, the glass and silver from appointments for my dressing case. I even had my own bed linen and beside all that, three trunks in the hold containing clothes and property. Though no slave to ease, like some I’ve known, which often brings ruin, I always travel in the best of style – for the comfort, of course, but also because it appears to be the only way that a woman alone can avoid insult and annoyance. A small fortune takes the place of a large protector in these circumstances. As does a revolver, I have also concluded. Therefore I rely on my trusty Colt for confidence, which I learned to use with accuracy up in the railway camps in my early days in Canada, where a big Russian anarchist, fugitive from his government, supported my trembling arm, as I aimed at a row of beer bottles on a stack of logs. Not, I have to say, that aboard the SS England any passenger would ever have occasion to produce a revolver over a foot long, weighing three pounds, though I had it with me, in my trunk, among the French dresses I had bought in New York.

  So – the sky was blue, the sea calm and all was well, but for a couple of gentlemen who were pursuing me, whom I avoided as much as possible: a thickset man, Ethan Baverstock, a meat packer from Chicago, and a tall young man from London, Marcus Brown, who had recently been touring the United States for his own pleasure, it seemed, in order to shoot wild animals, encounter wild Indians and mock the manners of those to whom he had introductions. He was full of anecdotes about the primitive customs of the inhabitants, by which I mean the civilized ones – their lack of servants and the democratic manners of those who were employed as help, the strange food and unpolished ways he encountered. He deplored the condition of the South, reduced, he said, to semi-barbarism at the end of the Civil War, had been most at home among friends in Vermont where some culture prevailed. But in spite of measuring everything he’d met against his own standards, which I suppose we all do, he was a pleasant man, kind and gallant, unlike Baverstock, who proposed marriage and bed, in any order, each time he cornered me alone, and fumbled me when he could.

  These two men, and the others who paid attention to me aboard ship, did, I think, believe my story that I was the young widow of a Scottish railway engineer from the North-West Territories, but their instincts gave them a different message. You can dress a woman who’s led The Life, as we call it, as a lady and still men will follow her like dogs after a bitch in heat. From city father to cowboy they’ll come across her, they’ll bump and jostle her as if by accident, they’ll propose all manner of things without knowing what they’re doing or saying. You can put the woman in a sack with a bucket over her head, or dress her as a bishop at the convocation of the Church of England, the result will be the same. It’s something in her carriage or manner, maybe an odour she has about her, but I don’t complain, since it’s been my living from the age of fourteen.

  Nevertheless, in spite of the burden of evading these gentlemen aboard a small mail ship carrying few passengers, I was content enough for the first three days of the voyage, though I knew there were considerations I was attempting not to bring to mind. By the time we were only two days from Southampton, where we were to dock, the inactivity a voyage imposes and the memories and anxieties I had were beginning to make me queasy in the stomach, a condition which had nothing to do with seasickness. I was afraid.

  It had been eight years since I’d set foot in England, struck the pavements of the London I knew, that warren of dirty streets and passages – Whitechapel – that byword for a slum. I’ve never seen dirtier, and I’ve seen many a dirty street since, and streets that were no streets at all, just tracks, muddy or dry between sheds, tents and sod huts thrown up as shelter on the outskirts of some apology for a town, or where the railway navvies made camp in winter snow or dusty summer among bears, snakes and insects. These places were no fit habitations for men. But neither those places nor the Indian quarters on the outskirts of town, where the natives live half-starved, with children playing on the middens, seemed to me as bad as what I remembered about the worst quarters of Stepney and Whitechapel, perhaps because what happens there takes place under clear Canadian skies, near mountains or limitless and untouched prairie, and, where at least there is enough space and work for those who wanted to do it.

  My heart sank as I thought of those seeping alleyways and courts, old buildings where families lived, as many as eight or nine to a room, crowded lodging houses at fourpence a night for a mattress on the floor, and the alleyways, railway bridges, courts, where people huddled without a roof over their heads at all. All this on the verge of a great rich city, like a piece of rotten meat hanging in a meat cage outside the window of a mansion. Canada’s a rum place enough, but at least wherever you are you can step outside of a morning, maybe, when it’s quiet for a moment, and look up at the huge sky and breathe in some pure air. In Whitechapel the air is always stale, laden with smoke, the smell of bad drains, the brewery if the wind’s in that direction, and whatever’s next to you – tannery smells, the abattoir, 60,000 people crammed into a square mile, all struggling for existence with even the babies coughing like old men. And the air seems dirtier because of the noise, by day costers’ cries, people shouting, hammering from cart and barrel makers, clanging from brass foundries and the like, wagon wheels, whipcracks and horses’ hooves, and by night arguments, women quarrelling, shouting drunks, pub pianos and singing in the street, while from windows comes the noise of rows between men and women.

  Always, all the time, there were babies crying, crying for their lives – small wonder, for who’d want to be born into all that and who’d be the mother who bore them?

  From the wooden hut I had first in Calgary, on the outskirts of town – then, all wooden houses (that was before the fire) – I could walk out of a morning, leaving the girls asleep, tumbled in their blankets, and walk up through the pines and look down and breathe freely in the silence. Sometimes I was afraid of the vastness and wildness and the absence of people, aghast suddenly about how far I had come, and how, like most of the settlers, I would never be able to go back. But even when matters went badly, even when I was afraid, I still had little regret for the East End streets I had escaped. And then, of course, civilization in the shape of the railway came to Calgary, I came with it and made my fortune.

  So now it had been eight years since I set eyes on London. That was on
a winter’s night when, under the railway bridge at about two in the morning, I was about to do my business with a slummer from the West End who was the worse for drink. Even as I leaned against the wall, while he fumbled with my skirts, it came to me that in two minutes my pimp Jim Bristow, who had seen me go into the darkness with a customer with a watch and chain and, no doubt, a few guineas in his pocket, would be along to hit him over the head and rob him, and it would be better for me if I acted faster and did it for myself. I was coming up sixteen, and at that age a boy or girl acts on impulse. Only later, when the consequences emerge, does the action make sense, if it ever does. At the time I was angry with Jim for denying me a watch, when he had just mutched a toff I had with me in Hyde Park the week before, and gained a number of guineas, how many he would not tell me. And I had not fancied going out that night, a rainy one, but he had made me, and I suspected he was trying to collect another girl, Rosa, to do his bidding and, as is well known, if a man has his own affairs and a girl who works the streets as well, they are partners; while a man who has two girls on the streets is just a pimp, no mistake about it. I was hurt by this thought of a rival. So, I stooped, as my customer opened his trousers, picked up half a brick from the pavement and, leaning back against the wall, slammed it against his head. I was through his pockets in a trice as he lay on the ground, finding a pocket-book with banknotes in it and a watch across his chest, made, it turned out, of solid gold. Then, afraid of Jim, and afraid I’d killed the man, I ran through the other end of the arch, and helter-skelter down in the direction of the river, with Jim after me, for he had been lurking so near he saw what I did. He pursued me, shouting ‘Hey! Hey! Stop, you bitch!’ There were people about, tarts standing on the pavement, sailors, a woman with a pram, an old man on a stick, it was dark and the air was misty so I managed to duck in and out and lose him quickly. Who, anyway, in that neighbourhood, would heed a man shouting ‘Stop, bitch’ after a woman? My feet were wings with the terror of what he’d do to me if he caught up with me.

  I went on running and running, but though I’d escaped the man I called my sweetheart, and others might have called my pimp (in fact he was both, a not uncommon relationship in those parts) I’d no idea what to do, or where to hide. It had just occurred to me on the instant that he had less right to that pocket-book and watch and chain than I had. I was the bait and yet again he was about to hook the fish. Then there was the watch he had not bought me, a sign of love withheld, and the business of Rosa and, I dare say, at the back of my mind, other things as well, one of which was the fate of poor little Ginny. She was a little girl of eight or so, blonde, with a cough, whom six months before he’d parted from her mother and sold off to a nobleman he’d met in a pub. He seemed to manage this easily enough. There were six children, Ginny the oldest, in a room in Stepney, the father in gaol for stealing a handcart. I can hardly describe her condition when I came into the lodgings I shared with Jim one night. There poor Ginny lay, on an old mattress in the corner of the room, bruised and bleeding and breathing shallowly. Jim was bending over her in a panic, offering her water she was unable to drink. It seems she’d been flung back at him with no thanks by Lord Pig when Jim – to ask if she’d given satisfaction – knocked politely at the back door of the house in the West End where he’d delivered her the previous evening. No satisfaction, and the girl no virgin, the customer had declared in a rage, when called. Then his manservant had appeared with the tottering girl, and while the lord threatened Jim that if he didn’t remove her the police would be summoned, the manservant had thrust this rag of a child at Jim, pushed them both out into the mews behind and bolted the door. All this, while the cook and a scullery-maid looked on.

  Jim got her back to Whitechapel in a cab. He was lucky with his driver for a man of Jim’s appearance, a flash cove in white trousers, an embroidered waistcoat and red silk neckerchief, who hails a cab in the broad and well-swept streets of Mayfair, full of gentlemen in top hats and ladies in cashmere and smart bonnets walking little dogs, and demands to be carried back to the slums with a young girl looking something like a broken doll, ought to have been driven to the nearest police station and put in charge by the cabman. But no, Bristow’s luck held and he got back without attracting attention. And so I fetched up with the poor girl. I chased Jim off sharply, for she was terrified of him, sent a child on the landing for a pail of water and I bathed and cleaned her as well as I could, put her in an old shift of mine, made her some tea with plenty of condensed milk, with the idea of trying to tidy her up and bring her to herself again and then, when she looked less bad, perhaps call for her mother or leave her at the hospital. I didn’t dare fetch a doctor, for fear of the questions about what had happened.

  All the while the child just lay there, staring up at the ceiling, incapable of speech. When Jim came back and put his head round the door she shook violently. He wouldn’t tell me who the mother was, for fear, I suppose, that the sight of her daughter in that state would arouse some maternal feelings and she’d go to the police and get him into trouble. I made him go again, for the child was so terrified of him I thought she’d go into fits. I called in an old nurse to help with the bleeding, for she was terribly torn inside, I think, and for the next few days I did what I could for her, putting her in the bed, and one morning when I awoke on the mattress and went to look at her, there she lay, cold and dead. She was a weak, underfed child, probably consumptive, and her constitution could not stand the shock and injury, said the nurse, and added I had better sort matters out quickly, or I could myself become involved in a trial over the death of a child and, for herself, she had never been to this room and did not know me and if I tried to say otherwise it would be the worse for me. I took the threat seriously.

  Jimmy, frightened by now, had to send for the girl’s mother. In the mean while the woman upstairs had dressed the child in a little clean nightdress she’d bought secondhand for twopence, good quality, with a little cotton lace at neck and hem, and by the time the mother arrived, weeping and wailing and tearing her hair, this good woman, who had four children of her own, had done what was right for the poor girl. A scene even now I find horrible to remember then ensued. The child lay still on the bed. The woman sobbed and ranted, talked of Ginny’s virtues: ‘She was a good girl. She never gave me no trouble. That child was an angel from God, if ever there was one.’ She accused Jim of having deluded her into thinking he had found the child a place as a servant in a respectable house. She threatened him with the police. Jim, meanwhile, defended himself and offered money. The deal was struck. Half a guinea for the doctor who would sign the death certificate saying the child had died of consumption, a guinea for the funeral expenses, although both knew the child would go into a pauper’s grave and the mother keep the money, and another guinea for mourning clothes for the family, which would not be bought.

  I stood in the doorway with the woman from upstairs, who had put the nightdress on the little corpse. Meanwhile, her own children peeped round her skirt as the macabre scene went on, staring in awe at the girl’s body. The woman’s face was frozen but she said nothing. She was wise. It hardly mattered, I suppose, what was said and done, what money changed hands, for the child was dead.

  For a good while few spoke to Jim Bristow, but the matter was overlooked soon enough in the day-to-day, week-to-week struggle to pay the rent, stay alive, straight and out of trouble. But although the affair might seem to have been overlooked, it would not be forgotten in the end. One day Jim Bristow would seek help, or silence, from someone who remembered the matter of the child’s death, and not get it. And for me it was a different matter. That was when I found out what Jim Bristow really was. The woman from upstairs called him a devil. He was greedy, lacking in forethought, without any scrap of concern for any creature but himself. Perhaps devils are like that. All I knew was that when he wanted something, when he saw an advantage, he saw nothing else; he grabbed for what he wanted without thinking. He and his brother had scarcely known a home. They
’d wandered out to fend for themselves like puppies who stray out of an open door almost as soon as they’re weaned, and that street life of living on scraps stolen and picked up, sleeping rough, running with a gang, finding their parents for a night or two only when cold or sickness was too much for them, and not getting much comfort when they did, all that had played its part in turning Jim into what he was.

  At that time they were beginning to spend the money subscribed for the conversion of the heathen down in the East End, having noticed there were just as many heathen there as in Africa. But this business of hymns and soup kitchens was too late for Jim Bristow, even if the trick would have worked for him. Anyway, now he had helped to kill a child, and there’s nothing worse than taking the life of another. That was one of the reasons why I ran away from him.

  A second reason was that having seduced me, said he loved me, then sent me up west to make my fortune, he threatened to destroy me or commit suicide in the name of our love when a lady offered me a position in a house in Mount Street. There I would have been taken care of and could have done well for myself, but by his sobs, promises and protestations he persuaded me not to accept the offer which would have parted us, and so put me back patrolling the pavements and squares of London. Finally, when I fell for a baby, he put me into the hands of an old abortionist near Waterloo Station, who half killed me and made me sick for weeks. This occurred before the death of the little girl, but the memory of that illness also turned me against him. He was kindly at first when I was ill, but after a few days he was gone more and more often and I had to fall back on the tender mercies of my sisters and finally, sick as I was, to look after myself.

  He was all over me once I was better but I saw I was in an alley with no way out. I urged him to get a job. He might get a barrow, I said, and set up as a trader, or, I offered, I could work and save up, and we could try taking a front room and sell something, beer, or groceries. I even suggested emigration, little knowing that when I emigrated it would be alone, and from fear of him. But Jim Bristow, though intelligent enough, had no vision. He knew of the profits to be got by me steering men into short-stay rooms round Covent Garden by night, or into the bushes of Hyde Park; knew how to reap the benefit of the fortune between my legs and what he could steal from time to time. He could see a life of taking his ease in coffee shops or taverns by day and visiting the theatre or the music hall or playing cards at Mrs Mundy’s at night, and in general living like a Whitechapel aristocrat. His motto was, as they say in the sporting houses, live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse – and they might as well, for usually there’s no choice.