The Cry from Street to Street Read online

  So there it was: once happy and heedless and feeling immune to any trouble or woe, I had now taken the first bites of the bitter fruit all the women in our neighbourhood had to consume. Those women had looked at me in Whitechapel Road, skipping along in all my finery, jumping on to omnibuses, giggling and laughing, arm in arm with Jim, he, perhaps, with his pockets jingling after some coup he’d made, or a horse had come in first for once, and they’d looked, and how they’d looked, those women in the streets, with cabbages in string bags, or a jug of ale for the old man’s supper, all looks sending me the same message, the same chorus of the same old song we all get to know in the end – ‘You’ll find out. You’ll be sorry when you do.’

  It could be argued that in the long run Jim Bristow did me a favour, for, it seemed, between the abortion and the sexual disease I caught my body was so mangled, like a country trampled over by an invading army, that I never after that got any pleasure from relations with men, which enabled me to keep my head over them. I was not one to give them gold watches and rings, drink away the sorrows they’d caused me, throw myself off a bridge crying ‘Goodbye, cruel world’ for the sake of love. I was from then on a whore by trade and a nun by nature, and it was Jim who created me. But I was not so grateful I ever wanted to see him again.

  The night I ran away I fled everywhere, not knowing where to go, except out of Whitechapel, and finally dropped down on the steps of a church in Fleet Street, getting woken later by a policeman and told I couldn’t sleep there. My heart was in my mouth because I still had the pocket-book and watch and chain on me. The rozzer tipped me the wink I’d be more tolerated, and safer, with the others in Trafalgar Square, so I walked through the dark and finished the night among the people huddling there. At dawn I woke very cold, my head on a man’s knees. He was a decent man, thirty years old or so, from the North. He’d come looking for work in London and found little. He said bitterly, ‘When I come here I’d a sum which would have paid my fare to America in my pocket, if I’d had the sense to see it. Now it’s gone on my keep, and I’m stranded here with nothing. I wish I had that money back. There’s opportunities in America. I’d go like a shot.’ I pulled out the watch and chain and slipped it to him. ‘There’s your fare,’ I said. ‘Never tell who gave it to you.’ Then I jumped up and ran for it, thinking he had his chance now to go to America or get taken up for theft of a watch and chain, whichever happened to him. I ran to the river and pitched the pocket-book in, then I hid the three five-pound notes in it about me and roamed about, looking for a place to buy a steamship ticket. It cost me three pounds and fifteen shillings. I hid out for four more long days and longer nights until the boat sailed, afraid Jim would find me, afraid I’d killed the man I hit and the police would be searching for me.

  I embarked at Tower Hill, in a big hat I pulled down over my eyes so no one would recognize me, one morning in December 1880, barely knowing to which quarter of the globe I was heading. I had a little bag with me, containing items I thought I would need. It makes me laugh to remember what they were. There was a hairbrush, a lace blouse (I had an impression New York must be in the tropics), a tin of tea, a pair of silk stockings. Then I found myself in steerage, with fifteen adults and seven children, all crammed together and mostly vomiting. A woman lent me a blanket to wrap round myself.

  Ten days later, confused and ignorant, sixteen years old and never out of London in my life, I arrived in New York. But I’d had a stroke of luck aboard for although they made every effort to keep the third-class passengers away from the others, I made contact with a first-class passenger, a Mr Geoffrey Bates, a railway surveyor travelling to Canada to assist in the construction of that exciting part of the Canadian railway system which was to travel from the American borders through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast, an enormous and seemingly impossible task, but an effort which had to be made, or the country would remain, in an important way, disunited, like two separate states, divided by the mountains.

  This contact I mention began with glances from deck to deck, the first-class deck naturally being out of bounds to third-class passengers, and ended in Geoffrey, a tall, brown man who had been all over the world on his business, even as far as China, meeting me stealthily at night by the lifeboats. This encounter led him to suggest that I might like to travel with him to the prairie where he was to begin his work and I, now knowing better from the talk of the other passengers what I was likely to meet when I arrived in America, and afraid of how I could manage, agreed.

  It was in New York that I slipped out of the hotel where we were staying and put myself in the hands of a doctor who half killed me with his treatment of a venereal disease I had discovered on board ship. The pain of the scrapings and ointments was terrible. The result was a kind of mutilation: although outwardly I was a woman, I ceased as far as I knew in most respects to be one. From then on I felt no sexual pleasure. The doctor informed me that I had been a wicked girl and now would never bear a child.

  By accident it happened that because of my association with Geoffrey, at that time my only rock and stay in trouble, I became part of an historic event – the creation of the Canadian Pacific line between the years 1881 and 1885. As it turned out, that historic event created my own fortune, too.

  It was in the spring of 1881, after a dismal winter spent in a boarding house in Winnipeg, that we set out across the prairie from Brandon in our wagons, Geoffrey being part of the advance party of surveyors and engineers who were to work out the gradients and curves and put in markers for the thousands of men who were to come to lay the track for nearly 700 miles, right to the Rockies.

  For those who have forgotten the history of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the story is this: the task was to link that part of Canada on the Pacific coast through the Rocky Mountains to Winnipeg in the North-West Territories, a total of 1000 miles of railroad track. At the one end the line would be laid across prairie for 700 miles odd, whilst at the other, on the Pacific side, the line would begin to crawl slowly up the mountain, blasting and bridging through the remaining 300 miles. It would be in the heart of the Rockies that the two lines would be joined together – Canada, as a country, would become one. In fact, even when the track through the prairie was half completed, they had still not even found the pass through the mountains on the other side. This lack of foresight on the part of the engineers was only equalled by the heroism of those small parties of men who tackled that part of the range known as the Selkirks again and again in an effort to get through.

  And so, off we set into the limitless prairie. I posed as Geoffrey’s wife, Mrs Bates, in this situation, for the navvy camps were full of clergymen. The truth is that Canada, as soon as it got shot of the infamous Yankee traders, began to work hard to become a highly respectable country. The men could escape this to some extent, there were so many of them, but there was no room for irregularities among the officials. I don’t know whether this story of my marriage was believed. It was plain Mr Bates was a gentleman, and I was no lady. Nor was I at that time capable of posing as one – this was an art I learned later, through necessity. Still, it might be said that three years on the prairie were the real test of who was a true gentleman and who was not. And Bates failed the test in the end, while many a less promising candidate succeeded.

  I believe now that it was a privilege to be one of the first, and last, people (excluding, of course, the Indians) to set eyes on the prairie as it had been for countless thousands of years before and, due to the coming of the railway, was never to be again. As we moved along, always some twenty to thirty miles ahead of the navvy gangs, I saw the great plain from spring to fall, three times over, from the coming of the coveys of geese, snipe and duck after the winter and the springing of the great tall grass, the bursting out of willow and balsam, the daisies, tiger lilies and purple sage right to the coming of the first snows. I smelt the scents of this untouched land, saw the great herds of antelope and buffalo moving across the landscape.


  At the place called Pile o’ Bones Creek, which is now Regina, thousands of buffalo bones and skulls lay all along the river banks in the pens the Indians used to drive them into for slaughter. As the railroad moved forward, it broke the plain in two and drove all the existing life before it, not merely the animals and birds, but the Indians too. It was not just the army of men 12,000 strong, living in tents or whatever squalid shacks they could construct for themselves, nor the tiers of railroad cars, kitchens, offices and the like at the end of the track, but the noise breaking a thousand years of silence, the shouting and clanging as the track was constructed, the singing and swearing of men, steady hammers going down on ties and rails. Small wonder all the former residents of the prairie, from frog to wolf, ran ahead of it, as if it had been a prairie fire.

  The horizons, as we moved, were seldom empty of a herd, a solitary animal, or a long line of Indians, the braves with their women and children and the horses they obtained from the white man carrying their tepees, cooking pots and the rest. Other Indians of course hung around at the end of the track where the lines stopped. These had already been corrupted by the American traders at places like Fort Whoop-up (now soberly named Leth-bridge), who bartered guns and whisky for their skins and furs. These traders had been cleared out by the North-West Canadian Mounted Police ten years earlier, to the great relief of the Indian chiefs themselves, who saw the Mounties as the lesser of the two evils. But they had left evil knowledge behind. The Indians, too, knew well what the price of opposing the white man’s advance truly was from the experience of the other tribes in America. News travels fast in these places, as it does everywhere. Also, the buffalo were dying out and the Indians knew in their hearts they were dying too. It was all good luck for us, otherwise we would have been faced with attacks from the Cree and Blackfoot of the plains. As it was, I was never confident, our party being small and ahead of the main body, that I wouldn’t wake up one night to hear whooping and hollering and end up minus my scalp. I carried a pistol all the time, whether going to the creek for water, building a fire or whatever. But we had no trouble.

  The Government had wisely decreed that the whole territory should go teetotal, chiefly on account of the Indians’ shocking predilection for alcohol. Many’s the man, of course, and woman too, who has lost employment, home, family and friends through this vice, but with the Indians, unused to alcohol, this fatal craving caused collapse immediately and almost universally. It took little for the noble savage to become an inebriate who would do anything for a drink, and this caused them to be much despised by the whites, who said that they would sell their women for whisky, a thing no white man would ever stoop to – yet I’ve seen many women, high and low, sold in civilized surroundings, so I thought this just hypocrisy. These natives had been fierce and warlike only years before; but now the buffaloes whose meat they ate and from whose hides they made tents and clothing had been slain, they were hungry and often ill. It was a pathetic sight to see the women with their infants begging for food.

  Meanwhile, some 12,000 hardened navvies, men who had taken the railroads across America and often many other countries too, worked hard, got high pay and were faced with the prospect of nothing at the end of a hard day’s work but a cup of tea. It would not do. Human nature being what it is, there was a big trade in the smuggling of alcohol and the making of it, too. The home-made hooch was very sinister stuff. However, this state of teetotalism throughout the territory was to help me greatly later. Part of my arrangement with Mr Hamilton of the North-West Canadian Mounted Police in Calgary was that I would supply my customers with drink as long as matters never got out of hand. That way, I profited and he knew where his problem lay, so we were both content.

  And so we moved on, for three years, in rain and storm – the spectacle of lightning over the prairie, mile on mile of electric swords flashing down over the landscape, disappearing, then flashing down again elsewhere, was impressive. Alarming, too, since we at that time were the highest feature of the landscape, most likely to be struck by lightning, until the engineers improvised a lightning conductor to protect us. The spectacle of the early snows, too, turning that world to white, was equally astonishing. There were times when, rising and looking at the great arc of the eastern horizon turning red, the great sky overhead coming blue, I felt so pure I was like a saint. There were far more times when the emptiness and stillness made me feel I might go mad, the company of Geoffrey likely to make me kill him or him me. Then I was desperate to escape. The hardships were awful, too – the washing, the cooking on an open fire, the fuel-gathering, the lugging of water, and worse, even, the moments when we ran out of water and did not know when we would find more. There was a perpetual battle with the weather, mud when it rained, boiling heat in summer, the cold of the first snows and the dread that we would not get back to base before a chance blizzard struck us. I was desperate, as I say. I might have turned back, but what had I to go to except life as a whore or a servant in the little glum town of Winnipeg? The truth was, I was afraid to go on and just as afraid to turn back. Yet I survived it all.

  Geoffrey, my prairie husband, did not. He did not die, but he degenerated. He held it against me, anyway, that I had infected him with gonorrhoea, which had necessitated a trip back down the line for painful and humiliating treatment. I denied the charge, but I don’t think he believed me. The isolation, the responsibility for keeping the gang together in such primitive surroundings, had turned Geoffrey to drink. By the time we neared Calgary he had added opium, the use of which he had learned in China, to the recipe. This was brought to him over the mountains often in conditions of great hardship by the Chinese working at the Pacific end of the line.

  The other two engineers of the team tried to control and hide his excesses, but he grew worse and worse, more brutal with his workforce – and with me, too. It was not far off Calgary when he beat a Sarcee Indian worker so savagely that the Irish foreman, seeing the madness in him had to drag him off the man, whereupon Geoffrey dismissed the foreman on the spot. The Irishman’s wife, who had just come out to join him, did her best for the Indian, but he died. Savage fights, beatings and violence of every kind were not unusual on the line, but this episode was one too many: Geoffrey was becoming dreadful to all, as a man can become when he is powerful and living in areas where no white man ever put his foot, where there are no towns or cities, settlements, law or any civilization at all. He had become a tyrant, that is all, and made the mistake of showing it too close to a settlement where the men knew there was law and order administered from a fort, run by the North-West Canadian Mounted Police. Feeling against Geoffrey grew. There was nearly a riot.

  So it was in the summer of 1884 when we reached Calgary that I jumped ship. We had been gradually approaching the Rockies. Their great forms stood out against the landscape and, looking over the prairies at them day by day, their snow-covered tops growing bigger and bigger as we advanced, I realized I could never tolerate railroad life as it began to penetrate the mountains, nor would I be able to live any longer with Geoffrey. He was getting to the point where a man turns on a woman and kills her. Her death might take only two minutes to accomplish – but the woman who does not see those moments coming and escape in time is nothing better than a fool. As we moved forward, I concluded that Calgary, then a mere matter of one fort, two missions, a store and a hotel, would soon become a town. Anywhere the railroad stopped became a town. They sprang up behind us. At that point the railway gangs would be in the mountains for years, work would be slow and each winter the gangs would have to retreat, leaving only a few hundred men up there to cut timber for ties and fuel for the engines. So the rest would come down into town in search of liquor, women and entertainment. (There was no future in the settlers. At that time I doubt if there were twenty homesteads along the whole track, so hard and dry was the land and so severe the winters.) But the railroadmen could be detained and the cowboys, loggers, trappers and the rest would all be attracted to Calgary once it became a
railhead town. Why, while the town was still a tent-city two men set up a local newspaper, in which they instantly began to denounce me! This sign of progress and civilization convinced me. Here, I realized, lay my future. Here was my end of track.

  I must admit I hesitated in my plan when the Blackfoot Indians mustered under their chief and said their lands were being taken away and destroyed by the railroad’s progress. In the end good old Father Lacombe, who had lived with them, nursed them through epidemics and all for twenty years, went up the hills with a cargo of sugar, tea and tobacco and persuaded them they’d do better to arrange matters with the iron horse than foolishly try to fight it. This they did. It was just a last moment of rage – they were in no mood really to quarrel with progress.

  That difficulty easily settled, there was a bright future for saloon keepers and whores. So, at the tender age of nineteen, I landed in Calgary, then set up shop in a wooden shack near the Bow River, just outside of town, with the help of one of my first customers, my friend and secret sleeping partner the Mr Hamilton of the North-West Canadian Mounted Police I’ve already mentioned.