Silvertown: An East End family memoir

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Silvertown: An East End family memoir
Melanie McGrath

Melanie McGrath’s critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in ebook format.In this remarkable book, award-winning writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath spent years wondering about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives Poplar, East Ham and Silvertown – are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, long since dead and already half forgotten.Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and lanes of Poplar in 1914, where eleven year old Jenny watches the men go off to fight; the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; the London docks, then the largest port in the world; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Café, opened full of hope by Jenny and Len – later a home to their troubled marriage – and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close knit community.The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End and the struggles of those who live there.

SILVERTOWN

An East End Family Memoir

Melanie McGrath

Dedication (#ulink_e157c65c-9244-5e32-ad50-9494f36c27ee)

In memory of my grandparents,

Jenny Fulcher and Leonard Stanley Page

Contents

Cover (#ubfcee93d-0b6f-5fc0-83e0-1752d1527aea)

Title Page (#u60e0207e-b7d5-5dcf-86e1-48fdd219746d)

Dedication (#u971fec03-d496-505b-a5e6-3166297ed951)

Preface (#ub29ee0ec-3f57-5f97-a934-3e2f08002190)

Part One (#ua3cd2048-d6e0-591d-afe9-edaa6ce88d5b)

Chapter 1 (#uaf6091a6-e905-57f2-8533-b777bc184921)

Chapter 2 (#u76129992-9b75-5c12-8dc3-e2c31792294d)

Chapter 3 (#u339d75a7-ea3a-52f0-b7d7-eb9adc45b4f0)

Chapter 4 (#ua86ecb9f-c5c9-59a0-b24f-6a3affb47dfc)

Chapter 5 (#u4450541a-ec0f-51b6-80ea-f1d85abbfdcd)

Chapter 6 (#u3bcb8b72-0d55-5e70-af78-a96b7513286d)

Part Two (#u902a9950-c9f5-566b-b018-e8f3549677e1)

Chapter 7 (#uac37705d-6aef-5f31-8e33-1f1d0c5efdab)

Chapter 8 (#u902abf23-e0e9-5847-9731-77efb35f9894)

Chapter 9 (#u46e4353c-2e74-5879-9bc0-2c1c1b71e0a0)

Chapter 10 (#u9b1d6674-696d-50e2-bc62-82a2257612aa)

Chapter 11 (#u216b2fa4-6fef-5217-853e-6ca34af34c6b)

Chapter 12 (#udacb97f0-bfa4-526b-bf9c-7828bd5fbf1f)

Chapter 13 (#u0c530da7-5790-578a-b045-64d477ed5b95)

Chapter 14 (#u9bc9f4c4-3cae-5fc8-8b4b-2b7265216cad)

Chapter 15 (#u38696d0a-24fa-5a04-8182-029e320232c3)

Chapter 16 (#uabd7a1c7-8b4b-5e4d-bdf5-8dd76b9d627c)

Chapter 17 (#u065a970e-7d50-59c1-bcf0-427824e7dcb4)

Chapter 18 (#u05ae585b-e8df-5738-b75c-8f8fcb819191)

Chapter 19 (#u07b2c239-6744-5408-9f1f-2e1d44da4036)

Chapter 20 (#u720e9ed3-334f-539c-ad3f-f5d09103cc90)

Chapter 21 (#u0bbbab51-cca6-5b88-ae8b-1d15bee3aaa6)

Chapter 22 (#ufedc2d84-3f81-5229-b53b-52bbffda8fa1)

Epilogue (#ueb81b298-6e30-57aa-882d-78877f02cce5)

Acknowledgements (#u23b1e2fa-8022-53c8-9c2f-9398eeda06c5)

About the Author (#u67c2983a-13b3-594c-8e84-d8432334b6fe)

Copyright (#u9cccaded-b2f3-5c24-b4f3-1fcab9f350d5)

About the Publisher (#u8df1cc89-bdeb-5417-a020-c582ac643280)

Out of the strong came forth sweetness

Judges 14 and motto of Lyle’s Golden Syrup

Preface (#ulink_238f81a6-ba5a-541a-881e-ac1678baff52)

You could say that Jenny Fulcher led a very ordinary life. She grew up, worked, married and had children. Her life was subject to the usual disquiets and worries. She fretted over her debts. She worried for the future. Every so often, lying in bed in the flat dawn light, she would wonder what the point of all the struggle was. And then she would get up and make a pot of tea and get on with it. Sometimes a voice in her head whispered that she was a bad wife and a poor mother. Other times the voice soothed and said she had done her best. From time to time, she wondered if anyone had ever really loved her. A few small comforts kept her going: tinned red salmon, cheap perfume and the scandal stories in Reveille magazine. She loved TV soaps and flowers – freesias and violets in particular. She knitted and sewed patchwork and converted the results into tea cosies. Over the nine decades of her life she made enough tea cosies to cover all the teapots of England.

It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn’t. It belonged to Jenny.

Jenny’s turn in the world began in 1903 in Poplar. The death of Queen Victoria two years earlier had ended an era, but remnants of the old century persisted. Women still wore corsets and horses still pulled hackney carriages. The streets still mostly unlit and as slippery as a snake pit. The East End had a grim reputation, and for the most part it was deserved. In the same year Jenny was born, Jack London visited the place and wrote a book about what he saw. He called it People of the Abyss.

My grandmother Jenny grew up in that Abyss. To be an East Ender then was to be among the lowest of London’s poor, but Jenny never thought of herself as low. To Jenny, there was only respectable and common and by her own account she was respectable. This had nothing to do with money – no one in the East End had much of that; it had to do with blood and conduct.

Jenny was salty and wilful, as thin and prickly as the reeds that once grew where she was born. Her heart was full of tiny thorns, which chafed but were never big enough to make her bleed. Vague feelings drifted about her like mist: bitterness, resentment and rage, mostly. Life was as much a mystery to her as she was to herself. She’d spend hours plotting how to squeeze an extra rasher from the butcher, but on the bigger issues she was helpless. She grasped the details without understanding anything of the general rules. She never had the means to manage her life and so was destined to be bent in the shape of desires, urges and ambitions greater than her own.

All the same, when her face lit up it was like a door swinging out into sunshine. There was something irrepressibly naughty about her. You’d imagine her standing behind your back poking her tongue out at you. She revelled in playing the martyr but was comically bad at the part. She’d insist on giving you the last piece of cake, then reach into her handbag when she thought you weren’t looking, pull out a huge bar of chocolate, stuff it in her mouth all at once and pretend she had a cough and couldn’t talk. Her luxuriant moaning had to be witnessed to be believed. On bad days everything from her kidneys to her knitting cost too much, ached like geronimo or was doing its best to rip her off.

No life is without its joys, though, and Jenny Fulcher harboured two great passions. The first of these was the crystallised juice of an Indian grass, Saccharum officinarum L., otherwise known as sugar. She favoured the bleached, processed, silvery white stuff, in crystal form or cubes. She spooned it into her tea in extravagant quantities and whenever she thought no one was looking, she’d lick a bony finger, dunk it in the sugar bowl and jam it into her mouth. She was partial to biscuits, cakes, marmalade, tarts and chocolate too, but sweets were really her thing. Over the course of her life, thousands of pounds of Army and Navy tablets, barley sugars, candyfloss, Everton mints, Fox’s glacier mints, humbugs, iced gems, jellies, liquorice comfits, Mintoes, nut brittle, orange cremes, pralines, Quality Street, rhubarb and custards, sugared almonds, Toblerone and York’s fruit pastilles, met their sticky end on my grandmother’s sweet tooth. Sugar was both lover and friend. It had the capacity to seduce, and also to keep her company. Her life went sour so quickly she relied on sugar to lend it sweetness. Sugar was the only thing she had the courage to make a grab for. Even after her hearing went she was never quite deaf to the rustling of humbug wrappers. When her sight failed she could still spot a Fry’s Chocolate Crème bar lying on a table top.

Though she didn’t realise it, my grandmother’s other great love was the East End. She moaned about it constantly – the cramped streets with their potholed pavements, the filthy kids and the belching factories – but she hated the thought of leaving, even for a day. She rarely ventured west and seldom troubled herself with whatever lay on the other side of the Thames. Her list of disgruntlements was long but she never really hankered to be anywhere else. The East End was a mother to her, and she had no means to imagine herself without it. She gave up her health for sugar but she gave up everything else for the East End.

Jenny Fulcher had a husband, my grandfather Leonard. He was not one of her passions. On the surface, they didn’t even have much in common. She was the product of the low-lying lanes and turnings of Poplar, where the Thames coils into a teardrop. He came from the sodden terrain of mud and reeds further to the east, from a hamlet sprinkled over the flat fields and rush beds of southern Essex. He was the son of a farm labourer, she the daughter of a journeyman carpenter. She grew up among the factories and tenements sandwiched between the Thames and the West India Docks. He passed his childhood among clouds and a sweep of cabbage fields.

All the same, they shared something beyond the everyday. There was something of the east of England about them both. Their beginnings were bogged down in poverty, their prospects tarnished and their horizons low. They began life on the flat. For years they both looked up at the world, and the world, in its turn, looked down on them.

On the surface, Len Page was all charm and muscular wit. Anyone who didn’t care to look too hard would see a diamond bloke, smartly kitted out, with a military swing to his step. People said he was a bit of a laugh. A right old type. In fact he was several types at once. The guv’nor, the back-slapper, the all-round card, but also the trickster, the slippery fish, the spiv. To tell the truth, Len Page was whatever type would get him where he wanted to go. He was as ambitious as the weeds that push up through concrete. To watch him closely was to watch the hatching and execution of unspoken plans.

Len also had two passions: the country and a woman called June. But there will be time for them later.

PART ONE (#ulink_5ebdeb23-226a-5bb3-9361-1d59f127f277)

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_fc3a05f4-260a-5146-be24-6691ebc1d5df)

Poplar was built on the back of the sea trade. About six hundred years ago, the place was marked by a single tree standing on lonely marshes and pointing the ancient route from London to Essex. The loops of the Thames at Limehouse Reach in the west and Blackwall Reach in the east protected the area from the worst of the river floods, and in 1512 the East India Company took advantage of its sheltered position to establish a ship-building business at the eastern edge. Very soon after, houses went up on the sloppy soil, craftsmen moved in, then shopkeepers. Oakum merchants arrived, followed by gluemakers, ironmongers, outfitters, manufacturers of naphtha, turpentine, creosote, varnish, linen, tar, timber boards, linseed oil and rubber goods, and Poplar became a town of ropemakers and sailmakers, chandlers, cauterers, uniform-makers, seamen, carpenters, ships’ engineers and, of course, ships.

Poplar was once a place that counted. It was from Brunswick Wharf on its eastern edge that the Virginia Settlers sailed. In 1802 the East India Company, frustrated by the small size of the upstream docks and wharves in the London Pool beside the Tower, carved out two spectacular corridors of impounded water, the East and West India Docks, one on each side of the mouth of the Isle of Dogs. Two-masted tea clippers, brigantines, colliers, packet boats, screw steamers, schooners, riggers, cutters, whalers, wool clippers, shallops, four-masters, dromonds, barges and lighters moored at the quays and wooden dolphins of these broad new docks, half-sunk with barrels of molasses, boxes of bananas, silk, pineapples, parrots, spices, tea, rice, sugar, grain, coffee, cocoa mass, ballast, monkeys, macaws, ivory, alabaster, basalt and asbestos, and discharged their cargoes safely into the warehouses inside the dock walls. It was a great time for trade and the East and West India Docks grew so fast that the bigger ships, the tea clippers and steamers, often found themselves moored for as long as a month at mid-stream anchor, waiting their turn to discharge.

My grandmother’s ancestors were tidal people, Huguenots who were washed first into the East End then into Poplar during the persecution of Protestants by Catholics in France in the 1680s. Afraid for their lives, they sailed up the Thames and found sanctuary in East London. Many gathered in Spitalfields near the City walls; others fanned out among the numerous little villages along the river, hoping to lie low for a while then move back to France once the troubles were done. But over the years of their exile their number multiplied and they stayed. Fuelled by the frantic energy of immigrants with something to prove, they evolved quite naturally into entrepreneurs, working as ragmen, clothiers, silk spinners and dyes-men. At Spitalfields they built silk weaveries and found a way to fix scarlet dye into silk which they then sold back to Catholic cardinals for robes. For more than a hundred years the River Lea ran red with their labours.

They developed English habits and their names gradually Anglicised, but after three hundred years you could still spot an East Ender with Huguenot blood. Take Jenny Fulcher. She was tiny, sallow, with the horse-brown hair of southern women. Her skin would only have to see the sun to turn brick brown. It was an embarrassment to her family. Fer gawd’s sake git some powder on yer face, you’re as black as a woggie-wog, her mother, Sarah, would say whenever the summer came. Having no money for powder, Jenny would salt her skin with bicarb of soda, because there was nothing worse than looking foreign (except being foreign, which was unthinkable).

Poplar is a mess these days. It has lost its civic quality and become little more than a scattering of remnants and cheap offcuts sliced through by the rush of the East India Dock Road and the Northern Approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. The workhouse has gone, and the East India Dock, but if you look carefully, what remains tells a story about how Poplar used to be. At the bottom of Chrisp Street, where a very fine market once stood, the monolithic pile of the Poplar Baths still stands, though the building is derelict and surrounded by razor wire. Along the High Street, between the new-build housing developments and shabby Sixties shopping parades, there remain the architectural remnants of Poplar’s marine and trading past: a customs house, some ancient paintwork advertising a chandlery, an old seamen’s mission. Further east on the Tunnel Approach, the magnificent colonnades of Poplar Library gather dirt from the traffic and its boarded up windows furnish irresistible spaces for taggers and graffiti artists.

By the time Jenny (or Jane, as she was then) is born, Poplar has become filthy and overcrowded, a victim of its own success. Those who can afford it have moved out to more spacious environs further from the dock walls. My great grandfather, John Fulcher, or Frenchie as he was known, his wife, Sarah, and their children live in Ullin Street, between the Cut and the River Lea. Ullin Street is near to Frenchie’s place of work, the Thames Ironworks at Orchard Place. Poplar is jammed with terraces of shabby lets and subdivisions put up by speculators as housing for dockworkers. There are a hundred, even a thousand similar streets stacked along the eastern flank of the city like so much left luggage. They are ugly, redoubtable places, but by no means the worst the East End has to offer.

If you are born there, the docks are the language you speak, the smells you know, the ebb and flow of your life. And so it is with Jane. She grows up beside queues of drays, moving slowly towards the dock gates; beside the twice-daily rush of men struggling to find day work; beside the crush of seamen and foreigners, their strange languages breaking from beneath turbans, yellow faces, pigtails, ice-blue eyes. Jane is aware of the tidal pull of the water before she can even read the tide tables flyposted on the sides of every public house in Poplar. The phalanxes of Port of London Authority policemen, the pawn shops, the bold glances of loose women, the rat nests and dog fights, the boozed-up sailors of a Saturday night, the bustling tradesmen, the drinking dives and gambling holes, the deals made, the greetings and the farewells, the dockers’ pubs and pawnbrokers and seamen’s missions: all these are familiar to her.

In 1903 the Fulcher family are living in the upper two rooms at number 4 Ullin Street. At the southern end of the street sits the bulking, red brick mass of St Michael and All Angels church and beside it, a gloomy vicarage set in a dark little garden. The remainder of the street is lined with poky terraces where it is common for families of seven or eight to be packed into a single room. There are men in Ullin Street who are forced to work night shifts because there is nowhere for them to sleep until their children have gone to school and the beds are free. And not unskilled labourers either, but craftsmen and artisans. The 1891 census shows sailmakers, foundrymen, glass blowers and carpenters, all living on Ullin Street.

Having two rooms between them, the Fulchers are among the more fortunate. The larger of these rooms is an imperfect square of about twelve feet containing an iron bedstead with an ancient horsehair mattress where Frenchie, Sarah and the younger children sleep, a large fireplace in which a coal stove burns whenever there is money for coal, a gas lamp, a table fashioned by Frenchie from fruit crates, a decaying wicker chair and two fruit crate stools. The room is for the most part mildewy and cheerless, smelling of the family’s activities: cooking, bathing, smoking and sex. It is rarely warm enough to open the window and the wooden sashes have in any case swollen with damp and stuck in their frames, though the draught still sails into the room like an unwanted relative. During the autumn and winter Sarah has to lay newspaper over the panes to keep the cold out, and for six months of the year the family live more or less in darkness, the gas lamp on the wall having been deemed an extravagance they can do without.

The second room is much smaller, little more than a box really, and houses another horsehair mattress which has to be shaken of its bedbugs every morning and rolled into a bolster to serve as a seat and a table. All but the youngest of the children, as well as an older female cousin, sleep on this mattress, and though the room has no fire, its small size and busy population keep it warm. In keeping with their relative sizes, Frenchie and Sarah’s room is known as Main Room and this second room Little Room. On occasion, when there is no money for coal or even for a bucket of coal dust, the whole family is obliged to move into Little Room just to keep from freezing.

Downstairs live another family, the Smileys – Jack, Violet and their nine or so children, the number varying according to whether there is a new arrival that year to balance the one or two carried off by the whooping cough or TB. The Smileys are permanently unlucky. If there is a bout of pneumonia going around, then one of the Smileys is bound to get it. If a neighbour’s boy runs amok with a football, then it will be the Smileys’ window which gets broken. If the vicar is doing his rounds, he’ll always knock first on the Smileys’ door.

Jack Smiley works as a hatchman in the East India and his wife takes in washing and sometimes cleans the ships’ galleys at the East India, but it is never enough. The tallyman is a regular visitor at the Smiley residence. So is the rent collector. And the bookies’ boy. Every Monday morning you can set your watch by the appearance of the Smiley children lumbering up the pavement carrying the family sheets and coats to Nathan James Ltd, outfitter and pawnbroker, where they will remain until Friday payday.

The Smileys and the Fulchers share a small concrete back yard with a privy and a standing tap, from where the Fulchers take their water. The privy is a dirty business. In the summer the smell draws egg-filled bluebottles and in the winter the wind sneaks in and freezes their buttocks to the seat. At some point during the previous decade the privy door worked part-way off its hinges leaving a gap the size of a toddler’s hand. But for all that, the plumbing is solid, there are rarely any overspills or seeping pipes, and most of the rats stay away. For those that don’t, the Smileys’ liver-coloured mongrel Bobs does a grand job of disposal, leaving rat tails and other remnants about as proof of his efficacy.

Frenchie Fulcher works as a ships’ carpenter at Thames Ironworks on Bow Creek, and sometimes at the West India dry dock. He is a journeyman without a permanent job and has to shape up each morning before seven in the hope that the foreman at the Ironworks has room for him. If not, he’ll go down to the West India and try to pick up something there. Fulcher is not a heavy man. All the same, he is an angry man and his neat little body conceals the strength of horses. Among dockers with their sloping shoulders, their rickety legs and half-broken backs, Frenchie the carpenter appears upright and dignified. His manner, too, sets him apart. Men less fastidious than Frenchie go to lengths at shape up, laying on their Irish/Polish/Scots origins and playing the blue-eyed boys. But French is above all that. If there is no work on any particular day, he will go home empty-handed and take it out on the kids. He is proud that way.

On a day when he is feeling right with the world Frenchie looks almost regal. His features are neat and well-made: a slender nose, domed a little in the middle but with a thin pinch at the end; wide-set, peaty eyes with a good measure of white in them, the kind of eyes in which daydreams have space to hide; and a generous but not excessive forehead – a testament, so Sarah says, to his good blood. His voice is high but his laughter, when it comes, is unexpectedly deep and clanging, not unlike an anchor dropping on its chain.

Sarah Fulcher is Frenchie’s opposite, a coarse-grained, flap-fleshed woman of wholesome temperament. She is pliant and sweet, with no obvious vices and a handy array of virtues ranging from dressmaking to midwifery. Most important of all, Sarah Fulcher is thrifty. She can sniff out a rotten swede or a poor potato at ten yards. No Chrisp Street costermonger will dare to slink a slimy cabbage or dud carrot into Sarah’s bag because they know her shrieks of latherish rage will echo halfway to the Thames Estuary. Taking money from Sarah Fulcher’s hand is as hard as prising the ring off a rigor mortised finger.

This small reservoir of fierceness is all the more remarkable because in other ways Sarah Fulcher is soft as snow. Her skin is soft and her hair is soft. Her ears have a wispy bloom of hair and fudgy lobes. Her body is as spongy as sausage meat, her lips as plump as spring chicks. Her disposition, too, is spring-like, fresh, sunny and innocent. A little insensitive, even undigested, but never, ever cruel. So sweet is she that the Smiley children all wish she were their mother, because, unlike Mrs Smiley, Sarah only thumps her children when she can’t think of any other way to make them do what they are told.

Sarah’s love for Frenchie is sweetly naïve and unshakeable. Her life is divided into two eras: Before and After Frenchie. Before Frenchie, Sarah Quelch toiled in a scullery for a family Up West. The family was miserable and the scullery was worse. Then Sarah met Frenchie, married him and found herself living in the bright new world of After Frenchie. In the wide open spaces of Sarah’s mind Frenchie is a kind of a god, or at the very least, a saviour. So unquestioning is Sarah’s devotion that she seems not to sense her husband’s deep sighs, his eyes rolled to the heavens. In an obscure corner of his heart Frenchie resents her. Resents his children, too. The wastefulness of them! The toiling that has to be done to keep them all from the poorhouse. Without Sarah and her brood of guzzling children just think where Frenchie might have ended up! As the owner of a timber yard, perhaps, or a chandler’s, or a leather business, or even a cabinetmaker’s shop. Occasionally, when he has had too much to drink, he’ll give voice to his disappointments, but Sarah only smiles at that and blows him a kiss and says, San Fairy Ann, dear, San Fairy Ann, and he will give up trying to explain.

Sarah gives birth to seven children: William, Rosetta, Frances Maud, John, Jane, Edith and Arthur. The eldest, William, is born premature and doomed. He survives for two days and his body is buried without ceremony in the cemetery not far from Ullin Street. (Rosetta does not grow to adulthood either, but we’ll come back to her.) William is never mentioned and the remembrance of him surfaces only occasionally as a faraway look in Sarah’s eye or a twitch on Frenchie’s face, and so Jane is born into a family with a missing part. No photograph of William exists, no sketch or representation of any kind. It is almost as though his very absence is shameful and must not be acknowledged. But acknowledged it is, of course. When Jane is about five or six, she comes across a wooden soldier wrapped in a piece of old sheeting and hidden at the back of the cupboard beside the fire. It is a beautifully carved, old-fashioned kind of soldier with painted eyes and woollen hair and a red wooden jacket around his broad shoulders and Frenchie’s mark carved into his base, and from then on the soldier is William, a little wooden brother who lives in a cupboard and will never grow up.

The Fulcher children are not the most handsome brood. Edie gets most of the looks: arched eyebrows, deep blue eyes and a mouth made from strawberry jam. Jane’s older sister Frances Maud, her older brother John and younger brother Arthur are like their mother, squashy and bovine and big-nosed. Only Rosie and Jane take after their father, though Rosie has inherited her mother’s soft outlines. By contrast, Jane is a tiny, reedy thing, with bones as skinny as a shrew’s. A meagre, curved nose juts from cheeks that would these days be prized, but in those days simply emphasised her thinness. The zooming eyes are a lively blue, though apt to be inspecting. The teeth are good and even. There is nothing wrong with any of her features. It’s just that when put together they are uneventful.

What does stand out is Jane’s extraordinary hair, a huge, mobile clump of mahogany brown, so soft that it sails in the wind like a bank of seaweed under waves. I’ll say one thing for her, says Frenchie, shaking his head, she musta bin standing in the giant’s line when the hair was given out. It looks more like an explosion than a bonce.

Mum, where’s the End in East End?

The Docks, Janey love, the Docks is the End. The East End is the Docks.

But Mum, where’s the Beginning then?

Oh Janey, Janey, the questions you ask! How should I know?

You knew where the Finish was.

But it’s harder to say where the Beginning is. Ain’t no East Beginning s’far as I know. There’s only an East End.

In Poplar, the day is divided not into twenty-four hours but into the two shifts of the tides. Since this isn’t so much a practical circumstance as a feeling, it would be more accurate to say that the day is divided into two feelings. A kind of thickness in the air signals high tide. Low tide has the sapping quality of a rainy Sunday afternoon. When the river is low the air is thinner and pulls on the hairs of the skin. As the tide rises, do does the mood; as it falls, the mood falls too.

Aside from this dependence on the tides, the typical Fulcher family day is like that of any other poor London family. Morning begins at dawn when the knocker-up wakes Sarah and Frenchie and the babies with a pebble at the window. Rising from the bed, Sarah goes downstairs to the tap by the privy to fetch water for Frenchie’s shave and, lighting three coals with a handful of kindling, she boils in the copper three tin cupfuls for the shave and a further eight for tea, before waking the children in Little Room. A child is despatched with two pennies and a tin jug to Neal Charles’ dairy in Cottage Place, where there is an outside pump in the shape of a cow’s head. While her husband scrapes his beard, Sarah slices half a loaf from the day before and spreads it with dripping or jam for the older children and soaks a little in sugared milk for the toddlers. If there are leftovers from the day before, then Sarah will fry them up for Frenchie. They eat on their laps with their breath pooling in the cold air of the room, the younger ones sipping warm sugary water, the older ones washing down their bread with sweet tea from the tin mug.

At six-thirty Frenchie joins the procession of men heading south towards the docks to the bomp-on for work, men in quiet waves, whistling against the cold. The Fulchers will not see him again till teatime at seven, or if it is a Friday, not till he rolls in from the pub singing ‘Mother Brown’. A little later the coal man, the beigel man, the cat’s meat man, the haberdasher, the tinker, the pie man and the rag and boner begin making their way along St Leonard’s Road, while in the neighbouring streets, doors fly open and women spill out on to the pavement, their hair all done in rags and curlers, eyes beady for a bargain.

Back at Ullin Street, the children scrub their necks and faces at the tap in the yard then the older ones sling on their jackets and head towards the red brick box at Bright Street, which serves as a school. By midday they will be back for lunch, to warmed rooms smelling of their mother’s chores. After school the girls will be sent out to fetch saucers of pickles or an egg or two from the grocer’s and the boys will be sent to the coal yard for coal dust at a farthing a bucket to make the coals go further. Then Frenchie will sail home hard and sweating from the day, a pilfered orange or a few raisins in his pocket. Look what old Frenchie found in the docks, nippers. Sarah will make sweet tea and put a new half-loaf on the table with marg and jam. Sometimes they will have a few potatoes with gravy or a hard-boiled egg with vinegar pickles and then, unless it is raining very hard or the cold is unbearable or they are sick, the children will play in the street – rope games, ginger, blind man’s bluff. Frenchie will sink into his dilapidated chair with his Daily Mirror and quarter ounce of shag and shake his head at the injustices of the world, while his wife sits beside him, mending rips and holes. And when the children are in bed and their overcoats are spread over their warming toes, Frenchie will tell them stories.

Frenchie’s head is a cargo of stories. He’ll tell them about the docker who was pushed into the oily water by a side of beef swung from a ship, and how his fellows made a fire right there on the quayside and roasted that side of beef in tribute to their lost friend. He’ll tell them about the parrots which came in on a boat from Uruguay and swore in fourteen different languages, or about the performing monkeys which could write the alphabet. He’ll tell them tales of everyday life on the docks. He’ll tell them about the sugar porters whose flesh is so raw from the sharpness of their cargo that the bluebottles get in underneath their skin and lay their eggs. How on a summer’s day you can tell a sugar porter by the clouds of tiny flies bursting from his limbs. He’ll tell them about the tarantulas they pull from banana hands, scooping them up into tobacco tins to give them to their dogs to kill. He’ll tell them about the oilmen, whose skin is like thick, black leather from the tar they scrape from the inside of the oil ships, about the potash haulers with faces white as ghosts coughing bloody spume into cloths; about the corn porters with their flour rashes and the sulphur men whose hair stinks of rotten eggs.

Frenchie knows things. He knows that London was once under the sea and there are shells embedded in the stones of Poplar Library. He knows where the plague pits and the bear-baiting dens used to be. He can point out where the Vikings thundered up the Thames in their longboats and where they got befuddled by the eddies and drifts at Bow Creek. He knows that the body of a whale was dug up out of the marsh at the West India. He’s witnessed dogfights. He knows where to find bare-knuckle fighters or nancy boys.

Jane Fulcher’s favourite story, one her father often tells, concerns two mastiffs and a cow. The cow had been left to graze on the marsh south of Poplar in the loop of the Thames. The dogs, whose job it was to protect the cow from hungry poachers, were chained to the animal’s feet. Every week a marshman came along and left meat for the dogs and between times they dug for worms and pounced on any small thing that crossed their path. But a mist came down as mists often did in the marsh and the cow, wandering about and unable to see its feet, stumbled on its chains and fell into a nearby bog, catapulting its unfortunate protectors into the quicksand. After a struggle the cow sank into the slime and died but, being lighter, the dogs remained on the surface for a while longer. For four days and nights the residents of Poplar heard a terrible wailing, but were too frightened to go down to the bog and see what was afoot. Rumours rushed around that the devil had landed in the marsh and was taunting them before making his move. When the marshman eventually returned to check on his charge he found two mastiff heads preserved in the marshy brine, their jaws open as if in a long, last howl of injustice. And that is how, Frenchie says, the Isle of Dogs got its name.

The stories have a fearful power. Whenever his children are defiant, Frenchie threatens to abandon them on barges that will carry them out on the tide beyond Southend to the Black Deep where their bodies will be consumed by whales and sea snakes.

Whales and sea snakes, nippers, whales and sea snakes.