Книга - Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End

Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End
Charlie Connelly


One forgotten street, 12 unforgettable women.‘’Ang on boy, Joan’s got sumfink to show yer.’ She rummaged in a drawer for a moment, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.‘Constance Street,’ she said. ‘As I remember it.’Through the story of one street – Constance Street – we hear the true life tales of a tight knit group of working class women in the East End of London set against a backdrop of war, hardship and struggle.It’s a story of matriarchy and deep family ties, of a generation that was scattered away from the street during the blitz bombings, but which maintained the ties of that street for decades afterwards.Set in an area of East London called Silvertown, a once thriving docking community that at the turn of the 20th century was the industrial heartland of the south of England; the story focuses on the lives of 12 incredible women and their struggle to survive amidst the chaos of the war years.We have Nellie Greenwood, the author’s great grandmother who runs a laundry in Silvertown which becomes the focal point of the community. In 1917 a munitions factory in Silvertown explodes flattening much of the surrounding area and causing extensive damage to Constance Street – Nellie’s daughter is blown from her crib but miraculously survives.Deciding to open the laundry as a field hospital for the injured, Nellie and the women on the street come together to tend the wounded, the sick and the emotionally shattered as they cope with the aftermath of not just one but two world wars.Through the Great War, the roaring Twenties, the Depression and then the unimaginable – the outbreak of a second world war – Nellie and the street survive with love, laughter and friendships that bind the community together. But just as this incredible group of women live through the worst, the unthinkable happens. On 7 September 1940, Constance Street is no more.Following in the footsteps of Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth and The Sugar Girls, Constance Street is a life-affirming, heart-warming read that reminds us of a time when people pulled together.










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Copyright (#u5ed3022c-4c60-5d90-9c3a-0415e9825bb6)


HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2015

FIRST EDITION

© Charlie Connelly 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Topfoto (two women); John Topham/Topfoto (background)

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Charlie Connelly asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007528455

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007528448

Version: 2015-07-09




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Contents


Cover (#u6e61cc8a-b834-5b96-9073-825766654ca0)

Title Page (#ulink_de3753a8-2918-5f49-bf78-7a35e32723ac)

Copyright (#ulink_11f34abb-94f1-5f62-ad6f-d7688e2b98d5)

By the Same Author (#ulink_0da06f00-9c6c-5c03-96df-23c83774d8c6)

Dedication (#ulink_2d37bd12-49f1-53fa-8873-3763ffefd759)

Map (#ulink_e1902662-87ee-5a78-88f6-fdf886ee97f8)

Chapter One (#ulink_733c6844-00ee-5753-94de-bcae741dc3f0)

Chapter Two (#ulink_0bc12f5b-edb4-50ea-86b5-c100d578c689)

Chapter Three (#ulink_ebe5d62d-26b5-5f27-aefa-d50d09391f8b)

Chapter Four (#ulink_47ccb001-896a-5bf8-a362-cedf1113c756)

Chapter Five (#ulink_e4124fa9-9f27-5f21-a388-da5cf332df8c)

Chapter Six (#ulink_609443d0-6a88-50c9-bad5-07f35ee14b11)

Chapter Seven (#ulink_4581c163-b2de-5e1f-9a7d-df32b163cb45)

Chapter Eight (#ulink_21950764-f2e1-5f94-a8ab-afe0e03f166a)

Chapter Nine (#ulink_3d103a1d-932c-5309-bb1c-633c64cd1501)

Chapter Ten (#ulink_ad042614-8b1b-5a0b-9e71-ccc1ee8704b2)

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_70aa3184-c110-5f5a-be0f-541a75e09f32)

Chapter Twelve (#ulink_e74e8f5e-fc2a-5b25-877c-5af8ba7027dd)

Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_f4bd5441-a28a-5deb-a498-9dc3f4bd50c5)

Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_ce20f0bf-b77f-5a10-8f3f-e01e632f38e7)

Chapter Fifteen (#ulink_01e12aaf-9e58-5f07-a65d-41a42f80d5a5)

Chapter Sixteen (#ulink_f925135d-da0e-5797-ada4-fe43244c3ea4)

Chapter Seventeen (#ulink_66cb533c-6314-5413-9d03-19450e820d1a)

Chapter Eighteen (#ulink_aa30d53e-7be4-5069-afd2-6e27a57eabc1)

Chapter Nineteen (#ulink_83ee3541-8191-5064-ae85-2d31cd4eba38)

Chapter Twenty (#ulink_2781378a-edb1-572b-938a-5065dd19289f)

Chapter Twenty-One (#ulink_aa3e6d57-59d5-57da-884f-0376eea74c30)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#ulink_6430316a-43e0-5bdb-8487-4196b21cb142)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#ulink_15085c28-2022-5b8f-aae7-21c6a577c7bb)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#ulink_87af9bc9-2410-501c-8551-b0973c8bc1d1)

Chapter Twenty-Five (#ulink_f9684c4e-d48c-59a7-b063-64e2e5d22c0f)

Chapter Twenty-Six (#ulink_a4606285-87a1-5070-89c5-fdeed6fe1868)

Chapter Twenty-Seven (#ulink_577ba907-a13e-5975-a9d7-7ea56374b733)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (#ulink_744b50f7-aadc-5876-8ef4-bd31740edaba)

Chapter Twenty-Nine (#ulink_c1f31f39-0420-5a87-bf75-9baa9d882304)

Chapter Thirty (#ulink_59244368-07d9-528a-bb75-79a7f81e248c)

Chapter Thirty-One (#ulink_78248032-72ff-51e7-8121-5828c67e3be4)

Chapter Thirty-Two (#ulink_c2619799-834b-5995-86fd-1efcb3cb7baa)

Chapter Thirty-Three (#ulink_1612f9f3-efb8-5e9b-bba3-cf679d1f62c3)

Chapter Thirty-Four (#ulink_2cd9fd43-2ef4-5247-a02e-c79e65e89168)

Chapter Thirty-Five (#ulink_cabe9812-08f5-5096-9137-f33a1547c543)

Chapter Thirty-Six (#ulink_b4409045-7541-5808-8a03-08e22e25f5f3)

Chapter Thirty-Seven (#ulink_55214546-a847-54b7-931e-85d4dafd6362)

Chapter Thirty-Eight (#ulink_d8a9ef8e-cdb2-519a-917e-f4f1c81e4f37)

Chapter Thirty-Nine (#ulink_f414e71f-2e13-5f70-bc99-a6da9258bfb0)

Chapter Forty (#ulink_769b409d-bac9-51e6-9eb4-dc8aa92c8cb5)

Chapter Forty-One (#ulink_2b0729d2-3d38-57cf-ab38-65cf723441f1)

Chapter Forty-Two (#ulink_80faa7b8-73b0-51a3-bdc2-628e8a22183f)

Chapter Forty-Three (#ulink_3649ec6d-e942-583c-9fad-327aa88a208e)

Chapter Forty-Four (#ulink_231c1c9c-8543-59c1-88d7-526db9117c3a)

Chapter Forty-Five (#ulink_763d061a-14c9-5768-9f7c-7d5c5ff72b8a)

Acknowledgements (#ulink_ac049565-168c-52a8-ba1c-57b2fbc4cff0)

Exclusive sample chapter (#u368d5c0b-ad8f-5bb9-a89f-5aab289dcfda)

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter (#uc9480c1b-21f0-5103-9724-9e0ecf602913)

Write for Us (#uc4cbceb1-13ad-5c3c-b08e-ba3950caad9f)

About the Publisher (#u11b6b0cc-a935-5660-9014-5dc10dfa20fa)




Dedication (#u5ed3022c-4c60-5d90-9c3a-0415e9825bb6)


For my mum, Valerie Connelly, the last Greenwood Silvertonian, and in memory of Joan Thunstrom, née Greenwood, 1923– 2015










Chapter One (#u5ed3022c-4c60-5d90-9c3a-0415e9825bb6)


A little before seven o’clock on the evening of 19 January 1917, Nellie Greenwood was just about to close up the laundry when all the windows blew in.

Just before it happened the lamps had flickered for a couple of seconds, causing her to look up with the heavy iron poised just above the sheet she was pressing. There was a brilliant flash, a second for the breath to catch in her throat, then a whump, a deafening roar, a blizzard of shards and a screeching ring in her ears. She clamped her eyes closed and, as the ringing diminished, other sounds began to emerge from the white noise: a metal lid spinning to a halt on the floor nearby, the Christmas tinkle of the last slivers of falling glass, the bang of a window frame flapping open, all as if it were a very long way away.

Then silence, and the chill seeping into her cheek that told her she was lying on the stone floor.

Tendrils of cold began to seep through the broken windows and open door and settle around her. Silvertown was never silent, not ever, which despite the screaming noise inside her own head made the sudden absence of the clanking of dock cranes and the distant shrieking of the sawmill even more curious. As Nellie slowly began to regain her senses she realised there was something else nagging at her; something about the silence inside 15 Constance Street was wrong.

A week earlier her husband Harry had wheeled her around this very floor, dancing to a hummed tune of his own devising to mark her thirty-ninth birthday. He’d managed to coax her out to Cundy’s, the pub at the end of the street, for a couple of hours in the evening, leaving their eldest child Winifred in charge of her five younger sisters, and when Nell insisted on checking whether she’d left the float in the till when they’d returned from the pub, he’d pushed his cap back on his head, grabbed her waist with one hand and her hand with the other and whisked her in circles.

‘Forty next year, doll,’ he said between hums, his breath sharp with the tang of alcohol. ‘Who’d have thought we’d live so long, eh? And you not looking a day older than the first time I clapped eyes on you.’

She told him to get away with himself. In the mirror that morning she’d noticed more grey streaks in her brown hair as well as the lines spreading from the corners of her eyes and heading due south from the corners of her mouth to her jaw line. She’d run her fingertip down them, her hands permanently pink and shiny from years of washing and scrubbing, from domestic laundry as a girl to running her own laundry today.

Thirty-nine, she’d thought, and I’m looking and feeling every day of it. And me with a four-month-old baby, too.

A four-month-old baby.

Nell scrambled to her feet, kicking away the drying frame that had fallen across her legs, and stood bolt upright, blinking, glass falling from her pinafore and her green floral dress. She ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. The door to the back bedroom had slammed shut: Nellie shouldered it open and half stumbled, half fell into the room. There was broken glass everywhere, the washstand had blown over, the basin was smashed, the little framed pictures were off the walls, and in the corner was the crib, tipped onto its side and sprinkled with sharp slivers that twinkled in the twilight like birthday icing. Next to the upturned crib, face down and sprawled motionless on the floor among the daggers of glass, four-month-old Rose.

Fighting back a sudden surge of cold nausea, Nellie took two long paces forward, each seeming as if there were suddenly miles between her and her child. She reached down with her raw, laundress’s hands and carefully picked the baby off the ground. She was limp. She turned the child around and held her face to face. Rose stirred, stretched her arms, fanned her fingers, yawned and half opened an eye.

Nellie pulled the baby into her shoulder and allowed a tear of relief to fall. She brushed a couple of glass fragments from the back of Rose’s nightdress and finally allowed herself to exhale, bouncing the child back to sleep on her shoulder. Into the room ran two of her daughters, Annie and Ivy. Their eyes were wide with shock, they were blinking back tears and mouthing words at her, but she could hear nothing except the tuneless high-pitched music inside her head, like the constant jostling tinkle of a thousand needles. It was only when she noticed how their shadows on the wall were a sharp silhouette against an eerie, glowing orange did Nellie begin to speculate about what might have just happened. She turned to face the window and saw the horizon fiery red over West Silvertown. The sun had set more than an hour ago, yet the sky burned orange as if it was rising again in the west.

She made a rapid mental roll-call of daughters. Annie, Ivy and Rose were here. Kit was with Win, delivering some laundry to North Woolwich. That was farther east, they’d probably be all right. Harry was at the docks collecting some table linen from one of the liners. It was the Albert Dock, so again, farther away from here, he’d be all right too, she reasoned with herself. That left Norah; she had been helping with something at the school a couple of streets away. Drew Road School was a big, solid building. Norah was probably all right. Please, she thought, let all of them be all right.

Through the jangling needles she began to hear crying – Ivy and Annie, 10 and 11 respectively, were at her side, tears streaming down their cheeks. She longed to embrace them but she was still carrying Rose. She nodded at the crib and Annie went over and set it upright. Ivy took the blanket to the broken window and flicked it out a few times before examining it closely for stray shards while Annie ran her hands around the inside of the crib. There didn’t seem to be any glass inside it and, once satisfied it was safe, Nell laid Rose, still sleeping, in the crib, tucked the blankets around her, dropped to her haunches and pulled her older daughters to her, their faces at her breast, and kissed the tops of their heads. The scene was still lit by the malevolent, flickering orange glow from the west that was bathing the room in a curiously soothing light.

‘Nell!’

The cry came from downstairs and she heard frantic footsteps on the broken glass inside the doorway.

‘Up here, Harry.’

The footsteps bounded up the stairs and her husband hurtled into the room, his piercing blue eyes flashing with concern.

‘Are you all right? Are the girls all right?’

‘We’re all right here, I think, yes. Kit and Win are at North Woolwich and Norah’s at the school. What is it? A bombing raid?’

‘Don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I was just on my way back from the Albert, just left the dock gate, when there was this flash in the sky and the next thing I know something’s knocked me off my feet and I’m in the gutter and everyone’s on the ground. I’ve got up and run all the way home. There’s not a window left between here and the docks.’

He thought for a moment.

‘If it’s a bomb, it’s one hell of a bomb.’

‘Stay with the girls, Harry,’ she said, rising to her feet again, ‘and wait here with them. Rose is asleep in the crib. Take them all into the parlour and get a fire going, it’s bloody freezing in here. I’m going round the school to find Norah. I wouldn’t think the trains will be running now so Win and Kit will be walking back and I want someone here when they arrive.’

‘OK, doll,’ he said.‘Try not to worry,’ he added. ‘They’re sensible kids, I’m sure they’re all fine.’

Nellie walked down the stairs, crunched across the broken glass and opened the shop door onto Constance Street. Beneath the fiery twilight the street was dark: the gas lamps had all shattered and blown out. She looked south towards the junction with Connaught Road and the Thames-side factories beyond, and in the gloom saw the silhouettes of men running, some in the direction of the glow, others going the other way. Somewhere, faintly, she heard a woman screaming. White faces loomed in the doorways and windows in the street. Drinkers in Cundy’s had gathered outside – people she knew, Constance Street people. Nellie set off north, though, towards the junction with Drew Road, and just as she got there was nearly knocked clean off her feet as Norah came racing round the corner.

‘Norah, love, are you all right?’

‘Mum! Yes, I’m all right,’ panted the eight-year-old. ‘We were putting away some tables and chairs and suddenly all the windows broke! They sent us home.’

She took Norah’s hand and walked down Constance Street, the way strewn with glass and debris. Each of the half-dozen or so shop-fronts she passed was dark, each window reduced to jagged fragments. On the other side of the street, curtains flapped hesitantly through the broken windows, tugged outside by the chill breeze. Nell paused briefly at some of the gaping shops as she passed, making sure everyone was all right inside, but nobody seemed to know what had happened, just the bright flash, then the pause and then all the windows blowing in.

At the end of the street, opposite the station, a crowd had gathered outside Cundy’s. Still holding Norah’s hand, she joined the group. There was Frank Levitt, the butcher whose shop was next door to the pub. He still wore his butcher’s apron and hat.

‘What is it, Frank?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’

He looked at her, his face almost as pale as his apron.

‘You’re cut, Nell,’ he said.

Nellie felt a warm trickle from her right temple, just behind the hairline. She caught it with a forefinger. It wasn’t a serious wound, but she noticed cuts on the backs of her hands too.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, ‘I’m all right. What’s happened? Are we bombed?’

She thought back to the night a year or so earlier when she’d seen the Zeppelin over Bow, slow and stately, and remembered the elegance of the searchlight beams playing around it, the low and distant hum that she’d felt faintly in her chest, the bright shell-bursts puffing around the giant airship, then the low horizon flashes and the sickening distant thud of bombs dropping. She’d wondered how such beauty could be seen in such a fearful thing.

But this was different, surely. She’d heard no Zeppelin, no hum in the sky, not even the throaty rasp of the Gotha planes they’d begun to use on bombing raids. She looked along Connaught Road towards the glow in the west and saw more shocked people beginning to emerge from their violated homes and businesses. The glow was a good half-mile away, yet there was utter devastation here. This was more damage than a whole squadron of Zeppelins could ever do.

‘We’re not bombed, Nell,’ said Simeon Cundy, the landlord of the pub. ‘It can’t be a bomb. Too big. There ain’t a bomb in the world that could do this.’

‘Unless there’s a new bomb,’ said another voice, ‘a big one, bigger than anything we’ve seen.’

‘Or mines,’ said another, ‘if the Hun has put a mine in the river and a ship’s gone up …’

‘A factory,’ said another man, incredulously. ‘I reckon it must be one of the factories blown up. Gawd bless the poor souls down there anyway.’

A smell of burning grew stronger until it began to irritate their eyes and nostrils, then a dark cloud of thick smoke came billowing through the sky and along the street towards them. The group stood back against the wall of Cundy’s as it drifted past along Connaught Road and over the roofs of Constance Street, darkening everything beneath the fiery twilight. No one spoke, they all stood in silence trying to process the enormity of what might have happened. Then Nellie heard coughing and a man emerged from the darkness. He was limping, his face was blackened and he had his left arm clamped to his side with his right. He was breathless and tired, as if he’d been running, and was shouting something in all directions.

‘Brunner Mond,’ he called in their direction, ‘Brunner Mond’s has blown up! Brunner Mond’s has blown up! It’s all gone!’

Nell’s shoulders drooped. Of course. It would be an exaggeration to say she’d seen it coming, but …

Brunner Mond, an already successful company based in Liverpool, had opened a chemical works at Crescent Wharf in West Silvertown in 1893. In the main factory they made soda crystals, while in the secondary plant on the site they manufactured caustic soda – but this had been discontinued a couple of years before war broke out. In September 1915 the government had requisitioned the old caustic soda works and turned them into a TNT purification plant in order to keep up with the demand for munitions at the front.

‘Silvertown is perfect!’ the deskbound map-pinners who make these kinds of decisions had said. ‘Ideally located and with a ready-made workforce to boot!’

The residents of Silvertown, while not openly dissenting, were uneasy; its saloon bars and back parlours murmuring with reservations through pursed lips about high explosives and packed streets of jerry-built houses. When they were preparing to open the plant, Harry had gone down there to see about some work but had come back shaking his head and sucking his teeth. ‘Don’t like the look of it, doll,’ he’d said to Nell. ‘They’re going to work all round the clock, shift work, means there’ll be constant deliveries of dangerous stuff day and night – there’s so much of it that trucks aren’t enough: they’re bringing it in on trains and barges as well. And they’re just moving in and starting straight away, when the place is set up for making caustic soda, not bombs. The people I spoke to down there seem out of their depth, to me. Got a bad feeling about it.’

Brunner Mond’s going up would make a warped kind of sense, thought Nell, as she began to notice strange golden speckles falling from the sky that danced in the air around them, billows of brilliant orange pinpricks that glowed and flared in the breeze and died wherever they landed. Jacob Eid, the baker, picked one from his jacket sleeve and examined the small black speck in the palm of his hand. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it.

‘It’s wheat grain,’ he said, incredulously, holding it up between finger and thumb like a jeweller inspecting a precious stone. ‘This is wheat grain. Lord save us, don’t tell me the flour mill’s gone up too.’

The gathering at the corner of Constance Street fell silent and looked for a while at the western sky still burning bright orange as if the sun was clinging to the horizon and refusing to set. On the breeze rumbled the low, malicious thunder of distant flames. They all stood for a while, wordless, helpless, fearful, hands thrust into pockets and collars turned up against the cold, feeling occasional wafts of smoky warmth drifting across from the west.

And then they came. Out of the smoke, out of the glow, out of the darkness, among the billow of golden sparks: the people. A trickle at first, the advance party of the bewildered and the injured. A woman, wide-eyed in a torn coat, swivelling from side to side as she walked, shouting ‘Billy!’ at the buildings on one side of the street and then the other. A young man, deathly pale, his eyes dark and sunken, blood pouring down the left side of his face and neck, staining his jacket, glassy-eyed, looking ahead but looking at nothing, just walking, just getting away. A mother, hand in hand with two young children, all three of them blackened and shiny, repeated, at nobody in particular, ‘It’s gone. All of it. It’s all gone.’

Nellie watched them pass and saw more following behind, a shuffling stream of humanity, uncomprehending, mouths open, breath clouding in the chill evening, eyes seeing nothing, a parade of the shocked, a carnival of casualties. She leaned down to Norah and spoke directly into her ear.

‘Go home, Norah. I’ll be along in a minute.’

Once she’d watched her daughter run back along the street and turn into the doorway of the laundry, she looked back at those passing the end of Constance Street. It was like a parade of the damned. The wind changed, turned to the south and sent the clouds of smoke across the river, giving central Silvertown some relief from the oily smoke and brightening the streets a little, courtesy of the eerie orange glow.

Nell thought of baby Rose, a tiny pinprick of innocence among all this dread, while watching the shuffling procession pass by from a catastrophe whose scale those gathered at the corner of Constance Street could only guess at. She closed her eyes, and pictured bending her head to press her nose to Rose’s cap and breathing in a mixture of soap and baby. She became overwhelmed by a need to protect. The image of Rose, face down on the floor surrounded by glass and debris, came into her mind and made her shudder. These people, these wild-eyed, waxy-pale husks of humanity, they were all Rose to somebody. None of them deserved this. Whatever had happened over there, whatever horrors lay a few hundred yards to the west, had as far as she could deduce left these people with nothing. As well as their physical injuries they were all in a state of nervous shock, driven on by a base human instinct to get as far away from danger as possible. A wave of maternal compassion ran over her. These were her people, Silvertown people, yet they were suddenly otherworldly and vulnerable. She stepped into the street to a young man whose left arm was hanging at a sickening angle.

‘Here, boy,’ she said, and then, louder, ‘and anyone else, come with me,’ she called. ‘I’ve a laundry up this way. You can shelter there until …’ Until what? She wasn’t sure. ‘Tell you what, we’ll all have a nice cup of tea.’ She heard the words come out of her mouth and almost winced at the triteness of them, but this was the banality of disaster: normal was good, normal was what you needed at a time like this, and there’s nothing more normal than tea.

Thus Nellie Greenwood, businesswoman, wife and mother of ten, just embarked on her fortieth year, led a gaggle of the broken and bewildered along Constance Street to the battered and shattered business she ran with her husband with help from her daughters. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do with them when she got there, but she knew that right now they needed her more than anything in the world.




Chapter Two (#u5ed3022c-4c60-5d90-9c3a-0415e9825bb6)


Nellie Greenwood was my great-grandmother and I never knew her. At least, I never knew her in the sense that she’d died before I was born. Such was her legacy, however, such the force of her personality and the mixture of affection and fear she’d instilled in those who grew up with and around her, that I’ve almost manufactured false memories of Nell of my own. So powerful was her character that photographs familiar from albums and mantelpieces move and talk in my mind.

Nell was ‘Gran’ to everyone, whatever their generation, the matriarch, the central node around whom all family business and life was conducted. A formidable working-class woman who’d forged a business from nothing, who’d worked hard all her life, asked for nothing and expected nothing, bore thirteen children of whom five didn’t survive to adulthood, while informally adopting at least one other, and who despite knowing hardship, frustration, tragedy and loss, and never being less than forthright, opinionated and frank, never lost the deep and innate kindness that underpinned her life.

It’s thanks to Nellie that Silvertown was, is, and will most likely continue to be, for another couple of generations at least, regarded as home by my mother’s family even though none of us has lived there for more than seventy-five years. Between the wars Nellie was the heart of the family and the heart of Constance Street, which in turn was the heart at the centre of Silvertown, a community in east London isolated between the docks and the river where Nellie and the rest of the Greenwoods allowed their roots to embed in the marshy earth. Silvertown is, as my grandmother would frequently remind me, an island – because of the docks you have to cross water to leave – and an island mentality developed there. A closeness of kin and a bond to a place that formed ties so tight it would take something spectacular to break them. The physical ties would indeed be broken in such a fashion, but the spiritual ones linger and show no sign of weakening any time soon. ‘You’ve got dock water in your veins, boy,’ my grandmother Rose would tell me, ‘and don’t you forget it.’

When I was young, the way my grandmother and great-aunts – the daughters of Nellie and Harry – would describe Silvertown made it seem like a magical place. Even the name made it sound wondrous, the stuff of fairy tales, and the way these old cockney ladies, quick to laugh and masterly storytellers all, would talk about Silvertown did nothing to disabuse me of the notion that it sat on clouds with the sun glinting off a forest of golden turrets.

My first sense that Silvertown was actually somewhere real came one Saturday when I was about 10 years old. My mother had been out all day and arrived home as darkness was falling. She had, she announced, just been to Silvertown. She’d taken Nan and a couple of my great-aunts across the water to revisit a few old haunts and, what’s more, hadn’t come back empty-handed. She placed a lump of rock on the table in front of me on top of the copy of Roy of the Rovers I was reading.

St Mark’s Church, where my mother’s family had been christened, married and eulogised for generations, had been deconsecrated and was derelict when they got there, the victim of first a serious fire and then vandals. Our posse of nostalgics had snuck in through a side door and found the place in dusty chaos. The pews, on which successive generations of Greenwoods and myriad Silvertonians had sat for reasons both joyful and tragic, were either gone altogether or reduced to a jumble of splintered planks. The vandals had enjoyed themselves immensely, not least when taking a sledgehammer to the font and reducing it to a mound of shapeless lumps on the floor. One of these lumps now sat in front of me on the dining table, retrieved by my mother who had been the last of the Greenwood babies to be christened in it. I ran my fingers over it: there was a beautiful shiny white side, blemished gently by a web of cracks so thin it was as if they’d been drawn on faintly in pencil. It was slightly curved with a champhered edge, all perfectly smooth to the touch. It was beautiful even out of its context and destroyed. The rest of this piece of pilfered font rubble, the sides visible where it had been broken away from the curved symmetry and craftsmanship of the whole, was rough and ugly, the raw material beneath the carefully constructed exterior, the bits you weren’t supposed to see. In this piece of font was Silvertown, all right.

It’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve come to question or even explore the received wisdom that Silvertown was this Greenwood utopia, a lost land of green and plenty. A cursory delve into the history of the place reveals that Silvertown was far from bucolic; it was mercilessly, relentlessly, unpleasantly industrial and life there was hard. Constance Street was topped by the docks at its north end and tailed by heavy industry at its south: the sugar refinery, the chemical works, the rubber factory, the paint factory. Silvertown was noisy, dirty and dangerous. It had grown rapidly from empty marshland into the largest industrial manufacturing area in the south of England in a process that took barely forty years while the kinds of amenities we take for granted struggled to keep up, as did the law. Indeed, it flourished partly because it was outside the boundaries covered by the Metropolitan Buildings Act of 1844, which banned ‘noxious trades’ from London.

Yet that street, that one beloved street, seemed immune to the reality. Constance Street was a sliver of heaven, of pride, of scrubbed doorsteps and starched aprons, of kids playing, welcoming shops and the pub on the corner. Like the name Silvertown, Constance Street has a certain air to it: Constance sounds like the feisty younger sister from a Regency novel or the prim but kindly governess in a Victorian serial: there’s a propriety about the name Constance. Yet this was an artery between dock and industry, a typical street at the heart of one of the poorest areas London ever saw, and that really is saying something.

As I grew older and the pew of Greenwood sisters grew shorter with each funeral, we youngsters loosened the bonds as our lives began to look further outwards and our horizons widened. The modern world, in which industry and community were forced to beat a relentless retreat, meant large family gatherings became a thing of the past, yet I began to think more and more about Silvertown. As my grandmother and her sisters died I regretted not finding out more, not preserving their stories. Why had they spoken so fondly of the place? What was so special about Silvertown, and Constance Street in particular? How accurate were their memories of days where the sun always seemed to shine and every story seemed to end with screeches of helpless, eye-dabbing laughter?

My great-aunt Joan is the last of the aunts, the youngest of Harry and Nellie’s daughters, 91 years old now, widowed, sprightly, sharp as a needle and still the best and funniest storyteller I’ve ever heard. I was at her home on the Kent coast a couple of years ago and the conversation inevitably turned to Silvertown and Constance Street. ‘’Ang on, boy,’ she said at one point. ‘Joan’s got something to show you.’

She rummaged in a draw for a moment, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.

‘Constance Street,’ she said. ‘At least as Joan remembers it.’

On the sheet in front of me was a crudely drawn row of buildings, each numbered, each inscribed in unmistakable old lady’s shaky handwriting with a name, a street number and, where appropriate, the nature of their business. It was a plan of Constance Street as it had been in the 1930s.

Railway Hotel Cundy pub, said the first in line, the pub at the end of Constance Street that, despite being named for the station opposite, was always known as Cundy’s after the landlord at the turn of the twentieth century right up to the building’s recent demolition. All the shops were there, the butcher, the grocer, hardware shop, fish and chip shop, right up to the dairy at the far end of the street. And there, in the middle of the row, ‘Greenwood laundry’.

Joan had been barely 17 years old when the Greenwoods left Silvertown for ever, yet here, three-quarters of a century on, was as vivid a manifestation of a lost community as you could wish for.

Joan’s diagram stayed with me and I began to project the half-remembered stories of my grandmother and the aunts onto it, trying to work out what it might be that makes Silvertown my spiritual home even though I was born miles away, three decades after we left, and why all of us, Connellys, Millers, Whites, Burkes, Gileses, Hickfords, Busseys, Mitchells and the rest – why all of us are, and will always remain, Greenwoods of Silvertown.

I often think of my grandmother’s instruction never to forget the dock water coursing through my veins. I will never forget it, but to find out why this specific briny fluid flows in my arteries and understand why my roots are so firmly embedded in Silvertown I needed to use Joan’s diagram as a key to unlock the story of the Greenwoods and take myself back to the very origins of Silvertown itself.




Chapter Three (#u5ed3022c-4c60-5d90-9c3a-0415e9825bb6)


Stephen Winckworth Silver was four years old when his father died early in the summer of 1794. He had a vague memory of a warm day, sun streaming through the windows, the sound of his father’s footsteps on the stairs, then voices and laughter outside, horses’ hooves in the courtyard and finally the shouts of the riders encouraging the horses as the group rode away. He would never see his father again.

Stephen Silver senior, publican of the Three Tuns inn in Winchester, had set out that morning for the village of Barton Stacey with a group of friends. The landlord at the Swan Inn there was an acquaintance and had proposed a cricket match between the two inns for a wager. Silver and two companions were riding the seven miles to Barton Stacey to finalise the arrangements over a meal and a few pots of ale and also to see how the rebuilding work was progressing after the fire that had swept through the village two years earlier.

The three men left The Swan as the sun began to set, mounted their horses and set off back for Winchester beneath a burnished golden sky lined with long, dark clouds. When his friends made it clear that they were in no great hurry Stephen Silver, in great spirits, told them he’d go on ahead as he wanted to see his son before he was put to bed, dug his heels into the flanks of his horse, called out that he’d meet them in the saloon and galloped ahead.

The wind pushed his hair back from his face. Twenty-six years old, handsome, fast establishing himself as a leading local businessman, Stephen Silver was about as full of life as he’d ever been as he thundered home to Winchester that night.

Nobody would ever be quite sure how it happened as there was nobody else on the road at the time, but as Stephen reached the edge of Winchester, barely two minutes’ ride from the Three Tuns, something caused him to fall from his horse and strike his head against the ground so hard that he must have been killed instantly. His friends arrived shortly afterwards and found him lying in the road, on his back, face looking up at the darkening sky, eyes open and lifeless, a trickle of blood from his left ear the only tangible sign that something was wrong other than the agitated horse trotting one way and then the other nearby, tossing its head as the reins hung down from its neck.

The two men knelt by him and shouted his name, lifting his head from the ground and imploring him to answer, but Stephen Silver was gone.

They lifted him gently from the ground, laid him over the back of one of their horses and rode slowly back to the Three Tuns. They brought him in through the back door and one of them went to fetch Elizabeth and tell her the dreadful news while the other laid him on the dining table. Young Stephen, oblivious, was woken by the low, guttural wail of his mother that rose to a shriek, and then there was silence. He fell asleep again.

His mother came in during the night, sat on his bed, leaned over him and when she was sure he was awake said, ‘Stephen, your father’s had an accident and he’s had to leave us to be with God. Be brave, my son, my dear boy, for it is just you and I now.’ With that she plunged forward, the weight of her head heavy on his torso, and wailed again, so loud and so long that Stephen felt the vibration deep in his own chest.

Stephen Silver was buried three days later in the churchyard at St Thomas’s, but young Stephen wasn’t there; having been deemed too young to attend he stayed back at the Three Tuns where he was watched over by Emily, the family’s young domestic servant. The inn was closed and shuttered and they sat in the dark, just the two of them, Emily saying nothing; just crying quietly and watching him through red, weepy eyes.

He’d been told to stay out of the back parlour, where his father had lain since being placed there, and where the local doctor had carried out the inquest, confirming a tragic accident, giving his condolences to Elizabeth and ruffling young Stephen’s hair before he left. The sight of the closed door of that room would be a constant memory of his childhood, for him the ultimate representation of his father’s death, far more poignant than the grave itself which his mother never visited after the funeral and which he never visited as long as he lived.

This meant he also never visited his little brother, William, who had died the previous year at eighteen months of a weak heart. It wasn’t until much later that Stephen appreciated just what his mother had gone through, losing her baby son and her husband within the space of fifteenth months. It wasn’t until Stephen’s twilight years that he really forgave her for marrying again, either.

Four years after the death of his father, Elizabeth married again. So much for it being just the two of them now, he thought. After Stephen’s funeral she had thrown herself into the running of the Three Tuns and barely mentioned her late husband ever again. On the day of the funeral itself there appeared in the Hampshire Gazette a notice she’d placed, informing ‘her late husband’s friends and the public in general that she continues the business of the Three Tuns inn and solicits the continuance of their favours to which every attention will be paid’, and asking that everyone to whom her husband was indebted at the time of his death should send their accounts immediately.

And that was it. There was barely a mention of his father ever again. Indeed, so busy was Elizabeth with the running of the inn that he saw her but rarely. Emily prepared his meals and he’d help her with some of the chores when he wasn’t at school – the laundry and the pot-washing, and he’d occasionally go into the centre of Winchester on errands – but shortly after his mother’s marriage Emily left the Three Tuns when she herself was married, to a sailor, and moved to Portsmouth.

Stephen’s mother’s second husband was a man called John Hayter, who had also been widowed. He was kind to Stephen but he wasn’t his father. Every time John smiled at him Stephen would clamp his eyes shut as if every vaguely paternal act from somebody else, every tiny kindness, took his real father further away from him. His memories were faint enough and he struggled to hold on to them. He remembered a shape rather than a person; the features of his face had dissipated among the wispy caverns of Stephen’s memory. He wanted to cling on to what he had of his father, especially his name, and John Hayter, for all his good intentions, was gradually erasing all of it.





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