A Memory of Violets (7 page)

I
think I'm eight year old, and Little Sister is half that. I'm not full certain, 'cause I don't know what year I was born, see. The passin' of the years don't make much difference to us street sellers, sure it don't. All I know about the years is it's primroses in the spring, roses in summer, lavender in autumn, and cresses in winter. That's all I know of the years.

I'm not stupid though. I know the Queen dresses in black since her dear Albert died, and I know how many pennies is in a shilling. I can spell my own name, too, so I can. I was at the Ragged School, but that were a while ago. Master walloped me for not paying attention, and Mammy said I weren't to be going no more.
Said I'd be more use selling the flowers and cresses and doing a bit o' sewing for a few pennies than getting my backside walloped. Anyway, one of the coster boys has been teaching me to read this last while, and I can say my ABCs well enough.

Mammy and Da come over on the steamship from Wexford when I were just an infant. Mammy's cousin had sent for us, see—said there was plenty of work in the factories. What with things being so bad in Ireland an' all, Da borrowed some money (Mammy never asked him where from, but I'm after thinking it was got by bad means). We took the boat to Liverpool before traveling to London. Da worked at the sugar factory in Whitechapel for a while until he got caught stealin'. Mammy said he was lucky not to be thrown in the gaol. She said if it hadn't been Christmas and people feeling charitable, he more'n likely would have been. Truth be told, I think Mammy would have preferred if he
had
been thrown in the cells. Could have stayed there, too, for all I care. Sure, that's a shocking awful thing to say about y'r own da, but that's the way of it. He don't have much of a likin' for me and I don't have much of a likin' for him.

After the sugar factory, he started out as a bone grubber, going round collecting old rags and bones and iron. He didn't have money for a cart, let alone a donkey to pull it, so he walked the streets with that greasy sack slung over his shoulder. Me and Mammy'd stay in our room at Rosemary Court and make our matches and wait for him to come back so as we could sort through everything he'd found. Stinking to make you sick, so it was, all that stuff he'd be after collecting—'specially them bones. We'd sort the colored rags from the white (the colored gets more pence, y'see) and the bones from the iron. Sometimes he'd set me to scraping at the cracks in the paving, looking for nails from the horseshoes—ye can get good money for horseshoe
nails—and if I found a lost key, that was like finding real treasure, so it was. Good at finding the horseshoe nails I was, and it's better'n searching down at the filthy, stinking river like them mudlarks. Mammy said I was lucky not to be working at that business, standing on glass and rusted nails in my bare feet. She told me it's often a mudlark falls into the Thames at high tide and drowns, choking on all that shite that floats around in it.

I was glad when Mammy starting selling the flowers. I liked being away from Rosemary Court and its stinking drains. Preferred to be among them flowers in the market, I did, 'specially in the summertime, when the rains make the stocks and roses smell so sweet. And it turns out that I was much better at tying up the posies than I ever was at listening in the schoolroom. “Born to be a flower girl, so ye were, Florrie Flynn.” That's what Mammy'd say to me. “Born and bred to be among the flowers, sure ye were.”

We'd head out selling, whatever the weather—snows, rain, thick pea soupers, made no difference to the likes of us. Gen'lemen make the best customers—they often buy a posy to give to their lady friends. “Please, gen'leman, do buy my flowers! Poor little girl! Roses for love. Violets for faithfulness. Lavender for devotion.” That's what I'd cry as the gen'lemen walked past or stood about chatting and smoking outside the theaters.

A kind lady once touched my face with her gloved hand—touched me, she did—while her gen'leman friend was buying a posy from me. Said I would be a “pretty little thing” if she could “scrub all that filth away.” Then the gen'leman scolded her for talking to catchpennies and pulled her away as if I were nothing better than a mangy dog about to bite her.

Sometimes I'd forget I was supposed to be selling and would stand and gawp at the ladies' dresses, those green and purple silks, shimmerin' like the Thames when the sun pokes through
the fog. Then Mammy'd give me a sharp dig in the ribs with her elbow. “Stop y'r gawping and start hawking,” she'd snap and I'd get back to work, quick as you like 'cause Mammy had the sharpest elbows you ever felt.

It was always just me and Mammy, until she got the swellin' in her belly and I knew another baby was coming. It was hard for her then, and some days, toward the end, she couldn't go to market and I knew we would all go hungry if I didn't go on my own. So, I did.

I'll never forget the day Little Sister was born. Nearly killed Mammy, so she did, what with her coming out arse-ways first. If it wasn't for old Mrs. Quinn at the front of the house having delivered thirty-four babies in her time, they'd both have died then and there, sure they would. That's what Mrs. Quinn said. Seems like little Rosie Flynn was keen to have her life—and Mammy weren't ready to give up her own time on God's good earth neither. Not then, anyway. Not until the summer come along with all its disease. Then her time came all right.

Mammy knew she was dying. She made Da promise not to send me and Rosie into the workhouse ('cause there's nothing worse than the House, sure there's not) and she made me promise to look after Little Sister and not to be stealin' nor visiting the penny gaffs nor gin palaces. “And you're not to be falling in with them girls who sell
other
things to the gentlemen, as well as their flowers. Ye know the girls I'm talking of, don't ye, Florrie.” I did know the type of girls she was talking about, and I swore on my life I'd never be fallin' in with them type, nor would Rosie, neither, when she was all grown up.

Before she died, Mammy gave me and Rosie a lace handkerchief each, what had been made by our granny back in Ireland. “Blessed with holy water, so they are,” she said, “and with the
shamrocks sewn on, for good luck.” One of the nicest things I ever seen, that lace handkerchief was. Mammy told us we'd always be safe and have food in our bellies and flowers for the sellin' if we kept those handkerchiefs with us.

“You're to mind Little Sister now, Florrie,” she said to me. “You'll be her mammy now. You mind her good 'n' proper, d'ye hear? Promise me ye'll mind her.”

“Yes, Mammy. I promise. I promise I'll mind her.”

“Ah, ye're a grand good girl, Florrie Flynn,” she said. “A grand good girl, so ye are.”

Those were the last words she spoke.

“M
A
'
S DEAD
,” D
A SAID
the next morning. “Go in and pay your respects. She's still warm.”

Made her sound like a loaf of bread, so he did.

Auntie May said it was a blessed release 'cause she'd suffered shockin' pain—“the cholera does that to you,” she said, “eats a person up from the inside and drives them crazy with the thirst.” Her lips and mouth were as blue as cornflowers when I finally found the courage to go and look at 'er, and then I took to bawlin'. She was my mammy, see, and she was dead and gone and me an' Little Sister were all alone. Da was still livin' and breathin'—more's the pity—but he didn't care tuppence for me an' Rosie. We might as well have been all alone, for all the use he'd be to us.

The blankets were put up again' the window and the broken mirror covered over. Mammy lay among us for a week, so she did. Lyin' there as we slept and ate our bread and pudding. I couldn't stop thinking about her dead body behind that old curtain. I kept a bunch of stocks 'specially, so as to mask the smell of her. I'm ashamed to say it, but I was pleased when she was carried out, feet first. Buried in a pauper's grave, so she is.

I tell Little Sister about Mammy all the time, about what I remember of her, 'cause Rosie never had the chance to see her alive—not so as she'd remember, anyway. And I've kept my promise—to look after Little Sister. Love 'er to pieces, so I do. Like my own baby she is. I sing the songs to her now, just like Mammy used to.

At early dawn I once had been

Where Lene's blue waters flow,

When summer bid the groves be green,

The lamp of light to glow—

As on by bower, and town and tower,

And wide-spread fields I stray,

I meet a maid in the greenwood shade,

At the dawning of the day.

She's all I have in the world. Don't know what I'd do if anything ever happened to her, sure I don't.

R
osemary Court ain't a good place to live, we all know that. Da says, “Beggars can't be choosers, 'specially not Irish ones.” And there's no place else for us to be livin', sure there's not, so I don't grumble no more. What's the use?

You get to the Court down a long, cobbled laneway, just off Drury Lane, next to the oil shop. It's where lots of the Irish live. We like to keep ourselves to ourselves, see—don't be mixing with the English flower girls, sure we don't.

The Court is full of little lanes and alleyways so that you'd want to be knowin' y'r way around so as not to get lost. It's awful dark there, too, down the narrow lanes—the houses nearly touchin' each other and blockin' out the light. Some of the women upstairs can share a pipe of baccer or a smoke with their
cousin across the street just by leanin' out the window. There are big, high walls either side of the Court. “Wide enough to fit a coffin through, and high enough to stop anyone escaping,” so the saying goes.

Da says there's twenty houses in our court and two families in each, “which makes about as many Irish as there are left in the whole of Sligo.” There's just the two houses at the end not lived in. They're nearest the busted drains—not a soul will live in 'em, not even the rats, the stink is so awful bad.

A family from Cork live at the front of the house—there's seven or eight of them—and we live in the room at the back: Da, me, Rosie, Auntie May (who suffers with her nerves), and my cousin, Kathleen. It's shockin' cold in that room. The walls are black with damp and the windows all cracked and rotten, letting in drafts that just about freeze your blood in the wintertime. The summers ain't much better, neither. We've lifted the floorboards at one side of the room, to use as a privy, and there's chickens roosting at the back of us. The smell from under those boards and from them chickens and the busted drains and the buckets of piss and rubbish that get thrown into the street at the back of the houses hangs about somethin' awful—it gets into y'r blood, into the back of y'r throat. In the summers it brings the bile up from y'r belly and the tears smartin' to your eyes. Even the Thames don't smell as bad, sure it don't. We pay two shillin' a week for the room. Da says the landlord should be paying
us
to live there, it's that bad.

We've no water in the house, just a standpipe in the middle of the Court that we all use. It comes up brown like mud. Sometimes me and Rosie take a drink from the pumps we use to wash the cresses down the markets—it's a bit better than the standpipe, but not much. Da says ye would never see brown water
in Ireland. “Clear as glass,” he says the water was back there. I think he's sometimes sad not to be livin' in Ireland still. He gets fierce angry when he's after taking the drink, and then he shouts, “Feck the robbin' bastards anyway.” When he gets all maudlin and has a belly full of ale, I know a beating's coming for sure, 'specially if we don't sell our flowers and don't bring any pennies home.

They say not to drink the water now anyway, not until it's been boiled, for fear of the cholera coming back again, but we don't have money for buying fuel for the fire, so we've to drink it as it is, cholera or not. Sometimes I find some dropped lumps of coal on the street or walnuts—walnuts is grand for burning when they're dried out—and I gather them up in my skirts, and I know Da'll be pleased, but it's still not enough for a proper fire. Da says he'll more 'n likely have to burn the rest of the furniture this winter, just to get a bit of warmth, like. We don't have much furniture left anyway. He took most of it to the dolly shop for a few shillings. There's just a stool now for a chair, a tattered old rug by the fireplace, a penny tea canister that we use as a candlestick for our light, and an old table what Da nicked from one of the other houses when old Mrs. Herrity died. It's on the pallets now, for legs.

Da sleeps behind the curtain, and I sleep with Little Sister on an old flock mattress in the corner of the room. I make up stories to tell Rosie, about travelin' on one of them fancy paddle steamers from the pier and heading off for a day trip to Gravesend. Rosie likes when I tell the stories to her; makes the nights less frightenin' she says. Poor little thing. Terrible afraid of the nighttime she is—says she don't like it when the shadows go out. Lord bless 'er. She can only see shadows, y'see, what with her eyes not working proper: dark shadows and a faint glow from the gas
lights, that's all Rosie can see. So, I keep her 'specially close to me at night and we say our prayers and sing the songs that Mammy used to sing to us.

We all know Rosemary Court is a bad, filthy place to live, but we've nowhere else to go, other than the workhouse. Even the cold nights and the street gangs and the bad men and the thieves is better than that. If they took me and Rosie to the House, I might never see 'er again, and that'd be worse than dyin', sure it would.