On Mother Brown's Doorstep
Read On Mother Brown's Doorstep Online
Authors: Mary Jane Staples
The big event of the Walworth year was to be the wedding of Sammy Adams, King of Camberwell, to Miss Susie Brown. Everyone was looking forward to it, and Susie was particularly overjoyed when her soldier brother suddenly turned up on leave from service in India in time for the approaching ’knees-up’. The reason for Will’s extended leave wasn’t so good, for bad health had struck him and he didn’t know how long the army would keep him, or how he could find a civvy job in the slump of the 20s. When he – literally – picked Annie Ford up off the pavement in King and Queen Street, his worries were compounded, for Annie was a bright, brave, personable young woman and Will knew that if he wasn’t careful he’d find himself falling in love.
And over Walworth hung a greater anxiety – the mystery of three young girls missing from their homes – a mystery that was to draw closer and closer to the Adams and Brown families, and finally culminate – along with Will’s personal problems – on the night of the wedding.
ON
MOTHER BROWN’S
DOORSTEP
Mary Jane Staples
To Wendy and Jeffery
THE INCIDENT
It was in December, 1924, when a ward sister in a London hospital noticed that the door of a drugs cupboard had been neatly forced open. A large bottle of chloroform, new and unused, with its glass stopper still sealed, was missing. She reported the matter immediately to the matron. The police were called in to investigate the theft. They talked to all members of the staff and to walking patients. They made enquiries among out-patients, and checked up on visitors known to have entered the hospital on the day in question. They wondered, of course, why the thief should want chloroform. It brought them eventually to the reasonable assumption that the person was an outsider, a clever crook who had done his homework and had lifted the chloroform with the intention of using it to put prospective victims to sleep.
That theory looked remarkably like fact when, a month later in January, 1925, a Lewisham jeweller entered a police station in what appeared to be a state of inebriation. He reported having been chloroformed by a heavily masked man who came into his shop just as he was about to close up. When he recovered consciousness some time later, his takings for the day were missing. The thief left no fingerprints and had not yet been traced.
Among other things occupying the attention of the police in 1925 was the usual list of missing persons. The list included three young girls. Ivy Connor of Bermondsey had disappeared in February, Mary Wallace of Rotherhithe in October, and Amy Charles of the Old Kent
Road in December. Their disappearances had been investigated without success and their case files were still open.
THE MARCH DAY
was brilliant, the air crisp, the sun sharpening the sooty chimneys and rooftops of Walworth. Fog might arrive overnight and blanket London tomorrow, but today the weather made people feel cheerful and lively. It was 1926, the year of the Bright Young Things, with flappers showing their legs in short skirts, smoking cigarettes in long holders, and being jawed at by the law for the wildness of their ways. Some responded by flinging their arms around upbraiding bobbies and kissing them. The law and the Church and Mother Grundy were collectively shocked, of course.
In Walworth’s East Street market, some women shoppers were wearing their best hats to celebrate the arrival of the sun. William Edward Brown, in the khaki uniform of the East Surreys, took in the old familiar scene with a sense of nostalgia. He could not count the number of times he had ducked and dived under stalls as a boy, looking for discarded fruit such as specked apples or slightly pulpy oranges. His family had been bitterly hard-up during the post-war years, but his mum had never lost her smile and his dad had never let go of hope.
William was known as Will. He had kicked against being called Willy and fought street kids who had tried to label him so. Entering the Army as a drummer boy at the age of fifteen in 1921, he sailed with his East Surrey battalion for service in India in 1922, and during the next four years he had come to know that India, with its teeming cities, its many religions, its cultural variations
and
its extraordinary mixture of peoples, was something he’d need a lifetime to understand. But he hadn’t done so badly; he’d got along with the Indian regiments of the British Army. Indian soldiers served with pride and distinction alongside the British, particularly in the flare-ups on the North-West Frontier.
Will reached the rank of full corporal when he was only nineteen, having distinguished himself in a bloody battle against the Pathans. Subsequently, however, something went wrong with his chest. He had moments when he found it difficult to breathe. His commanding officer ordered him to go sick, and he finished up in hospital in Poona. Conditions were better there, the air was finer and not laden with sultry heat. But as soon as he was discharged and rejoined the battalion in Delhi, his chest began to complain again. He was invalided home and given three months leave, during the course of which he was to attend a London chest hospital once a week. He’d been home just over two weeks, had visited the hospital twice and heard the worrying word asthma mentioned, although oddly enough smoky old Walworth seemed to be doing him good. He hadn’t had one attack since arriving home.
He was enjoying his reunion with old Walworth and with his family, getting to know brother Freddy and sisters Sally and Susie all over again. Well, everyone was five years older. The whole family had gone barmy when he walked in on them with three months leave in the bag. His sisters fell on him, and Susie went all moist-eyed because he would be able to attend her wedding three weeks from now. The man in question was Sammy Adams, reputed to be Southwark’s most well-known businessman. Will had felt immediate pride in Susie. At twenty-one she’d grown into a picture postcard beauty. Besides which, she was a typical flapper in her 1926 outfits. She took him as soon as
she
could to meet Sammy and all the Adams family, showing him off as her soldier brother, which went down well with Boots, Sammy’s eldest brother. Boots had fought with the West Kents in France and Flanders during the Great War. He asked Will what the pay was like now. Lousy, said Will, but the grub’s free. Same old tight-fisted Army Paymaster, said Boots, and what are the socks like? I think I’ve been wearing your leftovers, said Will. Boots asked if they’d got darned toes. Darned heels as well, said Will. Yes, they’re mine, said Boots.
Susie was as happy as a lark about everything, and head over heels as well.
‘Ain’t I a lucky girl, Will?’ she said in the old way.
‘Not as lucky as Sammy,’ said Will.
‘But I wasn’t anybody when I first met Sammy.’
‘Well, you’re somebody now,’ said Will, ‘and Sammy knows it. You hold on to that, Susie, you need to be on top with a bloke like him.’
‘I am on top,’ laughed Susie.
‘Are you?’
‘All the time,’ said Susie. ‘Mind, Sammy doesn’t know it.’
Will didn’t think his parents had changed much. His mum was still plump and placid, his dad still wiry and cheerful, and making light of the gammy leg he’d brought out of the trenches. He thought the Army had done a lot for Will, and said so. Done me brown, said Will. At which his mum said she’d never seen anyone more brown, then asked exactly what it was he’d got to go to the hospital for each week. Just to check up on the nurses, said Will. Well, I never heard the likes of that before, said his mum, coming all the way home from India to see if the hospital nurses are behaving themselves. That can’t be right, she said. I expect Will’s got a bit of India in his system, said
Mr
Brown, and the hospital’s got to get it out of him. There’s funny things that can get into a soldier in India. Still, there must be nice things as well, said fourteen-year-old Sally, because they’ve made our Will all brown and handsome. I bet the girls will all go potty about him. I’d like some of that, said Will.
After his second visit to the hospital, Will let his family know that all he’d got was a little touch of asthma. Freddy asked what asthma was. Will said something like a cold on the chest.
‘That’s a blessin’,’ said Mrs Brown, ‘I thought it might be one of them Chinese diseases like gangrene.’
‘Mum, ’ow can you catch a Chinese disease in India?’ asked Sally.
‘What’s gangrene?’ asked Freddy.
‘Nasty,’ said Mr Brown.
‘I think I’ll buy you some thick woolly vests while you’re ’ome, Will,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘They’ll keep your chest warm.’
‘Make it itch as well,’ said Will.
‘What’s gangrene?’ asked Freddy.
‘It’s what you get if your leg falls off and the doctors don’t put the right kind of ointment on it,’ said Susie.
‘I ain’t fallin’ for that,’ said Freddy. ‘I mean what’s the use of puttin’ ointment on a leg that’s fell off? I ain’t daft, yer know, Susie.’
‘Not much,’ said Sally.
‘And only now and again,’ said Susie.
‘There y’ar, Will,’ said Freddy, ‘you can see what I ’ave to put up with from me skin-and-blisters. They’ll give me a complaint one day, and I’ll ’ave to come to the hospital with you.’
‘Good idea, Freddy,’ said Will, ‘you can help me check up on the nurses.’
‘Cor, I fancy that,’ said Freddy.
Will, his thoughts on his family, came out of the market and entered King and Queen Street. Kids just out of school were racing towards East Street. It was a thing with some Walworth kids to go to the market on their way home from school, and to do some scrumping for apples under the fruit stalls.
Walking to Browning Street, he saw a woman approaching, shopping bag in her hand and her best Sunday hat on.
‘’Ello, soldier, ain’t another war on, is there?’
‘Not here,’ said Will.
‘Thank gawd for that, I ain’t got over the last one yet.’
‘Never mind,’ said Will, ‘your titfer’s in the pink.’
‘Me ’at?’ said the woman. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Looks like spring,’ said Will. ‘I like it.’
‘Fancy me, do yer, soldier?’ twinkled the woman.
‘Yes, I’ll pop round on Sunday,’ said Will.
‘Me old man’ll chop yer legs orf.’
‘So he should,’ said Will, ‘that’s what husbands are for.’
The woman laughed and went on. Will continued towards Browning Street. A boy wheeling a home-made pushcart at a run caught him up and passed him. Round the corner came a girl. The pushcart collided with her, and down she went with an involuntary yell.
‘Oh, crikey,’ gasped the boy, a lad about nine.
‘Hard luck,’ said Will to the girl, and stooped to help her up. Winded, she turned on her back and gazed up at him. She saw the tanned face of a soldier under a peaked cap, and concerned eyes. Will saw a young lady with bobbed jet-black hair clasped by a knitted blue hat with a
bobble
. Her frock was rucked, her black lisle stockings showing to her knees. Her grey eyes looked cross. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.
‘Did you knock me over?’
‘Not me,’ said Will.
‘Me pushcart done it,’ said the boy.
‘You were lookin’ at me,’ said the girl to Will in an accusing way. She sat up. She winced and rubbed her right knee. She winced again. ‘Now look what’s ’appened, I’ve hurt me knee.’
‘Sorry about that,’ said Will. ‘Let’s try getting you up.’
‘What, on one leg?’ she said spiritedly. ‘I’ll look daft.’
‘Oh, ’elp,’ said the boy, ‘you ain’t broke yer leg, ’ave yer?’
‘I’d better not have,’ said the girl, touching her knee gingerly, ‘or me dad’ll push both your faces in.’
A woman came across from the other side of the street. She looked like one of Walworth’s numerous motherly bodies.
‘’Ere, young man,’ she said to Will, ‘what’s that gel doin’ on the pavement?’
‘She’s bumped her knee,’ said Will.
‘Excuse me, if you don’t mind,’ said the girl, ‘it was the other way about.’
‘Is it ’urting?’ asked the motherly body.
‘Oh, no,’ said the girl, ‘it’s just swellin’ up, missus, that’s all.’ She was cross. She ought to be home by now, getting tea for her brother and sisters.