Silvertown: An East End family memoir

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

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.