John Walsh - Sunday at the Cross Bones

I felt a surge of indignation, such as I have seldom experienced, that children should have to live like this. For thirty years, I have campaigned ceaselessly to find homes for homeless boys and girls. But when I look at the homes in which the poorest are expected now to live, I could cordially wish them an early death and a roomy grave. God forgive me, it is not a Christian thought. Give me strength, dear Jesus, as thou wert strong in the garden of Gethsemane when faced with the knowledge of thy imminent suffering and death, although at least thou didst not have to put up with the foul stench that came from the great metal bins ranged along the far-left wall. I took just one step in their direction, then froze to see a score of furry bodies writhing and tumbling over each other in a frenzy to consume some vestigial fragments of pie on a cardboard tray.

I found number 142 on the fourth floor, a vertiginous climb. The door opened the thinnest of cracks. ‘I am looking for Emily Murray,’ I told a single eye, a thin nose and a twisted mouth, through the crack. ‘I am her friend, Mr Davidson. They tell me she has moved here. It is imperative I speak with her.’

‘What’s she done?’ said the twisted mouth.

‘She has done nothing wrong,’ I said. ‘She is not in any trouble. I wish to speak to her and satisfy myself that she is well.’

‘Who’re you?’

‘I told you. I am a clergyman. Mr Davidson is my name. Miss Murray is a protégée of mine. I have been directing her steps and finding her work and it is vital –’

‘We don’t need no sermons here,’ said the face, expressionlessly. ‘It’s about the last thing we need.’

‘Will you let me see Miss Murray?’ I practically shouted. The face betrayed no emotion and I could see it was about to close the door for good. I changed tack. ‘Let me in, and I will pay you ten shillings as – as an entrance fee.’

A hand appeared at chest level, or at least some very thin fingers, cupped together in a beggar’s cringe. ‘Let’s have it then,’ said the face.

‘Five now, and five when I have had satisfaction,’ I said.

‘Satis—Well, why didn’t you say that’s what you was after?’ She opened the door and I was admitted into a room perhaps the size of Mrs Parker’s kitchen in Vauxhall. The only light was a dim electric bulb, poking down from the low ceiling. One bed and two mattresses on the floor took up most of the space, although a table and two chairs appeared, half hidden behind the figures. For in the room, apart from myself and the lady doorkeeper, there were five women.

Foolishly, seeing an older lady in their midst, I took them to be a mother and her many daughters, a family in straitened circumstances. But a second look quickly disabused me. The women were of many ages ranging from a barely pubertal thirteen to a prematurely lined two-and-thirty. Their clothes shone with the kind of greasy patina that comes of much hand-wiping and no washing, and a rank odour of overhung lamb and citric perfume pervaded the room. The youngest girl was round-faced and ringletted, and looked up expectantly from her vantage point on one of the mattresses, like a little girl playing with her dog in a Pears soap advertisement; but she was dolled up in skirts and high-heeled shoes, quite unsuitably. The eldest, whom I had momentarily taken for the mother, sat at the table, still as a Maltese madonna, a shawl around her shoulders. Her dark eyes reflected the light from a single half-curtained window, but she would not look in my direction. The thin-faced woman who had opened the door stepped back into the shadows, gripping my five shillings in a fist. On the bed, a dark-haired girl in a dirty green blouse and a Negress in a white lace garment that accentuated her powerful amplitude, lay side by side against a bolster talking with an absorption from which no stranger’s arrival could distract them.

‘What’s he doing here?’ said a voice. ‘What you let him in for?’ and the sixth woman came up beside me. She had a pronounced nose, but a handsome enough face with a generous mouth, which opened to reveal surprisingly fine teeth. Her hair appeared red but may have been dyed with henna in the gypsy style.

‘He’s looking for Emily Murray,’ said the thin-faced one, ‘and then he said he was after satisfaction. So I thought –’ She glanced around the packed and fetid room, as if identifying several places where sexual activity might be conducted in comfort and privacy.

‘No, no, no!’ I said. The stupid girl. I repeated my quest and looked around the room with a sudden wild suspicion. Could one of these defeated slatterns be my dear Emily, whom I saved from the travails of sin at the hands of a procurer in Soho? Could Fate have so changed her features that I now did not recognise her?

‘… and so I am here,’ I concluded. ‘Can you help me?’ I drew closer. ‘Can it be that –’ I faltered – ‘that one of you ladies knows of her whereabouts?’

There was a silence apart from the chatterers on the bed (‘Well, ’e fuckin’ never dunit ter me ,’ one was remarking to the other).

‘In fact,’ I asked, ‘is one of you called … Flo?’

‘That’s me,’ said the red-haired termagant. ‘What’s it to you? An’ what’s a protterjay when it’s at home?’

‘But this is marvellous,’ I cried. ‘I am getting somewhere at last. You are a singer in the local Palace of Varieties, I believe?’

‘You what? Girls, did you ’ear that?’ She gazed around the room, taking in her venal sisterhood in a glance. ‘I’m a well-known singer down the Palais according to his lordship here.’

There was raucous laughter. ‘Yeah,’ said one, ‘me too. An’ I always sing much better with me knickers off.’

‘Does your sister come to see you perform?’ I persisted. ‘emily, I mean?’

‘Sister? She’s not my sister. I ain’t got no sister. I know her, she lives here, on and off, but that’s it. She’s not, like, family. Someone’s been telling porky pies, mister.’

‘She lives here? ’ I waved a hand that took in the squalor, the smell and the defeatedness that hung in the room like a miserable fog. I meant to imply, ‘How could anyone else fit in here?’ It came out as ‘How could anyone at all live here?’

‘She lives here when there’s room,’ said the thin woman from the shadows. ‘Been turning up and going again for three weeks. Stayed here last weekend when Katrin was off working, but she came back and Em had to go. Any more’n six, and the landlords complain the privy’ll break down and they threaten to boot us all out, even though the rent’s paid regular.’

‘But where would she have gone when there was no room for her?’ I cried.

The thin woman pursed her lips and blew a little puff of air between them. The henna-haired one, Flo, said, ‘Where’d you think? She went on the street. Probably met a fancy gent with one of them new Bentleys, who took her back to his place and fed her sherry and cake and tucked her up nice with a little story.’

The others laughed again. Flo seemed to be the humorist in this sorry sorority.

‘And if she met no fancy gent?’ I asked with some asperity. ‘What would have befallen her?’

The thin woman puffed her cheeks out again. ‘She’ll take her chances. We all take our chances.’ She raised her fist and jingled the five shillings within. ‘You going now? Some of us have to get on. If she calls, we’ll say you was asking for her.’

I could not wait to depart from that Calcuttan hole. ‘Please take this note and make sure she receives it,’ I said, writing my address and the Vauxhall telephone number. ‘It is vitally important that I speak with her soon. Here is five shillings more for you – and there will be a substantial cash reward if you bring us together. Do you understand?’