A Plague on Both Your Houses Read online

  “Stay there!” was all he managed, unaware of the harshness with which he had blurted out the words. The children’s decibels increased if that were possible, and the sentence, such as it was, had been redundant. They were not going anywhere.

  He raced up to the roof. A woman Nash recognised as Muriel Matters was just about to bring another two children down the steps. Her assistant Hildegarde was trying to catch a child that was running round the roof like a whirling dervish. This was being made more difficult by an additional tot clinging to her skirt. Both children were attempting to scream but could barely get their breath to do so.

  No one other than Nash called the highly respected Montessori education pioneer by any name other than ‘Miss Matters’.

  “Mure, chuck me them two and go back and help Hild get the others down!” barked Nash. Mure did as she was told. Nash quickly placed the children with the others and returned to the roof. The two women now had a child each. Nash took hold of Muriel’s. The boy who had been running around the roof, was now thrashing his arms and legs about, making it difficult for the stooping petite young Hildegarde while she attempted to hand him over. Nash reached forward with his spare hand and grabbed the child roughly from behind via his shirt collar. The relieved young woman straightened and there was just a hint of a smile of thanks starting to cross her face when the bomb landed on the canal. She was no more than a couple of feet away from her colleague, Nash and the two children, but it was enough. A piece of shrapnel hit her square in the neck. The rest of them didn’t receive a scratch from the metal but were splattered with blood.

  Blood poured out of the woman’s severed jugular vein as she fell to the floor. She gurgled and spluttered her death throes. Nash immediately knew she was beyond help, so turned his back to shield the children from the horror and rushed them down the steps to join the others. He returned equally quickly to find the dying woman being cradled by her boss. Nash new it was hopeless but threw himself to the ground in any case and tried covering the wound with his hand. Blood poured over his fingers. The heart continued to pump blood over both him and Muriel for a while and then it ceased. She was gone. Nash leaned back and lay on the ground, his red hands holding the top of his head in despair. At that moment Ruby appeared in the doorway.

  ******

  It was strange. Ruby felt her head was both floating on air and also a ton weight. If she made any movement the weight toppled forward and her head started to spin. It reminded her of how she felt when she had been force-fed for the first time in Holloway prison. There was a racket going on outside. It was what must have awoken her. Where was she anyway? She daren’t move her head sideways. A Victorian pub’s tin ceiling gazed down, informing her that she was lying on the ground floor of the nursery. She listened intently to make sense of the din. What sounded like a firework went off. That would be the all-clear maroon. This was almost immediately confirmed by an all-clear bugle, no doubt being blown by a boy scout atop a bicycle. There was the clattering of what sounded like heavy buckets on the cobbles, a squeak of something metallic being turned, and then metal being scrapped along the ground. And above these noises came the sound of shouting from young women and a lone male voice. She recognised the latter. What the hell was her husband doing outside?

  Nash was shouting up at someone crouched awkwardly half out of a first floor window in the factory.

  “Stay there I’m telling you!”

  But his subject was not being as compliant as the tots. A panicking young man was threatening to jump.

  A dozen members of the Bow Women’s Fire Brigade, less than resplendent in the most unflattering garb of neck-to-ankle blue overall uniforms with loose fitting black waist belts, were buzzing around. One of them was attending an unconscious female factory worker, lying on the cobbles face down. The firewoman crouched down to flip the teenage girl over, then grabbed hold of her and completed a fire officer’s lift, carrying the youngster off matter-of-factly over her shoulder like a sack of coal, towards an arriving ambulance.

  Another firewoman had just busied herself using two special wrenches to unlock a water supply cover. A couple of her colleagues had then dragged the heavy metal cover a few feet so others could manhandle their hose contraption onto the water supply outlet. Other women were ferrying huge empty fire buckets in each hand.

  Nash had taken all this in, and was impressed. But it did not stop him from trying to take charge.

  “Don’t worry about the factory! Drop them buckets and get your catching thing over here sharp!”

  The women ignored this bystander to begin with, but his shout did cause one of them to look his way for a moment. She then followed his gaze.

  “Ethel, jumper!” shouted the fire officer.

  The senior firewoman quickly reacted to her colleague’s cry.

  “Everyone stop action! Get the Browder!”

  Every woman stopped what she was doing and rushed to their fire engine. Moments later they were assembling a Browder Life Safety Net. Within seconds the dozen women were running with it to get below the young man perched precariously above them. The Browder was built to optimise the chances of catching someone falling from a far greater height. It had a big enough circumference for twenty fire officers to get around. The dozen in situ were finding it an unwieldy beast.

  Nash attempted to take charge again, pointing at some of the women at one edge of the safety net.

  “You four move over the other side, I’ll take the strain here!”

  Chief fire officer Ethel Robson was used to having to deal with men who thought they knew best.

  “Sir, will you kindly step aside and leave this to the professionals,” she retorted.

  “Let him help! He’s got experience of this sort of thing!” It was a wobbly Ruby, holding uncertainly on to the door arch of the nursery.

  She was somewhat guilty of exaggeration. Shortly after they had met, Nash had thrown Ruby off the deck of the Titanic, into the last lifeboat which had already started to be lowered. If anyone had experience of catching people falling through the air, it was the poor officer in the lifeboat on whom Ruby had landed.

  The man above was now so precariously balanced on the window ledge that if he did not soon jump he would surely fall. The chief made an executive decision.

  “All right that man, get hold!”

  Nash did as he was told and the young man above took this as his cue. He thudded into the net with quite a bump but the net held.

  “Blimey, just like a Charlie Chase comedy!” commented a relieved Nash.

  “No laughing matter actually sir,” retorted fire officer Robson, before turning on her heel to shout further orders to her team to get back to the factory fire and its casualties.

  “Yeah all right! Christ, that’s the thanks I get!” said Nash, with a twinkle in his eye to show it was only mock affront.

  At which point the oldest of the other fire officers, a woman in her forties, entered the fray.

  “I thought it was more like Harold Lloyd myself. And you look like a Keystone Cop if you ask me.”

  This was said with rather too saucy a purse of the lips as far as Ruby was concerned. She left the safety of her door arch support and approached.

  “Well, no one did ask you did they? I’ll give you Harold Lloyd!” she said knowingly, before she made the mistake of nodding her head to the side to add emphasis as she told the firewoman to “hop it” back to her fire duties.

  Everything started to spin.

  The next time Ruby opened her eyes she was back staring at the nursery ceiling again.

  “That’s three times I’ve picked you up off the floor today. You going to stay down this time?” scolded Nash.

  The reproach in Nash’s voice was his way of showing concern for his wife’s health.

  “Thank you for your concern darling. Perhaps if a member of the fire brigade hadn’t bee
n inviting you to the pictures, when she should have been getting on with putting out a fire, I might not have ended up on the floor a third time, eh?”

  “People have different ways of dealing with this here war. One minute she was helping save a life, the next she was having a bit of fun. There’s no harm in that is there darling?”

  When Mr & Mrs Nash started calling each other ‘darling’, it was a sign that their conversation was not without tension. A conversation then ensued which involved several more ‘darling’ broadsides before Ruby’s foggy mind suddenly wondered what had happened on the roof. Nash explained.

  “The stairs to the roof had just been hit. They must have been like Swiss cheese. Your weight on ‘em finished ‘em off. You fell through to the stairs below. You’ve got a gash on your leg and some scratches, and you must have copped a bash on the nut in to the bargain. Dr Alice has already given you a quick once over and drugged you up. She’ll be back to see you proper soon enough. She’s got her hands full right now mind.”

  He had said the last sentence with such gravity in his voice that Ruby knew something else had happened. She waited to hear the worst. Nash went on to explain that Hildegarde was dead. The planes had flown off. The body was still up there. An ambulance was on its way. People would have to use a ladder up to the roof for the time being. Muriel was on her way to tell Hildegarde’s parents. The nursing staff had returned, as had some of the parents of the children, and things were under control.

  Ruby felt terrible for the dead young woman and her loved ones. Then a huge sense of relief that it hadn’t been her husband flooded through her, immediately followed by an accompanying sense of guilt.

  Chapter 2

  “The disease simply had its way. It came like a thief in the night and stole treasure.”

  George Newman, Ministry of Health Report

  on the Pandemic of Influenza

  Dr Alice Johnson’s career had been determined by something as mundane as an ear infection. She had been twelve years old when her mother had dragged her daughter from their home in a leafy upper working class part of Stepney Green to see the new ‘doctoress’ who had started work at the local children’s hospital in nearby Shadwell.

  Alice had not relished the prospect of being seen by a young woman doctor down in darkest Shadwell, where the poorest of the poor lived. What would a woman in such a place know about medical matters? And from what Alice had heard of the death rate of children admitted to the hospital, the answer to that question was not much.

  She was even less enthusiastic when, after some painful poking about in her ear, the woman had diagnosed something called mastoiditis and insisted she have an operation, injections and, worst of all, a stay in the hospital as an in-patient for some time while all this was going on.

  Couldn’t she just have some more ear drops like the Leman Street dispensary had given her last week? The no-nonsense doctor had asked her without any semblance of sarcasm if the drops had worked. Alice had to admit that they had not. She hated it when adults asked her questions they already knew the answer to. And more to the point, they knew the answer was not the one she wished to convey.

  By the time her thirteenth birthday had rolled around, the now healthy again young girl had decided she would become a medical practitioner, just like her doctor, heroine and torchbearer, Miss Elizabeth Garrett.

  The success of Miss Garrett had so horrified the British medical establishment that they had made it more difficult for further women to take her path, but a dozen years later Alice passed her final MD’s examination in more medical woman-friendly Switzerland. And she had been a doctor running her own practice in the East End, specialising in women and children for over three decades since.

  And now, with so many male doctors in France for the past four years, she felt that the war had, if nothing else, allowed women doctors to get a firmer toehold on the medical ladder. In her case this had manifested itself in her being appointed to a role whereby she was representing East End MDs in liaising with the local sanitary authorities, local medical officer of health, the chief medical officer of the London County Council, local education authorities and the Board of Education, regarding all matters medical.

  And very little social work went on in the East End without Sylvia Pankhurst and her assistants becoming involved in it. Thus Alice found herself in the unenviable position of being the middle woman, stuck in the no man’s land between the warring factions of the authorities and Miss Pankhurst’s impressive organisation. And the latter were not interested in excuses, explanations, logistics or anything else other than getting things done. They repeatedly asked the one word question so beloved of the enquiring minds of four year olds. ‘Why?’ And the problem was that, like the parents and teachers of young tots, Alice could rarely articulate an acceptable answer.

  It was particularly difficult when she had to deal with her friend and Miss Pankhurst acolyte, Ruby Nash. And today was going to be such an occasion because she had received a note from Ruby stating that she would like to see her local doctor. The summons was short and to the point.

  ‘Alice, the flu is taking hold round here. I’ve heard the trenches have it bad. Sylvia tells me Madrid in Spain has it worst of all. There are people dead there. Are people going to die round here? What can we do? I will be at the nursery to receive you on your visit this morning’.

  Ruby had clearly recovered from her fall. That was for sure. The problem was that as regards most of the comments in the note, Alice did not know what her friend was talking about. As usual, the Nash’s and Miss Pankhurst’s grapevines were way ahead of her own official sources of information.

  ******

  The Cost Price restaurant provided good nutritious meals. There were significant shortages in most food staples, which had led to huge queues at shops and galloping price inflation. Sylvia’s organisation, which was now a sizable war charity with multi donation and subscription income streams, was able to buy in bulk and therefore cheaply, and also use its contacts to get hold of not just food, but coal with which to cook. This was a commodity often unavailable through local shops or the coalman. Thus it was much cheaper, healthier and more palatable for people to eat at the restaurant rather than in their own home.

  The first news to greet the newly restored to health Ruby on arrival back at the restaurant was that Sylvia had taken to her bed. The number of recent influenza victims in the area had Ruby immediately make an assumption.

  “Flu?” she asked, concern verbally etched into the solitary word.

  No it wasn’t the flu. One of the kitchen workers informed her that Miss Pankhurst’s fragile digestive system had not been able to cope with the restaurant cook’s latest culinary attempt at ‘food reformist vegetarianism’, as she called it. Mrs Richmond had apparently taken it upon herself to add cooking to Sylvia’s vast portfolio of reform work.

  Sylvia had done more hunger strikes than most during the Suffragette years. And during the particularly stressful final two years of the struggle leading up to the outbreak of war, she had taken to adding thirst strikes to her prison repertoire, because the body deteriorated quicker so she was released from prison on health grounds that much more speedily. And now, four years later, her digestive system had still not recovered. At least, not enough to tackle dishes involving the cook’s new penchant for pulses.

  Ruby quickly popped round to see Sylvia. This great champion, who had single-handedly forced the Prime Minister’s hand in 1914, bringing him to the negotiation table for the first time, and whom, Ruby believed, but for war breaking out, would have won the vote for women immediately thereafter, had been laid low by dried beans. She lay on her bed, feeling extremely sorry for herself, clutching a hot water bottle to her stomach to ease the pain.

  The two women discussed the restaurant; the need for the government to extend countrywide the present Home Counties rationing system on all important foodstuffs; and t
hey also spoke of the flu. Sylvia had received further news from Spain that the illness there had reached epidemic proportions. Ever insightful, she had questioned whether Spain could be the only country suffering in such a way. She suspected it was highly likely that because it was not in the war, Spain was the one country that was allowing its newspapers to tell the truth about the disease. Meeting and chinwag over, Ruby returned to the restaurant with orders to get the cook under some sort of control.

  The raison d’etre of the restaurant was to provide four hundred good filling two-course meals per day for tuppence per adult, a penny for children. And each evening a pint of hot soup and a chunk of bread for another penny. But not everyone could afford even these prices. Aware of the stigma attached to charity, Ruby had come up with an ingenious method to help those who could not afford to pay for their meals. Tickets for the meal were purchased at the door and free tickets given to those without means. No one sitting at the tables was aware of whether the people beside them had bought their ticket or not.

  Ruby thought meat pudding, greens and potatoes, followed by a nice slice of spotted dick, or something along those lines, should be the dinner order of the day, every day. Serving dried bean concoctions was not in the script.

  As Ruby got within yards of the restaurant in Old Ford Road, she was met by would-be customers turning away in disgust and demanding their food ticket back from the girl on the door. Ruby caught the eye of some, who simply shook their heads at her and muttered things under their breath, some of which, unfortunately, Ruby heard. It was not the most constructive of criticism but certainly got to the point. Moments later Ruby had detected the root cause of the problem. A restaurant helper was stirring a huge cauldron, doing a reasonable impersonation of ye olde medieval crone knocking up a batch of eye of newt. Ruby looked over the woman’s shoulder and she too was less than impressed by what she saw.

  “Mrs Richmond!” she exclaimed across the kitchen. “You cannot serve unpeeled potatoes in the soup!”