If Whitechapel was the worst of London, the thirty lanes and courts of the Nichol were the worst of Whitechapel. The parishes of these parts didn’t have shitrakers, because tenants couldn’t pay, and nor could we afford lighting, so the streets were deep in foul-smelling rubbish and swilling with blood and urine from the tanneries and abattoirs. At night it was a lawless, pitch-black wilderness. The terraced buildings were dry and brittle on the outside and dank and swollen inside. They were crammed to bursting: a single terrace would have sixty or seventy residents, with every adult paying an extortionate rent as a percentage of their pathetic earnings. Many had more than one family sharing a room, with only a hung sheet to separate them. Adults and children slept naked like fish in a bucket; babies were made and waste was excreted all in the same room. Rotten staircases and ceilings collapsed and the wallpaper rippled with vermin. Some lived in inches of filthy water in the flooded cellars, breathing in bacteria and disease. Everywhere stank, thick with the stench of sweat and shit and whatever odour came with the trade of that court’s inhabitants: phosphorus, smoked fish, meat. Windows were either black with coal dust or broken and patched up with sacking or newspaper. Not that anyone ever opened them, as the reek from outside was worse. A few years living like that and our lungs never recovered. Little wonder that reaching thirty years of age was considered an achievement.
Strange to say, but the putrid terraces of the Nichol and the other Whitechapel slums were the most profitable in London. So many tenants, and so few improvements ever made. The better classes bemoaned our depravity and fecklessness and yet the buildings were owned by the very pontificating politicians, clergymen and lawmakers that professed to serve those they so despised. Such was the bleak existence I considered myself fortunate to have escaped. I could never be sure what was a real memory or what my imagination had created, but I knew some things, because my grandfather told me, although I didn’t dare utter a single word to a soul about my mother, not until much later. Born a bastard, I was lucky to be taken in by my grandparents.
I have no memory of my father and not a clue what type of man he was. My grandmother said he was a gypsy, or a hawker or a navvy, whatever she felt would shame me into obedience; either way, he was not a good man. If anyone ever asked how I came to live with my grandparents, I was taught to say that my parents had died of scarlet fever. I was trained to repeat it, like a mynah bird, and no polite person ever asked more than that.
When my grandmother died, I was left her modest house in Reading with the perennial rat problem, and a small sum of money. Her solicitor, Mr Radcliffe, did honestly by me, but the legacy was not enough to live on and I needed an income, so I became a nurse. I was after a means to support myself and a skilled profession, which was how I found myself back in Whitechapel once again, this time at the London Hospital. We nurses did not live in the slum terraces of the Nichol, but our patients did. Caring for them was not without its dangers, as I was to discover. It was common to lose nurses during an epidemic, for we spent our lives inches from infection with little protection other than our own good practices in hygiene. Also, our patients could be violent.
I hadn’t envisaged for a second being swept up in what I was to find at the London. I met Aisling, and for a while was living a life I had no idea existed let alone dared imagine. I was happy. It is a cruel trick that God made me learn such a lesson and then had it end so quickly. I certainly hadn’t intended to find a husband, although many women came to nursing with that in mind, much to Matron’s annoyance. She tried to sift out the starry-eyed nymphs on the hunt for wounded officers, but that was not in my plan.
Unless you come from wealth in England, you can only float above the fate of the poor, mere inches away from it yourself. You are on your own in this world; I accept that. It’s not to say there isn’t money rolling about and lots of it; it just stays in the same old families. The trick is to take some for yourself, and to do that you must be willing to play outside the rules. I have observed that life treats you more fairly if you come from a little money.
You must play the hand you are dealt and take the opportunities that present themselves, and present himself Dr Thomas Lancaster did. Who was I to reject God’s plan?
5
I was engaged in teaching paying probationers
