Saucy Jacky

Three – George Yard

Three – George YardMy lodging was south of, but relatively near to, London Hospital. I only mention it to make it plain that, with Emma Smith four months dead yet unaccountably again on my mind, though I lived close by, I did not feel like going home. When I left work, I needed air. I needed to walk and to think.

In order to truly understand this tale, it must be understood that upon stepping outside… I did not step into a romantic Victorian London, with Big Ben glowing magisterially above Parliament down river from a fog-shrouded Tower Bridge. Those did exist, in their own form, but west of there. West of there. I did not hail a satin covered hansom or a polished black hardwood coach with a thick-coated, thick-tongued cockney at the whip steering a snorting team of beautifully coiffed horses across rain-swept cobblestone streets. Those did exist, in their own way, but west of there. Well west of there. I did not enter beside high-hatted toffs into gay music halls, or arm-in-arm with respectable ladies into legitimate theatres or fine restaurants. I didn't go there. I didn't make faces at the rigid guards standing tall before Buck-place. I didn't tip my cap at the crisp, round-helmeted bobbies standing in the bright halos of gaslight on every street corner. Any of that might have taken place in London of 1888 but, if it did, it would happen in the City and in the West End. Well west of there.

This was the East End. I left London Hospital, walking west – through the East End.

Gay laughter was in short supply even in the entertaining streets of the East End. Hoots of derision and the cheers that followed the act of having put one over on someone, those were the sounds likely to be heard. There were few music halls (and those by the docks), no tapping feet, no cheering crowds. Joy, rarely expressed, came in the form of too-loud drunken bleats. There was no champagne, only cheap wine. There was no best bitter, only cheap gin and cheaper beer. Instead of the sounds of wafting West End gaiety, the streets here were filled with the plonks and plinks of tinny pianos, one after another, escaping the doors and windows of one drab public house after another. The sounds of carousing, arguing, and fighting were the music of the crowded pubs in the East End.

There, square-jawed constables who'd missed a button on their uniform coat, or skipped a day in shining their boots, traveled the thin poorly lit streets (one lamp for every four in the West End) and the unlit back alleys in patrols of two (or in some streets of Spitalfields, four), jamming their lanterns in gin-clouded eyes demanding, “Here now, who do you think you're talking to?” or “Get out of it!” as they slammed a boot up an arse or a hand against the back of a head.

There were plenty of cabmen (or carmen as they're truly called) in the streets of the East End. But most were on foot, walking from their lodgings to work, or from their work back home again. Their cabs, hansoms, and coaches were owned by someone else and stabled elsewhere, mostly in the city. There were wagons and carts in the streets, plenty of them, pulled by tired work horses and over-tired nags; filled, not with toffs in evening dress, but with the fruits of labour, the products of the wharfs, the fields, the furriers. There were barrows, barrows by the hundreds, pushed by hand by the fishmongers, the costermongers, the greengrocers and fruiterers, the butchers, the bakers, and the trinket peddlers.

By day the streets were filled with labourers, salesmen, customers, and children; dirty rag-wearing children everywhere. By night the streets of the East End emptied until only the criminals, the coppers, the drunks without doss money, and the whores remained. And the streets were dark.

So, needing to think, I headed west – through the East End. I followed the Whitechapel Road south and further west. I passed the workhouse, then the County Court, on my right. As I said, I'd been feeling out of sorts for some time and that night was no exception. The sights and sounds of dirty Whitechapel hit me like never before, adding to my confusion.

London was the largest and wealthiest city on earth, the heart of the British empire; a fact incomprehensible to anyone walking the streets of the East End in those early morning hours. There before me on the curb, barely touched by the amber nimbus of a gas lamp above, sat a grand example; an emaciated Jew by his looks, dark and swarthy, dirty and unkempt, muttering to himself (talking to voices?) in the foreign language of the Russian or the Pole. It was impossible to tell which as it was under his breath. Clearly he suffered as the result of years of indulgence in solitary vices. While he carried on his insane conversation, he picked wet bits of bread from the gutter and devoured them ravenously. I walked on, wordlessly, leaving him to his madness. But I couldn't forget him. He was a symbol of life around him in that filthy slum. Violence, drunken brawls, robberies, deprivation, poverty, and hardship were everywhere.

The driving forces behind all? Obviously… I was certain. Emma Smith had made it clear. They were the combination of cheap alcohol and women of low character.

Headed west on the Whitechapel High, I paused again at the corner of a northbound side street and stared up through the gloom at the sign overhead. I looked again and, this time, really took it in. Osborn Street. Another crashing wave of thoughts overtook me. Osborn Street.

The attack on Emma Smith had taken place on Osborn Street, there in Whitechapel. One block up, past the County Court, at the corner of Osborn and Wentworth. Four months had passed yet, suddenly, more fiercely even than it had earlier in the night, it all came back. Easter. Osborn Street. Emma Smith, a drunken w***e bringing down the whole East End.

That's what must be understood! The affect her kind had on society, the city, the people. Cor, my landlady, had gone on about it endlessly! True, she could never get enough of colourful or infamous street gossip, with tragedy and violence being particular favorites of hers, but she wasn't wrong. And Emma Smith had already been heavy on my mind. Now again, four months on, I stood at the foot of Osborn Street – where it began.

I reached into my coat; felt the long bladed knife I'd borrowed from hospital. Still there. I slipped my hand into my pocket (ignoring the string, chalk, and matches I always carried) and touched my short, sturdy penknife. Where it belonged. I had everything a boy could need. Isn't that how my vicious mother would have said it, breathing beer all over me? You have everything a boy could need!

Forgive me. I'm having trouble keeping my focus as I tell it.

I was having the same difficulty that night as well. Standing there on Osborn Street, it had suddenly all become too much. Overwhelmed! Yes, I was overwhelmed. I needed to get away; to go somewhere quiet. Some place I could be alone with my thoughts. Someplace where I might put my thoughts in order. I had to get away from Osborn Street. I hurried on another short block down the Whitechapel High. Then I slipped through a covered archway, into a dark and narrow, seemingly out of the way place… I paused, backtracked several steps to find and read the sign. George Yard.

I found myself suddenly entering a quiet dark little thoroughfare called George Yard. I needed to sit down. I wanted to have a think by myself.

I hadn't been there long, hadn't begun to do the thinking I'd intended, when I was startled by the click-click-clicking footsteps of someone approaching quickly from the north; the Wentworth Street entrance. I leaned back into the shadows but continued to stare in the direction of the sound as the approaching figure took shape. It was a woman, all alone.

As she drew nearer, I made her out… to be young, pretty, carrying a bag of what I guessed to be groceries in her arms. She stopped before the entrance to the residential George Yard Buildings and slipped a hand inside her pocket. Searching for a latch key? This she did in the dark for neither of the two gas lamps at the top of the stairs, above the building entrance, were alight. She seemed indifferent to the dark, at home; suggesting a tenant, well-used to the conditions. She also seemed ignorant of my presence; completely unaware how near to her I was. I could have reached out and touched her. I could have… done anything to her. But… she was respectable-looking.

She didn't require cleaning. Why would I touch her?

It didn't matter. Key in hand, she climbed the wide staircase and disappeared inside. I took a needed breath. But I felt nothing. My hands shook, my heart was trotting, I admit that. But I felt nothing. I had to think.

But it wasn't my night to think. It was destined to be my night to act. For, in no time at all, came another interruption. It was a couple this time, a man and a woman headed my way, also from the north entrance. She was short, plump, middle-aged. (She might well have been my mother.) He, of all things, was a soldier of the Grenadier Guards. No sooner did I make them out in the gloom than I was angry with both. He ought to have been resplendent in his bright red uniform, but he wasn't at all. No! He was staggering drunk; an embarrassment to Queen and country. The woman seemed to have all she could do to hold him upright as they came deeper into the Yard. She was an obvious women of the streets, drunk and immoral, nothing at all respectable about her. He should not have been with her. She should not have lured a man in his cups away from duty and decency.

They stopped in roughly the same spot as the respectable woman moments before; near me. I leaned further back into the shadows not to be found out. I slowed my breathing not to be heard. Still, I remained near enough I could have touched either one – and neither knew I was there.

“C'mon, love,” the woman said, pushing her arm through his and assisting him up the wide stone staircase, the same used by the good woman, to the dark entrance to George Yard Buildings. But they did not enter. I watched from below in rapt attention.

I heard a church bell sometime round then, I'm not sure which church or from which direction, St Mary Matfelon or Christ Church maybe? I don't know my churches as I should. I'm not sure when, either. It's a bit confused in my head. Two gongs it was, whenever I heard it. It had to have been, or only just gone, 2:00 am.

What I knew was what was happening a few steps above my dark hiding place. The drink sodden soldier and the woman of the street struck their bargain. They agreed upon a price, then moved to carry out their evil compact. He struggled to open his belt and drop his trousers. She fell back, standing, against the cold bricks of the entrance wall and hoisted up her skirt and petticoats. She burbled something at him, encouraging him to get the deed started. He teetered, with his trousers round his ankles, complaining he wasn't ready. She huffed impatiently and reached out to help him.

That's when something went wrong.

It might have been a sudden attack of conscience on the part of the soldier, but I doubt it. Most likely it was on account of his severe inebriation. Whatever the cause, the fellow was not able to… He could not perform the vile act of coupling which he'd commissioned.

That difficulty, in turn, caused the woman to giggle. A sickening drunken giggle. Then she dropped her skirts and she laughed in his face. The soldier ought not to have been there, involved in such a ridiculous transaction. Still part of me stood with him. To be unable to function was enraging; to be ridiculed for it was devastating. It must have been. Then, as if she hadn't done injury enough, the woman demanded her money; the amount they'd negotiated.

The soldier refused payment, of course. When she objected he threatened her with violence. I can't say I blamed him. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right, the way she'd treated him; laughing in his face, demanding payment without fulfilling her wretched service. It was no way to treat a member of Her Majesty's Grenadier Guards. It was no way to treat a man. Wasn't bad enough she spread her muck about the city.

I found myself joining the soldier in his rage. In my mind, at that moment, the woman stopped being a woman. She became nothing but a common street w***e. She was the problem with those filthy city streets. She was Emma Smith all over again. The more I thought of her, the more furious I grew.