As the Crow Flies

CHAPTER

1

“I don’t offer you these for tuppence,” my granpa would shout, holding up a cabbage in both hands, “I don’t offer ‘em for a penny, not even a ha’penny. No, I’ll give ’em away for a farthin’.”

Those were the first words I can remember. Even before I had learned to walk, my eldest sister used to dump me in an orange box on the pavement next to Granpa’s pitch just to be sure I could start my apprenticeship early.

“Only stakin’ ’is claim,” Granpa used to tell the customers as he pointed at me in the wooden box. In truth, the first word I ever spoke was “Granpa,” the second “farthing,” and I could repeat his whole sales patter word for word by my third birthday. Not that any of my family could be that certain of the exact day on which I was born, on account of the fact that my old man had spent the night in jail and my mother had died even before I drew breath. Granpa thought it could well have been a Saturday, felt it most likely the month had been January, was confident the year was 1900, and knew it was in the reign of Queen Victoria. So we settled on Saturday, 20 January 1900.

I never knew my mother because, as I explained, she died on the day I was born. “Childbirth,” our local priest called it, but I didn’t really understand what he was on about until several years later when I came up against the problem again. Father O’Malley never stopped telling me that she was a saint if ever he’d seen one. My father—who couldn’t have been described as a saint by anyone—worked on the docks by day, lived in the pub at night and came home in the early morning because it was the only pla

ce he could fall asleep without being disturbed.

The rest of my family was made up of three sisters—Sal, the eldest, who was five and knew when she was born because it was in the middle of the night and had kept the old man awake; Grace who was three and didn’t cause anyone to lose sleep; and redheaded Kitty who was eighteen months and never stopped bawling.

The head of the family was Granpa Charlie, who I was named after. He slept in his own room on the ground floor of our home in Whitechapel Road, not only because he was the oldest but because he paid the rent always. The rest of us were herded all together in the room opposite. We had two other rooms on the ground floor, a sort of kitchen and what most people would have called a large cupboard, but which Grace liked to describe as the parlor.

There was a lavatory in the garden—no grass—which we shared with an Irish family who lived on the floor above us. They always seemed to go at three o’clock in the morning.

Granpa—who was a costermonger by trade—worked the pitch on the corner of Whitechapel Road. Once I was able to escape from my orange box and ferret around among the other barrows I quickly discovered that he was reckoned by the locals to be the finest trader in the East End.

My dad, who as I have already told you was a docker by trade, never seemed to take that much interest in any of us and though he could sometimes earn as much as a pound a week, the money always seemed to end up in the Black Bull, where it was spent on pint after pint of ale and gambled away on games of cribbage or dominoes in the company of our next-door neighbor, Bert Shorrocks, a man who never seemed to speak, just grunt.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for Granpa I wouldn’t even have been made to attend the local elementary school in Jubilee Street, and “attend” was the right word, because I didn’t do a lot once I’d got there, other than bang the lid of my little desk and occasionally pull the pigtails of “Posh Porky,” the girl who sat in front of me. Her real name was Rebecca Salmon and she was the daughter of Dan Salmon who owned the baker’s shop on the corner of Brick Lane. Posh Porky knew exactly when and where she was born and never stopped reminding us all that she was nearly a year younger than anyone else in the class.

I couldn’t wait for the bell to ring at four in the afternoon when class would end and I could bang my lid for the last time before running all the way down the Whitechapel Road to help out on the barrow.

On Saturdays as a special treat Granpa would allow me to go along with him to the early morning market in Covent Garden, where he would select the fruit and vegetables that we would later sell from his pitch, just opposite Mr. Salmon’s and Dunkley’s, the fish and chippy that stood next to the baker’s.

Although I couldn’t wait to leave school once and for all so I could join Granpa permanently, if I ever played truant for as much as an hour he wouldn’t take me to watch West Ham, our local soccer team, on Saturday afternoon or, worse, he’d stop me selling on the barrow in the morning.

“I ’oped you’d grow up to be more like Rebecca Salmon,” he used to say. “That girl will go a long way—”

“The further the better,” I would tell him, but he never laughed, just reminded me that she was always top in every subject.

“’Cept ’rithmetic,” I replied with bravado, “where I beat her silly.” You see, I could do any sum in my head that Rebecca Salmon had to write out in longhand; it used to drive her potty.

My father never visited Jubilee Street Elementary in all the years I was there, but Granpa used to pop along at least once a term and have a word with Mr. Cartwright my teacher. Mr. Cartwright told Granpa that with my head for figures I could end up an accountant or a clerk. He once said that he might even be able to “find me a position in the City.” Which was a waste of time really, because all I wanted to do was join Granpa on the barrow.

I was seven before I worked out that the name down the side of Granpa’s barrow—“Charlie Trumper, the honest trader, founded in 1823”—was the same as mine. Dad’s first name was George, and he had already made it clear on several occasions that when Granpa retired he had no intention of taking over from him as he didn’t want to leave his mates on the docks.

I couldn’t have been more pleased by his decision, and told Granpa that when I finally took over the barrow, we wouldn’t even have to change the name.

Granpa just groaned and said, “I don’t want you to end up workin’ in the East End, young ’un. You’re far too good to be a barrow boy for the rest of your life.” It made me sad to hear him speak like that; he didn’t seem to understand that was all I wanted to do.

School dragged on for month after month, year after year, with Rebecca Salmon going up to collect prize after prize on Speech Day. What made the annual gathering even worse was we always had to listen to her recite the Twenty-third Psalm, standing up there on the stage in her white dress, white socks, black shoes. She even had a white bow in her long black hair.

“And I expect she wears a new pair of knickers every day,” little Kitty whispered in my ear.

“And I’ll bet you a guinea to a farthin’ she’s still a virgin,” said Sal.

I burst out laughing because all the costermongers in the Whitechapel Road always did whenever they heard that word, although I admit that at the time I didn’t have a clue what a virgin was. Granpa told me to “shhh” and didn’t smile again until I went up to get the arithmetic prize, a box of colored crayons that were damned-all use to anyone. Still, it was them or a book.

Granpa clapped so loud as I returned to my place that some of the mums looked round and smiled, which made the old fellow even more determined to see that I stayed on at school until I was fourteen.

By the time I was ten, Granpa allowed me to lay out the morning wares on the barrow before going off to school for the day. Potatoes on the front, greens in the middle and soft fruits at the back was his golden rule.

“Never let ’em touch the fruit until they’ve ’anded over their money,” he used to say. “’Ard to bruise a tato, but even ’arder to sell a bunch of grapes that’s been picked up and dropped a few times.”

By the age of eleven I was collecting the money from the customers and handing them the change they were due. That’s when I first learned about palming. Sometimes, after I’d given them back their money, the customers would open the palm of their hand and I would discover that one of the coins I had passed over had suddenly disappeared so I ended up having to give them even more bees and honey. I lost Granpa quite a bit of our weekly profit that way, until he taught me to say, “Tuppence change, Mrs. Smith,” then hold up the coins for all to see before handing them over.

By twelve, I had learned how to bargain with the suppliers at Covent Garden while displaying a poker face, later to sell the same produce to the customers back in Whitechapel with a grin that stretched from ear to ear. I also discovered that Granpa used to switch suppliers regularly, “just to be sure no one takes me for granted.”

By thirteen, I had become his eyes and ears as I already knew the name of every worthwhile trader of fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden. I quickly sussed out which sellers just piled good fruit on top of bad, which dealers would attempt to hide a bruised apple and which suppliers would always try to short-measure you. Most important of all, back on the pitch I learned which customers didn’t pay their debts and so could never be allowed to have their names chalked up on the slate.

I remember that my chest swelled with pride the day Mrs. Smelley, who owned a boardinghouse in the Commercial Road, told me that I was a chip off the old block and that in her opinion one day I might even be as good as my granpa. I celebrated that night by ordering my first pint of beer and lighting up my first Woodbine. I didn’t finish either of them.

I’ll never forget that Saturday morning when Granpa first let me run the barrow on my own. For five hours he didn’t once open his mouth to offer advice or even give an opinion. And when he checked the takings at the end of the day, although we were two shillings and fivepence light from a usual

Saturday, he still handed over the sixpenny piece he always gave me at the end of the week.

I knew Granpa wanted me to stay on at school and improve my readin’ and writin’, but on the last Friday of term in December 1913, I walked out of the gates of Jubilee Street Elementary with my father’s blessing. He had always told me that education was a waste of time and he couldn’t see the point of it. I agreed with him, even if Posh Porky had won a scholarship to someplace called St. Paul’s, which in any case was miles away in Hammersmith. And who wants to go to school in Hammersmith when you can live in the East End?

Mrs. Salmon obviously wanted her to because she told everyone who was held up in the bread queue of her daughter’s “interlectual prowess,” whatever that meant.

“Stuck-up snob,” Granpa used to whisper in my ear. “She’s the sort of person who ’as a bowl of fruit in the ’ouse when no one’s ill.”

I felt much the same way about Posh Porky as Granpa did about Mrs. Salmon. Mr. Salmon was all right, though. You see, he’d once been a costermonger himself, but that was before he married Miss Roach, the baker’s daughter.