The room that Edith commandeered in a remote, and now shunned, south-facing tower gamely aped one of those seaside hotels, built in the 1930s, to pastiche the glamour of a blue-ribbon ocean liner. There were wooden handrails, and a salty curved window overlooking the sparkling tributary of the railway, that ran from Hackney, through Homerton, to the cancelled village of Hackney Wick — and on, in the imagination of the idlers, across the marshes to Stratford, to Silvertown, to the graveyard of steam engines at North Woolwich. Another more stable vision was also there for the taking: security systems, tenement blocks, pubs, breakers’ yards, a Catholic outstation with albino saints and blackberry-lipped virgins, and the green-rim sanctuary of Victoria Park.
For a week Edith swept and scrubbed, polished and painted. She stole food and begged for toys and books. She was determined to impose a formal regime; to re-create a High Victorian Dame School. She wanted canvas maps, sailing boats, new yellow pencils, wide bowls of exotic fruit. She wanted music. Their strange thin voices drifting out over the hidden yards and storehouses. Her stolen children, playing at something, came — by degrees — to accept its reality. They were boarders, sent from distant colonies, to learn ‘the English way’. They were no longer solitary: they were a troop. They even, covertly, took exercise. They left the hospitaclass="underline" walking down the Hill in a mad, mutually-clinging crocodile, over the Rec to the Marshes. They were too frightened to breathe: not deviating, by one inch, from the white lines on the football pitches — climbing over obstacles, cracking corner-flags, tramping through dog shit. They huddled, a lost tribe, under massive skies. The rubble of pre-war London was beneath their feet. They walked over streets whose names had been obliterated. They could have dived down through the grass into escarpments of medieval brickwork; corner shops, tin churches, prisons, markets, tiled swimming pools. On the horizon were the bright-orange tents of the summer visitors; the Dutch and the Germans who processed in a remorseless circuit between the shower-block and their VW campers.
Over the months, Edith coaxed the children towards language. Or shocked it from them: in tears, and in fits of laughter. The railway passengers noticed this single window, blazing with light.
Other unlocated souls made themselves known to her. Orwin Fairchilde, cushion-cheeked, chemically castrated, had been turned out of the ward as ‘insufficiently disturbed’: he could not escape its pull. He pretended to be part of the queue of outpatients that formed early at the gates: a queue from which never more than one or two highly-strung potential travellers hauled themselves aboard any vehicle foolish enough to slow down. Cars kept their doors and windows locked. The other loiterers remained — until dusk fell — leaning against the hospital wall; picking up sheets of old newspaper, greeting unknown friends, or screaming challenges at imaginary enemies. The queue was perpetual and self-generating: an unfunded ‘halfway house’ between the hospital and the insanity of the world at large. The people who mattered offered a loud ‘Yo!’ to Orwin’s oracular question: ‘Are you in the queue, man?’
Orwin polished his bottle-glass spectacles on his shirt-tails. Then he set up his elaborate, but eccentric, sound system. He Scotch-taped his sheet music to the side of a bus shelter, and dived, scowling, into ‘Greensleeves’. He plucked at the strings of an Aria-Pro (II) electric guitar — as if he was extracting porcupine-spines from his bulging thigh. The noise was hellish. He sealed his eyes, and entered some dim cave of absolute concentration.
It became a ritual of Edith’s to take Orwin for a drink in the Spread Eagle on her way to the station. He would roll a cigarette and offer it to her. She would refuse, and offer him a drink: which he, in his turn, declined — on religious grounds. He spoke about the Ethiopian Saints who had lost themselves in this City of Sin; but who would certainly acknowledge Orwin as a fellow spirit, by spotting the coded note-sequences in his music. The Saints left messages for him in books. But, of course, the libraries would not let him get his hands on them: claiming that he could not read. The teachers had all been bribed to keep him in ignorance.
Dr Adam Tenbrücke also spent time as a temporary guest of the hospital. He had been found, weeping and shaking, running his head at the door of a warehouse-gallery on the perimeter of London Fields; which featured, at the time, a chamber flooded with sump oil. This was instantly optioned by the Saatchis. The owner, a claque of tame critics, and a few jealous hangers-on rushed outside, squawking, ‘Did Doris ring?’ — bursting to break the news to any passing drifters. They tumbled, in a heap, over Tenbrücke, who was rocking back on his heels, imitating a blind monkey. Smelling the weirdness of ‘real’ money, the owner dragged him inside.
Tenbrücke pointedly refused to sign his name in the Visitors’ Book, and would speak only in German. The Gallery Man, now suspecting the devious hand of the encamped ‘travellers’, rang for the snatch-squad — who were only too happy to tranquillize the gibbering doctor with their truncheons. He was delivered — a knot of terror — to the reception cages. He would talk of nothing but suicide. ‘I’m drowning in filth,’ he whispered. In other words, he was depressingly normal. He sounded like a politician. They frisked him, hit him with enough stuff to stop a runaway horse, and turned him loose. He tore off his clothes and — howling Aryan marching songs — stumbled down Marsh Hill. He walked back to Limehouse Basin along the River Lea: white, and fat, and stark-naked. But he went unmolested; just another long-distance health freak jogging into obscurity.
It was still quite possible to survive on a nurse’s salary; but not to eat, to travel, to take decisions over your own life. Therefore, most of the nurses moonlighted as cleaners, or as barmaids. Even their uniforms were rented — warmed by their bodies — to a drinking club on the Stoke Newington borders; where they were worn, with minimal adjustments, by hostesses who catered to a certifiably specialist clientele.
But it was the opening of the Dalston/Kingsland to Whitechapel rail link that granted Edith’s continued presence at the hospital and economic viability. Now, at the end of her working day, she could take the North London line to Dalston, change, and step out within half an hour on Whitechapel High Street. Time to read, once again, her faded pink copy of The Four Quartets. ‘And so each venture/Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate…’ The generous arches and lamps of the London Hospital penetrated the gloom like a Viennese opera house. Edith slipped Mr Eliot back into her raincoat pocket.
The balance was achieved. Edith Cadiz could nurse by day, and supplement her earnings by unselective prostitution at night; ‘blowing’ the priapic hauliers, who were working out the last days of the Spitalfields Vegetable Market. It would be simplistic to suggest that Edith’s was a mechanical response to circumstantial poverty. The twist was more complex: if she was unable to live as a nurse, she was also unable to live as a prostitute. The attractions of these twinned survival-modes were quite different. They were separate, but equal. In both theatres of risk, Edith was involved with external demand-systems that gave her unexpected courage, and fed her dramatic sense of self. The risks she took brought to life a scenario, in which she could not quite believe that she participated. She maintained, to the end, an inviolate sense of silence. The emissions of the lorry drivers, she trusted, would somehow engender language for the mute children, safely secreted in their ruined tower.
Edith was an unusual person.
IV
The great shame, and dishonour, of the present regime is its failure to procure a decent opposition. Never have there been so many complacent dinner parties, from Highbury to Wandsworth Common, rehearsing their despair: a wilderness of quotations and anecdotes. ‘My dear,’ a Camden Passage ‘screamer’smirked, as I cleared a few boxes of inherited books from his cellar, ‘we never get asked to Mayfair any more — it’s always Hackney. Wherever that is.’ Writers were glutted on hard-edged images of blight. They gobbled and spat, in their race to be first to preview the quips that would surface in next week’s Statesman; or to steal, from some Town Hall booby, statistics to lend credence to a Guardian profile. Literary bounty-hunters — bounced publishers, and the like — scouted out-of-print anthologies for any Eastern European poets, in wretched health, who had not yet been ‘targeted’ for an obituary. They fell over each other to finger these deservedly-forgotten scribblers at thirty pounds a hit.