Silvertown: An East End family memoir. Melanie McGrath

following Friday afternoon, Jane and Dora return to the Mile End workshops.

      A bulbous woman in a matt brown wig ushers them up the broken stairs with their covering of torn lino, and into the main workroom. Then she sets them down in front of a sewing machine and takes ten minutes explaining how to lift and drop the foot, how to feed in the fabric, thread the needle, control the speed of the sewing line with the treadle, and finally how to reinforce seams and remove the pins and basting. Then she hands each of the girls two small scraps of fabric and says she’ll be back in ten minutes to inspect their work. For what seems like the longest while, the girls sit speechless before the pitiless contours of the machine.

      Blow me if I know where to start, says Dora, poking cautiously at the needle. I ain’t been this scared of nothing since me mum cut a loaf and there was a rat baked inside. But at least the rat was dead. She brings her foot hard down on the treadle and the needle begins a mad jerking. Janey, she says, we ain’t never gonna be rich unless we get them seams done.

      I think you ’ave to do it slower, Dor. With the greatest caution, Jane eases her foot on to the treadle, and the needle floats upwards. Like this.

      Five minutes later Jane has put an elegant, forceful seam across the fabric.

      How d’you get it straight, then? asks Dora, struggling with a fishing net of knotted threads. Finish this off before Mrs Wig comes back, will yer?

      Right-o, Dor.

      And Janey, you won’t tell, will yer?

      Jane Fulcher shakes her head and smiles.

      Not in a million years, Dor.

      The two girls clamber back down the broken stairs with the promise of a job picking pins and clearing away the threads for six shillings a week and all the sugared tea they can drink, start on Monday. At fourteen they can already see their adult lives stretching out before them: work, marriage, children, a home to look after, tea cosies to sew, and all Mrs Folkman’s sweets they can manage. Marching across the Mile End Waste they feel as though they have grown a foot in an afternoon. They wander back down through the Waste Market, past stalls laden with ripe beef ribs and belly lamb, past trestles laid out with cabbages and haberdashery.

      Stopping beside the beigel bakery, Dora whispers, Me dad says them Jew-boys is a bunch of cowards the way some of them have gone on the conscientious to get out of fighting. Me dad says they don’t mind killing things when there’s some killing to be done. To see them out on a weekday evening at the back of their little shops cutting creatures’ throats and letting the blood run out and me’ Dad says that ain’t right. And most of them ain’t half canny in the business way ’cos me dad says you can always strike a deal with a Jew-boy. She meanders on, but by now Jane isn’t listening. She is thinking about six shillings a week and what you can buy for it if you get the bargaining right.