The Princess Alice
The bosun pipes the watch below,
Yeo ho! lads! ho!
Then here’s a health afore we go
A long, long life to my sweet wife an’ mates at sea;
And keep our bones from Davy Jones, where’er we be
from the ballad ‘Nancy Lee’ performed
aboard the Princess Alice, September 1878
The girl was crying again. A desolate sound of great grief, devoid of any hope, a child abandoned.
I sat up in bed, trying to identify where it was coming from. Somewhere nearby. I couldn’t bear to hear it and do nothing.
I leant over and shook my husband’s shoulder.
‘There,’ I whispered, ‘she’s here again. Can’t you hear her? The same as before.’
He stirred. We listened. But now, though I could hear the traffic on the Broadway and two lads shouting about a taxi, I could no longer hear the weeping of a child.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Someone in the street, that’s all. Don’t let it bother you.’
Rob rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving me sitting in the dark, knees drawn up, wondering if I was going bonkers. It was the third time in a week I’d been woken by the desperate sobbing. I glanced at the clock: five minutes past one in the morning, just like before.
This was our first flat and we loved it.
A one-bedroom in a modern block conversion in Glaisher Street overlooking the Thames, good value for money, excellent transport links to the City for Rob’s work and cycling distance to the University of Greenwich campus where I was due to take up a new teaching job in a couple of weeks’ time.
We’d only moved in at the end of August, but I’d met all of the neighbours already.
Like us, they were mostly in their twenties and concentrating on their careers. None of them had children.
I leaned back against the wall. So why could I hear a little girl crying? Who was she?
Rob didn’t mention it in the morning and neither did I.
We went through the usual morning rituals – shower and shaving, a shared pot of coffee, a peck on the cheek and a smell of aftershave.
‘I’ll be back by six,’ he said. ‘Seven tops. Fancy Chinese?’
I smiled. ‘I thought we might go out. Find somewhere nice by the river. See what there is.’
‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘Let’s play it by ear. I’ll call.’
I nodded. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Have a good day.’
Since it wasn’t raining, I went out for a walk. I wanted to get to know our new neighbourhood before the demands of timetables, students, marking, colleagues took over. Once term started, I knew I’d have no time to explore. To get under the skin of the place.
I headed towards Lewisham first, following the Ravensbourne, one of London’s old forgotten rivers, then doubled back parallel to Brookmill Road.
A smell of stale beer seeped out of the pub at the bottom of St John’s Vale.
In the morning sunshine, a cellar man clanked and rolled his empty barrels into the waiting lorry, a cigarette balanced on his lower lip.
Along Cranbrook Road and over Friendly Street, through the white clapboard estate towards Tanner’s Hill and Wellbeloved the Butcher, then on to Deptford Broadway.
Deptford Church Street was shut for the weekly market, so the traffic was heavy. All the lorries on their way to Dover, the salesmen in their clean company cars, jackets hanging from the hooks in the back, tapping their fingers impatiently on the steering wheel.
I held my breath, trying not to inhale the diesel and petrol fumes.
For a fraction of a second, nobody moved, then the lights turned green and the front runners surged out of the gates, up the hill towards Blackheath.
As the whine of the engines grew fainter, I found myself wondering if any of the drivers had even noticed the tiny streets through which they were driving.
Did they see the stories beneath the cobbles and all the wharf buildings, the distinctive character of this corner of south-east London?
Or did they only notice the booze shops hidden behind metal grilles, the burger joint and 24-hour supermarket where the drunks congregated, trying to make friends with anyone foolish enough to make eye contact.
A piece of urban art – what town planners and the Daily Mail call a ‘feature’ – sat at the top of Deptford Church Street.
A large wrought-iron anchor set in stone, reminding shoppers of the district’s maritime past. Two boys and a girl were clambering all over it, hooking their legs over the arms, hanging upside down like monkeys.
The hoods of their coats flopped over their faces and muffled their childish giggles.
And, with that, the memory of my broken sleep slipped back into my mind.
The girl who cried in the night. I wondered who and where she was.
Why no one did anything to comfort her. Rob thought I was making something out of nothing and I supposed he was right.
Sound carries in the small hours, so the fact that there were no children in our block didn’t mean anything.
There were plenty of families living nearby.
But as I walked back towards Glaisher Street, the oddness of it – the fact that I always heard her at the same time, the fact that Rob hadn’t ever heard her – and nor had any of the neighbours – played on my mind.
The market was now in full swing. Men shouting into microphones, selling toasters, dinner sets and sofas.
You want it, they’d got it. I negotiated my way between the two rows of stalls, their red and white plastic awnings rustling and flapping in the wind.
There was even someone selling Jesus. Bibles, embroidered pictures with Christ’s face stitched in bright gold thread on shiny black material, a pauper’s Turin Shroud.
CDs of gospel music proclaiming the happy day and a man, half preaching, half singing, welcoming in the lost souls.
It seemed to be working – the stall was surrounded by women and their shopping trolleys.
Just fifty pence per prayer or three for a pound: a bargain.
I ducked to avoid the halal meat hanging out over the pavement and tried not to catch the bulging eye of the red snapper and hake and salt fish in their white crates outside the fishmonger.
I looked up, above the bustle of the market, and saw the curve of the Regency houses.
The bricks were pale now, faded from their glory days when the docks were thriving and Deptford was a place with prospects.
When I looked down, I saw blood leaking from the fish and meat into the gutter.
We hadn’t completely unpacked – and I knew the last thing we needed was any more books – but I couldn’t resist going, just to look, at the second-hand sellers who set up shop outside the Albany.
There, the traders flogged their house clearances.
A family’s history for sale, wholesale, entire lives sold off to pay for the coffin.
Huge boarded tables took up most of one side of the square, every inch covered with junk.
In the middle, a fifty-year-old woman with a suspicious face sat perched on an iron stool, watching the many hands fingering her wares, picking things up, putting things down, checking for damage or brand names.
A Barbie with no hair, a pair of horseshoe bookends, brass hooks, pirate videos claiming to be ex-rental. Sold as seen, no guarantees.
Buyer beware.
The scavengers held things up and waited for Dee to catch their eye. She never engaged in conversation, just snapped the price. Quid, one-fifty, six for a quid. No negotiation. Like a ringmaster in a circus, she remained alert to the possibility that the animals circling could turn on her.
There were plenty of adults browsing the Albany plaza, accompanied by bored children who chased each other up and down between the stalls. A pale, thin girl in a long coat, down to the ground, and lace-up boots, was standing alone and ignored by the others.
I headed for one of the traders in the middle of the square. His quality books were displayed in rows on a table, but he’d tipped the rest onto an old red curtain spread on the ground.
‘Ten for a pound, love,’ he said when I got close.
I nodded, though I knew anyway. Last week, I’d picked up a faded leather-bound 1904 edition of Bleak House and a carrier bag full of Agatha Christies, Ngaio Marshes and Gladys Mitchells.
I bent down and started to work systematically through the piles, focused and methodical as I moved books from place to place, careful not to hurry.
If a book spiked my interest, I checked the pages weren’t stuck together or missing, that bits of food or worse weren’t pressed between its covers.
If it got a clean bill of health, I put it with the ‘definites’ or the ‘definite maybes’.
Perhaps there was a better selection than usual, but I went into what Rob called my ‘book trance’.
Book after book went on the pile. I was unaware of what was going on around me and of the weather turning.
Didn’t notice everyone else heading for cover.
I didn’t hear the rumbling in the sky or how the light drizzle had turned to rain, how the awnings pegged over the tables were being snagged and twitched by the wind.
‘It’s about to chuck it down any minute now, love. You done?’
I looked up with a start. ‘I’m sorry, yes. I’ll take these.’
I started to weed out the books I’d put aside.
‘Call it ten. Need to cover this lot up.’
‘That’s kind of you.’
‘That’ll be a quid. Need a bag?’
Rather than getting soaked, I ducked into a table in a café by St Paul’s Church to wait for the rain to pass.
The plate glass windows were already steamed up, the consequence of too many people in too little space.
Outside clouds of umbrellas jostled, green and red and white and blue as people rushed for shelter.
The traders had thrown black bin liners over their stock, hoping the storm would be done quickly and let them get back to earning a living.