Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End
One forgotten street, 12 unforgettable women.‘’Ang on boy, Joan’s got sumfink to show yer.’ She rummaged in a drawer for a moment, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.‘Constance Street,’ she said. ‘As I remember it.’Through the story of one street – Constance Street – we hear the true life tales of a tight knit group of working class women in the East End of London set against a backdrop of war, hardship and struggle.It’s a story of matriarchy and deep family ties, of a generation that was scattered away from the street during the blitz bombings, but which maintained the ties of that street for decades afterwards.Set in an area of East London called Silvertown, a once thriving docking community that at the turn of the 20th century was the industrial heartland of the south of England; the story focuses on the lives of 12 incredible women and their struggle to survive amidst the chaos of the war years.We have Nellie Greenwood, the author’s great grandmother who runs a laundry in Silvertown which becomes the focal point of the community. In 1917 a munitions factory in Silvertown explodes flattening much of the surrounding area and causing extensive damage to Constance Street – Nellie’s daughter is blown from her crib but miraculously survives.Deciding to open the laundry as a field hospital for the injured, Nellie and the women on the street come together to tend the wounded, the sick and the emotionally shattered as they cope with the aftermath of not just one but two world wars.Through the Great War, the roaring Twenties, the Depression and then the unimaginable – the outbreak of a second world war – Nellie and the street survive with love, laughter and friendships that bind the community together. But just as this incredible group of women live through the worst, the unthinkable happens. On 7 September 1940, Constance Street is no more.Following in the footsteps of Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth and The Sugar Girls, Constance Street is a life-affirming, heart-warming read that reminds us of a time when people pulled together.
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First published by HarperElement 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Charlie Connelly 2015
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Cover photographs © Topfoto (two women); John Topham/Topfoto (background)
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Charlie Connelly asserts the moral right to
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Source ISBN: 9780007528455
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780007528448
Version: 2015-07-09
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Contents
For my mum, Valerie Connelly, the last Greenwood Silvertonian, and in memory of Joan Thunstrom, née Greenwood, 1923– 2015
A little before seven o’clock on the evening of 19 January 1917, Nellie Greenwood was just about to close up the laundry when all the windows blew in.
Just before it happened the lamps had flickered for a couple of seconds, causing her to look up with the heavy iron poised just above the sheet she was pressing. There was a brilliant flash, a second for the breath to catch in her throat, then a whump, a deafening roar, a blizzard of shards and a screeching ring in her ears. She clamped her eyes closed and, as the ringing diminished, other sounds began to emerge from the white noise: a metal lid spinning to a halt on the floor nearby, the Christmas tinkle of the last slivers of falling glass, the bang of a window frame flapping open, all as if it were a very long way away.
Then silence, and the chill seeping into her cheek that told her she was lying on the stone floor.
Tendrils of cold began to seep through the broken windows and open door and settle around her. Silvertown was never silent, not ever, which despite the screaming noise inside her own head made the sudden absence of the clanking of dock cranes and the distant shrieking of the sawmill even more curious. As Nellie slowly began to regain her senses she realised there was something else nagging at her; something about the silence inside 15 Constance Street was wrong.
A week earlier her husband Harry had wheeled her around this very floor, dancing to a hummed tune of his own devising to mark her thirty-ninth birthday. He’d managed to coax her out to Cundy’s, the pub at the end of the street, for a couple of hours in the evening, leaving their eldest child Winifred in charge of her five younger sisters, and when Nell insisted on checking whether she’d left the float in the till when they’d returned from the pub, he’d pushed his cap back on his head, grabbed her waist with one hand and her hand with the other and whisked her in circles.
‘Forty next year, doll,’ he said between hums, his breath sharp with the tang of alcohol. ‘Who’d have thought we’d live so long, eh? And you not looking a day older than the first time I clapped eyes on you.’
She told him to get away with himself. In the mirror that morning she’d noticed more grey streaks in her brown hair as well as the lines spreading from the corners of her eyes and heading due south from the corners of her mouth to her jaw line. She’d run her fingertip down them, her hands permanently pink and shiny from years of washing and scrubbing, from domestic laundry as a girl to running her own laundry today.
