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 bett
er 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.
I stood in the queue at the till, which got longer as more people splattered in, stamping their dripping feet on the mat and shaking umbrellas out the door. I noticed the same thin girl from the market, tracing her name on the window, and wondered why she didn’t come in out of the wet. By the time I’d paid for my coffee and found a seat, she’d gone and the letters were smudged.
I hadn’t paid attention to the last few books I’d bought, so I stuck my hand into the carrier bag and pulled out the one on the top. I didn’t remember the look of it at all or picking it up, but it looked interesting. Not even a book, instead it was a diary. Or, rather, a record of events. Thin spidery writing, a few dates, all cramped up as if the writer didn’t think she’d ever have enough paper to finish.
This is the private property of Miss Alice Sarah Livett,
Glaisher Street, Deptford, S.E.
If lost please return to rightful owner.
I smiled, intrigued by the coincidence of the address, then started to flick through the journal. The back pages were filled with columns, the weekly housekeeping accounts of everything required for the household in Glaisher Street, I assumed. Cloth, firewood, coal, horsemeat, wax, rum – I screwed up my eyes to decipher the tiny letters – and, next to each entry, the cost.
I flicked back to the beginning and found a list of birthdays and important events. Different colours of ink and subtle changes in the handwriting gave the impression that the list had been built up over many years.
15th May 1870. Robert William Livett to Isobel Grace Harris. Married St Paul’s Church, Deptford.
18th June 1871. Alice Sarah. Born Glaisher Street.
20th June 1873. Nancy Grace. Born Glaisher Street.
24th May 1874. Hilda Eugenie. Born Glaisher Street.
17th February 1878. Florence Isobel. Born Glaisher Street.
3rd September 1878. Princess Alice.
19th September 1903. R. W. Livett to Mary Chalker. Married St Paul’s Church, Deptford.
20th May 1904. Grace Charlotte. Born Evelyn Street.
The calendar filled several pages. It contained few references to anything outside Alice’s immediate circle of family and neighbours and royalty. Day trips, visits to and from Glaisher Street, local events. The death of Queen Victoria was recorded, as was the Jubilee of King George V in 1935, but most national and world events went unremarked. Even the First and Second World Wars did not appear.
I glanced at the final entry.
25th November 1944. Woolworth’s with G.
There was no explanation as to why Alice had suddenly stopped writing.
It was raining harder than ever so I looked to the counter, hoping the queue had died down so I could get another coffee. There were more people, though, so I kept reading and hoped no one would ask me to move.
By skimming backwards and forwards between the dates at the front and the diary entries themselves, I began to build up a picture of Alice’s life. She was the eldest of four daughters – the other three didn’t appear in the journal except at the beginning, and her mother was never mentioned, though her father was from time to time. At the age of fourteen, Alice was apprenticed to a local dressmaker, but continued living with her father in Glaisher Street and was still there when he remarried in 1903. There was no more than a handful of references to the second Mrs Livett, and the care of Grace, the child of that remarriage, in the Evelyn Street house, seemed to have fallen to Alice.
It was an odd experience reading about places I knew, or was starting to, and though things had changed hugely in a hundred years, I could still imagine Alice walking these same streets. I could picture the tramlines and the big shops in Lewisham and New Cross, could imagine the gentle, confined pace of Alice’s life lived in and around Deptford. From the journal, it seemed neither Alice nor her younger half-sister Grace ever married, but both were regular church goers and members of various Bible groups who met in the Wesleyan Hall round the back of Sayes Court. Day trips with local schoolchildren to the seaside in 1925. Not Margate or Southend, but upriver to the mudflats by Tower Bridge to make mud-and-sand pies in the sunshine.
The second Mrs Livett died in 1925 and, after a long illness, Alice’s father followed her a year later. And there, in Alice’s diary entry for the day before his death, was the record of a conversation between father and daughter. The only personal entry of any kind.
It sent me back to the beginning and the list of dates.
3rd September 1878. Princess Alice.
The entry had stuck out the first time I’d read it because it didn’t seem to belong in the list of family birthdays and anniversaries. Now, though, from Alice’s record of the penultimate day of her father’s life, it was clear the date mattered a great deal.
Without considering the luck that had brought such a journal into my hands in the first place, never mind the coincidence of our living in the same street as the author of the diary, I packed up.
Ten minutes later I was home and sitting in front of the computer.
Beyond the window, the Thames was still shrouded in low cloud and smears of drizzle ran down the window. I typed in the date and waited for information to come up, watched the images and words roll onto the screen.
On Tuesday, 3rd September, 1878, the London Steamboat Company’s pleasure paddle steamer, the Princess Alice, sailed on a day trip to Gravesend and Sheerness. Among the seven hundred passengers were a Mrs Hawks, the owner of the Anchor and Hope pub at Charlton, a group of ‘ladies of the night’ from the Seven Dials area of London, forty women from Smithfield’s Crowcross Mission and a group from a Bible class which included Mrs Isobel Livett and three of her daughters, Florence, Nancy and Hilda, aged seven months, five and four respectively. The eldest daughter, Alice, had stayed home to look after Mr Livett, who was not well enough to join the party.
My chest tightened. I dreaded reading on, yet I couldn’t stop.
At seven-thirty in the evening, the steamer was approaching Gallion’s Reach. Many of the passengers, in good spirits from their day out, were below deck in the restaurant bar listening to the live entertainment. Accompanied by a ramshackle choir made up of the steamer’s crew, a tenor was performing Maybrick’s ballad ‘Nancy Lee’.
As the steamer rounded the bend between Crossness and Margaret Ness near Tripcock Point, she met the steam collier, Bywell Castle. The collier had just off-loaded her cargo at Millwall Dock and was returning to the South Shore.
The Princess Alice was new in 1865. It was originally licensed to carry 486 passengers, increased after a refit in 1878 to 936. The Board of Trade considered one lifeboat and one longboat to provide adequate safety precautions, despite the fact they could carry no more than sixty people apiece. The collier ploughed full steam into the Princess Alice, splitting her down the middle. There was no time to sound the al
arm and no time to alter course. The stern and bows folded upwards and, within minutes, the pleasure steamer had sunk, taking almost everyone with her.
Children and women, mostly unable to swim, were pulled down by their crinolines and skirts and few made it to the shore, even though it was only three hundred yards away. Others survived, only to be swept downstream in the ebb tide to drown in the polluted waters from the Southern Outfall works near Erith.
The bodies brought ashore were taken mainly to Woolwich Dockyard and Roff’s Wharf and given numbers until they could be identified. Some corpses drifted as far as Gravesend, where they were laid for claiming in the pier waiting room. Later, a large Celtic cross was raised at Woolwich Cemetery by public subscription, 23,000 people giving sixpence each to make a grave for the 160 unclaimed victims. Others were buried by their families at St John’s Church in Lewisham and St Paul’s Church in Deptford, including four members of a well-regarded family living in Glaisher Street. The newspaper noted that when the police arrived to inform Mr Livett of the tragic accident at five past one, on the morning of the following day, he suffered a seizure and was unable to leave the house. In the absence of any other adult, his only surviving daughter – seven-year-old Alice Livett – was obliged to identify the bodies of her mother and her sisters.
I turned cold. Five minutes past one in the morning.
My mind racing, I sat back in my chair, trying to piece everything together: the timing of the police’s arrival, the collapse of Mr Livett at the news, the fact that Deptford had been badly damaged during bombing in World War II. Most of the houses on the river had been flattened. Was it possible that our block stood where once Alice Livett had lived? Could it be her cries I heard at night? Or rather, the echo of her grief? And if so, why? Because she had been forgotten? Because the story had been forgotten?
I glanced out of the window and saw the rain had stopped. I put my coat back on and left the flat. With Alice’s journal in my hand, I headed back to St Paul’s.
The sun had come out now, causing the wet grass to glint and giving the impression of everything having been washed clean and made new. There was no guide to the graves in the churchyard and the church itself was locked, so I could find no one to ask about parish registers. I walked up and down, reading each name on the headstones, tracing the faded dates with my fingers, looking for Alice and her family.