Paradise Court Read Free Page A

house. Up before five each day, she had to clean and lay fires in twelve different rooms before the rest of the household had risen. It was her job to provide hot water for the bedroom pitchers, her job to cartaway the lukewarm slops. If a coal scuttle was ever found empty, Pattie felt the housekeeper’s stick. She scrubbed and brushed and polished until midnight seven days a week. Bed was a box in a garret.
    Duke rescued his Pattie from this slave labour by marrying her. She was just nineteen. He was twenty-six. He found work as a cellarman in a pub in Spitalfields, where his size and muscle came into their own once more. He rolled the great barrels down chutes and up cellar steps with enviable case, and hoisted the empty ones like toys on to the dray carts. Besides, he never fell sick and he never missed a day through drunkenness, unlike so many in his trade.
    While Pattie gave him children to dote on; first Frances, a solemn, round-faced baby with her mother’s pale colouring but her father’s striking dark eyes; then gurgling, smiling Hettie, so Duke worked his way into the esteem of the pub owner. And when, in 1889, Jess was born, a third daughter and so a cause of disappointment to the burly cellarman, the offer came of a pub of his own.
    It meant moving across the water and leaving behind all Pattie’s family for new neighbours, new streets. But they went eagerly to set up home above the run-down Duke of Wellington public house at the corner of busy Duke Street and dingy, ramshackle Paradise Court.
    Five years on, the family had grown to be as much a part of the place as the bricks and mortar. Indeed, Wilf had already come to be called ‘Duke’, and the name had stuck.
    When the Parsons moved in with their young family, the Duke itself was one of the old-style beer houses; disreputable home to King Beer and Queen Gin. But the neighbourhood was a warm, closely connected one of men who’d built the underground railways, or who worked the markets and the docks, and women who’d begun to go out to work in the factories and shops. A problem shared was a problem halved, they said. And the Duke was the place to meet and give vent to troubles after work. This was true for the men at least. The women often preferred to stay at hometo gossip, or else they chatted on street-corners in fine weather, while their hordes of children played at marbles in the gutter.
    Wilf Parsons, or Duke as he now was, wanted to provide a place a notch or two above the standard in the working men’s own homes. To that end he painted and spruced the place up with cast-iron tables with glossy mahogany tops. And when money allowed, he lined the walls with beautiful bevelled and etched mirrors and fancy brass brackets for the gaslights. Electricity failed to impress him, however, and he clung for many years to the familiar hiss of gas and the gauzy white mantels.
    Meanwhile, Duke’s family had increased in size. Robert was born, his pride and joy. The boy was perfect in looks and temperament; impossible to upset and with a ready smile for all the coos and caresses bestowed by his older sisters. Duke felt his heart would burst with pride whenever he took an hour off on a Sunday and walked at the head of his small procession across London Bridge and under the stem white walls of the old Tower.
    It almost burst with a more painful emotion before long, however, when he nearly lost Pattie as she bore him their next child. Never strong, she found the complicated labour was almost too much for her, and poor Ernie himself was damaged in some unseen way; not perfect like Robert.
    Duke thanked God that Pattie was spared, and for a time they were careful to have no more children. Then, in a kind of gentle, autumn affection, a baby was conceived. It was another troubled pregnancy, and this time Pattie was too weak and worn out to survive the labour. Sadie, another girl, was born, but her mother died to give her life. Duke