Farewell To The East End

was their genius – and their prodigious memory. They would rattle off, with machine-gun precision, a list of about fifteen different items, together with the prices, adding it all up in complicated shillings and pence (there were twelve pence to a shilling, not ten), and no one dared to question them. Once I saw a bold woman look at her change and say, ‘I gave you a ten shilling note. I should have three and fourpence change, not two and elevenpence!’ The two women behind the stall drew together. They grabbed the shopping basket, tipped everything out, weighed it again, shouted out the prices, tossed figures back and forward to each other, and came up with the magic total of seven and a penny. They pushed the bag at the woman: ‘There you are, and there’s yer change, two and eleven. An’ don’ come back ’ere. We don’ wan’ your sort. Next?’ The poor woman wandered off, bewildered, counting her pennies.
    Perhaps most of their customers were too mesmerized by the speed of delivery and the confidence of their joint attack. No one could be as quick as they were. Singly, each was as sharp as a razor, but together they resembled a double-edged sword. To Megan’mave all customers were there to be manipulated, to be squeezed of a couple of pence here and there, to be bullied into buying more than they wanted, and to be hypnotized into thinking they had got a bargain.
    The physical appearance of Megan’mave was singular, to say the very least. They looked like something out of another century, and another country. They had fine features, high cheek bones and clear but slightly swarthy skin. I have mentioned their black, flashing eyes, which undoubtedly had an unnerving effect on their customers. They were both very thin, almost skeletal, but strong and muscular; their hands were large and bony, and their fingers long. Their clothes – how on earth can one describe their clothes? To begin with, they were identical, like their wearers, and excessively plain, yet would have stood out in any crowd. Megan’mave always wore garments of dark brown or fusty black, long in the skirt and shapeless in the body, pulled tightly into their waists by heavy leather belts, from which hung two or three rings of keys. Their stockings were thick lisle, and their shoes were old, shapeless, and unpolished. Their headgear, without which they were never seen, was distinctive. Each wore a headscarf, an ordinary headscarf that any woman could buy, but it was the way they wore them that arrested attention. The scarves were pulled down low over their foreheads, so that barely the eyebrows were visible, and tied very tightly at the nape of the neck, so that not a wisp of hair could be seen. So tight were the knots that the scarves were strained almost to splitting. I sometimes wondered if the two women were bald, as the result of some rare disease, but this proved not to be the case. What with their clothes and their headscarves they looked rather like Buddhist nuns, but without the smile. I was reminded of a Hogarth etching of very poor women from the back streets of eighteenth-century London transported to the life and vitality of Chrisp Street market, Poplar.
    Megan’mave were married. It was said that the banns had been read out on three successive Sundays for Margaret, spinster of this parish, but that Mavis had signed the register, or perhaps it was the other way round – hearsay can be notoriously unreliable. To be sure, both of them answered to the title of Mrs M. Carter. Which of them had stood at the altar and vowed to love, honour and obey, no one was quite sure, least of all Sid, the man of their choice. If he had ever had any illusions about the reality of these ancient marriage vows, Megan’mave soon relieved him of such fantasies. Megan’mave were the boss, and Sid had to honour and obey! In his romantic younger days Sid may have thought that he was getting a bargain – two women for the price of one – but life taught him that Megan’mave were the ones who got all the bargains, while everyone else paid the price. He was a little wisp of a Cockney, about five and a half feet tall and seven stone in weight, who was always seen in the market carrying boxes of apples and pears, cabbages and turnips, to the stall where his wives were doing their strident stuff. Unlike other Cockneys he never laughed and joked, never went for a drink with the other costers, never joined in when dirty yarns were being spun, could