Farewell To The East End

she was twenty-five, but she looked fifty because no one had ever taken care of her, or had given her that pride in herself which is necessary to a woman’s existence. She had not even the happiness of being wanted or necessary – a condition in which the altruistic soul of woman thrives. This man of hers would obviously be better off without her. She had once been pretty.
    The shame of it! To parade her woman’s body draped in rags through streets full of other women in their neat clothes, to meet the pitying eyes of other wives and mothers, and to drag on, tied like a slave, behind this shambling, shifty man. Is there a crucifixion for a woman worse than this?
    He walked ahead so that she had plenty of time to wonder why she married him. Now and then he would turn and jerk his head, trying to make her quicken her pace. She took no notice, just plodded on in who knows what merciful dullness?
    Then the sleeping child in her old brown shawl awakened and moved with the curious boneless writhing of a young baby. The mother’s arms tightened on it and held its small body closer to hers. She stopped, went over to a shop window, and lent her knee on a ledge of stone. She placed one finger so gently in the fold of cloth and looked down into it …
    I tell you that for one second you ceased to pity and you reverenced. Over that tired face of chiselled alabaster, smoothed and softened in a smile, came the only spiritual thing left in these two lives: the beatitude of a Madonna. This same unchanging smile has melted men’s hearts for countless generations. The first time a man sees a woman look at his child in exactly that way something trembles inside him. Men have seen it from piled pillows in rooms smelling faintly of perfume, in night nurseries, in many a comfortable nest which they have fought to build to shield their own. No different! The same smile in all its rich, swift beauty was here in the mud and the bleakness of a London street.
    They went on into the crowd and were forgotten. I went on with the knowledge that out of rags and misery had come, full and splendid, the spirit that, for good or ill, holds the world to its course.
    Two beggars in a London crowd, but at the breast of one – the Future. Poor, beautiful Madonna of the Pavement …
    H. V. Morton, first published in the Daily Express, 1923.

    Human memory is the strangest thing. Apparently we have millions, perhaps billions of interconnecting fibres in our brains, triggered by electrical impulses, which can record our experiences. But sometimes these stores lie dormant for years, and the memories seem to be completely lost. But they are still there, waiting for some spark to ignite them.
    A book of essays by H. V. Morton was the spark for me. I took them with me on holiday and after a strenuous day of swimming and cycling I was sitting in the last long rays of the evening sun, reading. As I read this beautiful and tragic story of a bully of a man and a downtrodden woman, it all came back to me. I had completely forgotten the Laceys. I read the first page of the essay – the description of the shiftless couple in the streets of London – without much thought, but then came the heart-rending but uplifting paragraphs about the baby and the woman’s love. The spark of memory had been ignited and the memory of the Laceys was there, in a flash, as they say. It only remained to be written down.

    John Lacey was the landlord of the Holly Bush, just off Poplar High Street. As I came to know him better, I found it incredible that Trueman’s (the brewers) had ever granted him a licence and continued to pay his wages, but stranger things have happened in the world of employment, and he enjoyed the role that fate had generously offered him.
    John Lacey had been diagnosed as having late-onset diabetes. It was not very severe at the time of diagnosis, and the doctor had advised that it could be controlled by a diet of reduced sugar and carbohydrate. But John Lacey refused to cooperate, and his blood-sugar level rose higher. Insulin injections were prescribed, and the doctor – judging that if the patient would not control his diet, he would not inject himself regularly and accurately – asked the Sisters to give the injections twice daily. This was very time-consuming. Soluble insulin was used in those days, and each injection only lasted twelve hours in the body. We received a lot of requests to attend diabetics because back then it was very difficult to