Lesley Pearse - Never Look Back

Lesley Pearse

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 2000
25

Copyright Lesley Pearse, 2000
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-191067-3

I dedicate this book to my youngest daughter Jo, for having enough faith to believe I could drive us all the way from Missouri to the West Coast of America without getting lost and cheerfully assisting me in the enormous research needed for this book. I hope it will be a permanent reminder of the laughs we had along the way.

And to Elizabeth Toots Olmsted in Oregon, for remaining a dear friend for nearly thirty years and retaining enough interest and devotion to scour American bookshops for my research material. Who would have thought when we met working for Yellow Pages all those years ago that our lives would take us so far apart, yet our hearts and minds would stay so firmly linked!

To Harriet Evans and Louise Moore not just for their skill and tact in editing my work but for their joyful enthusiasm, encouragement and warm friendship. I love you both.

To Peter Bowron, John Bond, Nicky Stonehill and the rest of the team at Penguin who have worked so hard on my behalf. I appreciate it more than mere words can say.

To Marcy and Alan Culpin of Denver, Colorado, for their extensive knowledge of American history and for digging around to find the answers to my more obscure questions. I hope you will enjoy the finished work and look back to that dinner party, so long ago now, when I first told you of my ideas. You inspired me more than you realized.

Special thanks to the knowledgeable and astoundingly helpful staff in: The American Museum, Claverton, Bath, England; The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Manhattan; South Seaport Museum, Manhattan; New York Public Library; Ellis Island Immigrant Museum, New York Harbour; The National Frontier Trails Centre, Independence, Missouri; Fort Laramie, Wyoming; The Emigrant Trail Museum, Truckee, California.

It would be impossible to list all of the vast number of books I read during my research but some were so particularly outstanding and stimulating they deserve a special mention: The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger; San Francisco from Hamlet to City by Roger W. Lotchin; The Prairie Traveler by Captain Randolph B. Marcy; Women of The Gold Rush by Elizabeth Margo; How the other Half Lives by Jacob A Riis. His haunting, very early photographs of the poor in New York, along with the graphic descriptions of the way they lived, gave me tremendous insight into how it was for the disadvantaged in the nineteenth century; Low Life by Luc Sante; Womens Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schissel; Soiled Doves by Anne Seagraves; The Way West and The Civil War by Geoffrey C. Ward; Foreign and Female by Doris Weatherford.

A final special thank-you to all those kind and helpful people I met briefly along my own trail across America in motels, hotels, restaurants, laundrettes, bars, streets and places of historical interest. I remember you all with fondness, if not all your individual names. But especially Kate Deline and Ken from Illinois, the bikers who rescued me when I ran out of petrol in the middle of the Nevada desert. Bless you!

New York 1900

Is she crazy? Fanny Lubrano whispered to her father as he came back from settling the old lady into a seat up in the bows of their tug.

It was a grey March day, the blustery wind coming straight in off the Atlantic, and even in the shelter of the wheel-house it was very cold.

She has to be crazy to offer me a hundred dollars, Giuseppe replied, the expression on his weather-beaten face one of utter bewilderment. But she sure dont sound like she is!

Before making ready to cast off, they looked down through the wheel-house window at the old lady. She had the style and poise of the rich women who lived on Fifth Avenue, swathed in a sable coat and matching hat; yet that sort of woman wasnt likely to want a trip round New York Bay in an old tug.

Fanny said she thought the lady was too fashionably dressed for someone of advanced years, and her dainty side-buttoned boots were hardly suitable for a boat trip. Giuseppe was more concerned that she had no companion, and he found her tense stance and the way her eyes scanned the waterfront very suspicious.

What if she is crazy, Pa, and her folks are out looking for her? Fanny said suddenly. I know she got out of a fancy carriage and the driver said hed wait for her, but if she catches a chill, well be blamed.

Giuseppe pushed back his cap and scratched his head. I guess if we dont take her, someone else will, and maybe rob her too. Besides, she seems to know what shes doing, and about river craft. Asked me how long Id been working the harbour, about you and where we lived. Goddam it, Fanny, I want to please her, she was right kindly, but maybe I oughtnt to have taken her money, a hundred dollars is a whole lot too much.

Fanny half smiled at that. Her father looked tough, but he had a soft centre. The elderly, children and the very needy always plucked at his heart strings. She had long since lost count of the loans hed made to his brothers and sisters which were never repaid; that was one of the reasons why they still lived in a cramped East Side tenement.

That fur cost a whole lot more than we can make in a couple of years. She shrugged. We never asked her for that much, did we? She offered it. So I reckons wed better look lively and cast off afore she changes her mind.

As the tug chugged along past the busy wharves, the old lady took a deep breath of the smoky, fishy-smelling air and smiled at the memories it evoked. Fifty-eight years had passed since she arrived here as a seventeen-year-old immigrant, staying for five years before moving on, and the place had changed dramatically in the intervening years. In her time South Street was crammed with graceful sailing ships, bowsprits half-way across the cobbled quay and drying sails flapping and crackling in the wind. The warehouses, grain stores, saloons and sailors boarding-houses had been mostly rickety wooden places built in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. Now the ships were mostly steamers, the buildings all of fine, sturdy brick only the smell, the sounds of rumbling carts, the sailors and stevedores yelling to one another were the same.