As is true of any good actor, Sickert knew how to make an entrance and an exit. He had a habit of vanishing for days or weeks without telling Ellen or his second or third wives or his acquaintances where he was or why. He might invite friends to dinner and not show up. He would reappear as he pleased, usually no explanation offered. Outings often turned into his missing in action, for he liked to go to the theater and music halls alone and afterward wander during the late night and misty early morning hours.
Sickert’s routes were peculiar and illogical, especially if he was returning home from the theaters and music halls in central London along the Strand. Denys Sutton writes that Sickert often walked north to Hoxton, then retraced his steps to end up in Shoreditch on the western border of Whitechapel. From there he would have to walk west and north to return to 54 Broadhurst Gardens in northwest London, where he lived. According to Sutton, the reason for these strange peregrinations and detours into a dangerous part of East London is that Sickert needed “a long silent tramp to meditate on what he had just seen” in a music hall or theater. The artist pondering. The artist observing a dark, foreboding world and the people who lived in it. The artist who liked his women ugly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A BIT OF BROKEN LOOKING GLASS
Mary Ann Nichols was approximately forty-two years old and missing five teeth.
She was five foot two or three and plump, with a fleshy, plain face, brown eyes, and graying dark brown hair. During her marriage to a printer’s machinist named William Nichols, she had given birth to five children, the oldest twenty-one, the youngest eight or nine at the time of her murder.
For the past seven years or so, she and William had been separated because of her drinking and quarrelsome ways. His support of five shillings each week ceased, he later told the police, when he learned she was living the life of a prostitute. Mary Ann had nothing left, not even her children. Years ago she had lost custody of them when her ex-husband informed the courts that she was living in sin with a blacksmith named Drew, who soon enough left her, too. The last time her former husband saw Mary Ann alive was in June of 1886 at the funeral of a son who had burned to death when a paraffin lamp exploded.
During her desolate times, Mary Ann had been an inmate at numerous workhouses, which were huge, dreaded barracks packed with as many as a thousand men and women who had nowhere else to go. The poor despised the workhouses, yet there were always long lines on cold mornings as the penniless waited in hopes of admission into what were called “casual wards.” If the workhouse wasn’t full, and a person was taken in by the porter, he or she was carefully interrogated and searched for money. The discovery of even a penny sent the person back out on the street. Tobacco was confiscated; knives and matches were not allowed. Every inmate was stripped and washed in the same tub of water and dried off with communal towels. They were given workhouse-issue clothing and directed to stinking, rat-infested wards where canvas beds stretched out between poles like hammocks.
Breakfast at 6:00 A.M. might be bread and a gruel called “skilly” made with oatmeal or moldy meat. Then the inmate was put to work, performing the same cruel tasks that had been used to punish criminals for hundreds of years: pounding stones, scrubbing, picking oakum (untwisting old rope to reuse the hemp), or sent to the infirmary or mortuary to clean the sick ward or tend to the dead. It was rumored among inmates that the incurably sick in the infirmary were “polished off” with poison. Dinner was at 8:00 P.M., and the inmates got leftovers from the infirmary’s patients. Filthy fingers attacked mounds of table scraps and stuffed them into ravenous mouths. Sometimes there was suet soup.
Guests of the casual wards were required to stay at least two nights and one day, and to refuse to work was to end up homeless again. Rosier accounts of these degrading places can be found in gilded publications that tend to mention only “shelters” for the poor that provided uncomfortable but clean beds and “good meat soup” and bread. Such civilized charity was not to be found in London’s East End unless it was at Salvation Army shelters, which were generally avoided by the street-smart who had gotten cynical. Ladies of the Salvation Army regularly visited doss-houses to preach God’s generosity to paupers who knew better. Hope was not for a fallen woman like Mary Ann Nichols. The Bible could not save her.