Number twenty-nine Hanbury proved to be a broken-down tenement in sooty brick. It housed seventeen souls, several of whom were employed in a nearby cigar factory. It was a working-man’s tenement, not a doss house where the homeless flopped for the night. Two doors led in from the street. One took residents into the house proper and another led directly to the yard behind the squat brick structure. Margo and Shahdi Feroz chose this second door, opening it with a creaking groan of rusting hinges. The noise startled Margo.
And brought instant attention from an older woman who leaned out a second-story window. “Where d’you think you’re going, eh?” the irate resident shouted down. “I know your kind, missies! How many times I got to tell your kind o’ girls, keep out me yard! Don’t want nuffink to do wiv the likes o’ you round me very own ‘ouse! Go on wiv you, now, get on!”
Caught red-handed trying to sneak into the yard, Margo did the only thing she could do, the one thing any East End hussy would’ve been expected to do. She let the door close with a bang and shouted back up, “It’s me gormless father I’m after, nuffink else! Lager lout’s said ‘e ‘ad a job, workin’ down to Lime’ouse docks, an’ where do I see ‘im, but coming out the Blue Boy public ‘ouse, ‘at’s where! Followed ‘im I did, wiv me ma, ‘ere. Sore ‘im climb over the fence into this ‘ere yard. You seen ‘im, lady? You do, an’ you shout for a bottle an’ stopper, y’hear?”
“Don’t you go tellin’ an old woman any of your bloody Jackanories! Off wiv you, or I’ll call for that copper me own self!”