WITH 4 DAYS TO GO, thanks to the generosity of 14 more donors since yesterday, we have now raised £17,766 with £7,234 left to find to reach our target of £25,000 to publish WOMEN AT WORK, Sarah Ainslie’s East End Portraits 1992-2025. CLICK HERE TO VISIT OUR CROWDFUND

Kyri demonstrates a pattern for a circular pleat

In a remote corner of Tottenham, in the midst of an industrial estate, sandwiched between a kosher butcher and a panel beater, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I found Rosamanda Pleaters. We dipped our heads and stepped through a low door to enter a crowded factory. As our eyes accustomed to the gloom, we peered into the depths where lines of machines filled the space, appearing to recede into the infinite distance. We expected a horde of ghostly workers shrouded in cobwebs, but on closer examination the machines were all idle.

Yet, in a pool of bright light, one man worked alone, wrestling cloth, cardboard, sticks and string, subjecting them to his will with expert control. This was the legendary pleater Kyriacos Hadjikyriacou, universally known as Kyri. He removed a piece of silk from between a pair of cardboard patterns that were folded into an intricate design which they imparted to the cloth, as delicate as a butterfly wing and as richly coloured as the plumage of an exotic bird. We were entranced.

The magic of pleating is to take diaphanous fabric and give it volume and structure through a geometric series of creases. These pleats move, amplifying the gesture and motion of the wearer in unexpected and sensuous ways. This is the spell that pleating can impart to clothes. Kyri is the grand master of it.

He has contrived hundreds of unique designs for pleats, spending months conjuring his intricate notions. Pleating is his imaginative world. ‘This one is stars on one side and squares on the other,’ he explained unrolling an elaborately folded piece of cardboard that quivered as if it had a life of its own. ‘I call it ‘Crown Pleat,” he confided to me in a proud conspiratorial whisper. ‘I have never used it yet.’ Kyri finds inspiration for new designs in pantiles, scallop shells and hieroglyphics.

All day the phone rings and breathless fashion assistants arrive from London’s top designers – Christopher Kane, Alexander McQueen, Jasper Conran, among others so fancy we are not permitted to mention – bringing lengths of cloth for Kyri to work his transformative wizardry upon.

A tall slim man with pale grey hair and straggling white moustache set off by his mediterranean colouring, Kyri cuts a handsome figure. Of philosophical nature, he is untroubled by the endless to and fro, delighting in the attention and maintaining a confident equanimity throughout. He may serve the capricious world of fashion, but his is the realm of geometry and chemistry. Cardboard, sticks and string are his tools, and steam is the alchemical essence that enables him to work his sorcery upon the cloth, subjecting it to his desire.

“As a pleater, you are always learning. Even after forty-three years of pleating, I am learning. It is not just a question of mastering three or five styles, you have to use your imagination. You have know engineering and about how machines work, you have to know geometry to understand how the patterns function, you have to know chemistry to predict how the material will react.

There’s a lot of things you have to know to be a pleater. It’s a talent. I create new things everyday. I design my own patterns. If I see something I like, I work how it is done and I design my own version. At the beginning, I used to come in every Saturday just to experiment with styles. I tried different ways to use the machines to find new styles. I have two hundred different designs of my own.

Hand pleating is done by placing the cloth between two paper patterns, known as ‘pleating crafts.’ They are made of a special paper that is water resistant and does not get wet. You open the craft, stretch the two papers and lay down the material, sandwiched between the two papers. Then you tie them tight and put them in the steam.

The easiest fabric for pleating is polyester. It holds the pleats well, you can even put it in a washing machine. In hand-pleating, you use only steam but in machine-pleating you use the heat of the machine and steam too, so it is more powerful and will resist washing. I have all these machines. One can do fifteen hundred different styles, another is a fancy one that do a couple of thousand different styles.

I don’t need to advertise, people come and find me, and they keep coming back. I tell them,’If you need me, you find me!’ If I make something, it has to be of the standard that I would like to buy – which means it is good to give to a customer.

My work is perfect pleating. It is rare. There are some patterns, I am the only person in England who can do them. Other pleaters do standard pleats and they think that’s everything but it is not. It can take six months to design a pattern. I might start work on it at Christmas and finish in June. I did not  know how to do it, but slowly I work it out. I enjoy pleating because I am always creating things. When I started, I didn’t know anything about this.

I have an Msc in Agriculture. I finished my studies in Athens in 1975 and, because of the war in which Turkey invaded Cyprus, I came to England as a refugee. I married my wife Eleni and in the beginning I worked in a knitting factory, Sharon Fabrics in Holloway. After they closed down, I worked at a water plant, analysing water in  Crews Hill in Enfield for bacteria. But somebody told me to push a wheelbarrow and I didn’t like it so I left.

After that, I was asked to work for a pleater in Hackney and that was how I started. In 1980, me and two other people, we opened a knitting factory in Clerkenwell near Smithfield Market. My wife worked in Holborn as a bookkeeper then. She asked me, ‘How much does it cost to set up a pleating factory? I told her, ‘Maybe two or three thousand pounds.’ So that’s what we did, we started in business together and we employed two boys. Eighteen months later, we had a fire and all the others left but I carried on.

I have been here in this workshop in Tottenham for twenty-six years. I had a pleater who passed away before my wife eighteen months ago, so I am on my own. There’s just me now but in the past I used to have seven pleaters working for me. All these machines I have are from factories that closed and nobody else wants them There is no business any more for volume. All the High St shops manufacture in the Far East, my business is just with designers now.

I used to work on Sundays, I arrived at eight o’clock every morning and worked until seven. Now I arrive at nine o’clock and work until five, just weekdays. I will carry on as long as I can. I said to my children, ‘I am not going to retire because – for me – if somebody retires they are waiting for death.’ It’s true! If you put your car outside for six months and don’t use it, the tyres and battery go flat. The human being is like that I think.”

Kyri lays a pattern on the table

Kyri has over two hundred patterns for pleating that he has designed

Kyri shows off a favourite pleating pattern

‘I call this ‘Crown Pleat”

‘Craft pleats’ ready for use

Kyri places weights upon the patterns to make sure the fabric is tightly sandwiched

Kyri removes the weights once the pattern is compressed

Kyri rolls the patterns to squeeze the fabric into the form of the patterns

Kyri places the patterns between two splints

Kyri ties the splints together

Kyri concertinas the patterns as tight as possible between the splints

The completed ‘pleating craft’ is ready for the steam oven

Kyri’s steam ovens where the pleats are baked

Kyri shows off his pleating machine

Last minute maintenance to the steamer

A pleated silk shirt ready to be steamed flat

Kyri the pleater

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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With seven days to go, thanks to generosity of 132 donors, we have raised £14,081 towards our target of £25,000 to publish Women at Work, Sarah Ainslie’s East End Portraits 1992-2025. If you have not contributed please consider doing so at this crucial moment. If you have contributed please help us by persuading your friends, family and workmates  to do so too. Click here to visit the crowdfund

Curator of Human Osteology, Rebecca Redfern watches over her charge (Portrait by Sarah Ainslie)

In his Survey of London 1589, John Stow wrote about the discovery of pots of Roman gold coins buried in Spitalfields and it had long been understood that ancient tombs once lined the road approaching London, just as they did along the Appian Way in Rome. Yet it was only in the nineteen-nineties, when large scale excavations took place prior to the redevelopment of the Spitalfields Market, that the full extent of the Roman cemetery was uncovered.

In March 1999, a Roman stone sarcophagus containing a rare lead coffin decorated with scallop shells came to light, indicating the burial of someone of great wealth and high status. Grave goods of fine glass and jet were buried between the coffin and the sarcophagus. It was the first unopened sarcophagus to be found in London for over a century and when the entire assemblage was removed to the London Museum, the coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman in her early twenties, buried in ceremonial fashion. In the week after the opening of the coffin, ten thousand Londoners came to pay their respects to the Spitalfields Roman woman. She was the most astonishing discovery of the excavations yet, as the years have passed and more has been learnt about her, the enigma of her identity has become the subject of increasing fascination.

Analysis of residue in the coffin revealed that her head lay upon a pillow of bay leaves, her body was embalmed with oils from the Arab world and the Mediterranean, and wrapped in silk which had been interwoven with fine gold thread. Traces of Tyrian purple were also found, perhaps from a blanket laid over the coffin. Such an elaborate presentation suggests she may have been displayed to her family and friends seventeen hundred years ago as part of funeral rites.

The sarcophagus and grave goods are on public exhibition at the Museum but, thanks to Rebecca Redfern, Curator of Human Osteology, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I had the privilege to visit the Rotunda where the human remains are stored and view the skeleton of the Spitalfields Roman woman. Deep in a windowless concrete bunker filled with metal shelving stacked with cardboard boxes, containing the remains of thousands of Londoners from the past, lay the bones of the woman. We stood in silent reverence with just the sound of distant traffic echoing.

Rebecca is the informal guardian of the Spitalfields woman and remembers switching  on the television to watch news of the discovery as a student. Today, she has a four-year-old daughter of her own. “The work went on for so many years that a lot of couples met working in Spitalfields,” Rebecca admitted to me, “and there is now a whole generation of ‘Spital babies’ born to those archaeologists.”

“She’s five foot three and delicately built, petite like a ballet dancer,” Rebecca continued, turning her attention swiftly from the living to the dead and gesturing protectively to the bones laid out upon the table. While some might objectify the skeleton as a specimen, Rebecca relates to the Spitalfields Roman woman and all the other twenty thousand remains in her care as human beings. “They’re able to tell us so much about themselves, it’s impossible not to regard them as people,” she assured me.

Recent research into the isotopes present in the teeth of the Spitalfields Roman woman have revealed an exact match with those found in Imperial Rome, which means that her origin can be traced not just to Italy but to Rome itself. “I find it very sad that she came so far and then died so young,” Rebecca confided, recognising the lack of any indication of the cause of death or whether the woman had given birth. Contemplating the presence of the skeleton with its delicate bones dyed brown by lead, it is apparent that the Spitalfields Roman woman holds her secrets and has many stories yet to tell.

More than seventy-five Roman burials were uncovered at the same time as the sarcophagus, many interred within wooden coffins and some only in shrouds. You might say these represented the earliest wave of immigration to arrive in Spitalfields.

“People were so mobile,” Rebecca explained to me, “We found a fourteen-year-old girl from North Africa whose mother was European. A legion from North Africa was sent to guard Hadrian’s Wall and we have found tagine cooking pots that may been theirs. I pity those men – how they must have suffered in the cold.”

The only Roman sarcophagus discovered in London in our time was uncovered in Spitalfields in 1999

Inside the stone sarcophagus an elaborately decorated lead coffin was discovered

At the Museum of London, the debris was removed to uncover the pattern of scallop shells

The lead coffin was opened to reveal the body of a young woman

Photographs of coffin & excavations copyright © London Museum

Portrait of Rebecca Redfern & photographs of skeletal details copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Inside the Rotunda At The London Museum

Next tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields on Saturday 16th May. Click here to book

The recipe is old but the cakes are fresh

This is Harry Thomas, baker at Townhouse, who makes all the cakes for our walking tours. His Queen Cakes from a recipe of 1721, served in the drawing room of the three hundred year house overlooking Christ Church, Spitalfields, have proved to be the ideal restorative for guests when they put their feet up and relax after a ramble round the neighbourhood.

Yet Harry has another string to his bow, since he matches his superlative flair in baking with an equal talent in music and songwriting – as Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie and I discovered when we joined him in the basement kitchen to hear the full story and observe the culinary spectacle of baking in progress.

“I would describe myself as a baker by trade and a musician in the rest of my time. Music has always been my passion and I played in a band for seven years when I was at school, growing up in Maidenhead, and then again at Goldsmith’s College where I studied Media & Communications. I graduated five years ago and started baking at Townhouse when I was twenty-one years old.

By then I was already in The Jacques. We are a touring band with more of an audience in France and continental Europe than here, so for the first couple of years, before Covid, we toured extensively. We are working on our second album now – I am a singer and we all write our songs together.

I have always been passionate about cooking and especially baking. My mother is a nursery school teacher, and we baked together and she took me to music lessons. As a child, I did not like reading fiction, instead I read cook books – that was what people bought me at Christmas.

At first, I read children’s cook books but then I graduated to adult ones at school, supplemented by Youtube cookery shows and the Food Network. As a consequence, I am not afraid of creating aggregates by taking parts of one recipe and the combining it with another. My parents will follow a recipe by the book exactly whereas  I do not. The more batches of cakes I have baked, the more I have come to understand the variables which gives me leeway in terms of how I want a cake to turn out.

Since I came to work here, I have introduced more cakes into the repertoire although I still make a lot of those that were being baked before I arrived. But the more I have baked them, and by listening to customers’ preferences, I have evolved the recipes.

Flavour-wise, I just play around with things until I am happy. I bake cakes the way I like them and I will not bake something that I would not be interested in eating myself. I like old recipes and cakes that remind me of the cakes that my mum would have baked or those I remember at bake sales at village fairs.

I want my cakes to make people feel special. When I introduced the Bakewell cake, I liked it because it was very crumbly, and I dust it with icing sugar and it feels special without being pretentious. It is very simple, equal measurements of everything in the cake and it just needs to be done correctly, with care.

I have a great balance in my life of baking and music. I could not have dreamt of a better balance of my passions in life. Obviously, I would like my music to advance and we have a record deal and a publishing deal. I am very uncompromising in that I always wanted my job to be rewarding and it is instantly gratifying. I get to cook all day and regularly go and play music all evening. Sometimes I get up early and go to the gym, bake cakes all day, and go and play music until midnight. Then I go to bed and come back and do it all over again!”

At the foot of the page in Mary Stockdale’s recipe book of 1721 is the recipe for Queen Cakes

Harry and his celebrated Queen Cakes, laced with mace and nutmeg

Photographs of Harry Thomas copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Happy in the crypt beneath John Soane’s St John on Bethnal Green of 1828, Piotr Frac works peacefully making beautiful stained glass while the world passes by at this busiest of East End crossroads. Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I visited Piotr in his subterranean workshop and were delighted to observe his dexterity in action and admire some of his recent creations.

Piotr’s appealingly modest demeanour and soft spoken manner belie the moral courage and determination it has cost him to succeed in this rare occupation. This is to say nothing of his extraordinary skill in the cutting of glass and the melding of lead to fashion such accomplished work, or his creative talent in contriving designs that draw upon the age-old traditions of stained glass but are unmistakably of our own time.

Gripped by a passion for the magic of stained glass at an early age, Piotr always knew this what what he had to do. Yet even to begin to make his way in his chosen profession, Piotr had to leave his home country and find a whole new life, speaking another language in another country.

It is our gain that Piotr brought his talent and capacity for work to London. That he found his spiritual home in the East End is no accident, since he follows in the footsteps of centuries of skilled migrants, starting with the Huguenots in the sixteenth century, who have immeasurably enriched our culture with their creative energies.

“I am from a working class family in Byton, Silesia, in the south of Poland. My interest in stained glass began when I was ten or eleven years old and I went with my school to see Krakow Cathedral. The stained glass was something beautiful and that was the first time in my life I saw it. I was inspired by the colours and the light, it still excites me.

I always had an interest in drawing and painting – so, after high school, I went to a school of sculpture where they taught stained glass restoration. This was more than twenty years ago, but it was the start of my journey with stained glass. After I got my diploma in the restoration of stained glass, I worked on a project at a church for a few weeks before university. I studied art education in Silesia and I learnt painting, sculpture and calligraphy. I believe every artist needs a background in drawing and painting.

My ambition was to do stained glass, but there were hardly any jobs of any kind – I sold fish in the market in winter and I worked in a hospital, I took whatever I could get. Around 2005, I decided to leave the country. I had some Polish friends who had come to London and they helped me find a place to stay in Brixton. In the beginning, it was very difficult for me because of the language barrier. Without English, it was hard for me to communicate and find a job here. I worked on building sites. Every morning I got up at five and I walked around with this piece of paper which told me how to ask for a job. Someone wrote down a phonetic version of the words for me and I asked at building sites. After two weeks, I got a labouring job.

I lived in many places south of the river but seven years ago I moved to East London and I have stayed here ever since. At first I lived in the Hackney Rd near Victoria Park and I am still in that area, close the Roman Rd. I visited stained glass workshops but I could not get a job because I could not communicate. I did not want to work as a labourer forever so I decided to go to language school to learn English and this helped me a lot. At the English school here in the crypt of St John’s Bethnal Green, my teacher asked us to prepare a talk about myself and my interests. So I talked about my profession as a stained glass artist and my teacher introduced me to a stone carver in the crypt workshop. He told me, ‘If you are willing to teach stained glass classes, you are welcome to use the workshop.’ I started eight years ago with one student.

My first commission was to repair a Victorian glass door. Most of my work has been Victorian and Edwardian windows and doors, which has allowed me to survive because there are plenty that need repair or replacement. There are not a lot of creative commissions on offer but sometimes people want something different.

Two years ago, I won a competition to design a window for St John’s Hackney. It took a year for them to approve the design and I am in the middle of working on it now. I need to finish and install it. Also the London Museum bought a piece of mine. It is gorilla from a triptych of gorillas and it will be displayed there next year.

Once I moved to East London, I felt I belonged to here – not only because I started my workshop but because I met my wife, Akiko, here. In 2016, I become a British citizen so now I am a permanent member of the community.

Stained glass is a wonderful medium to work with and always looks fantastic because it changes all the time with the light, in different times of the day and seasons of the year. I believe there is a great potential for stained glass in modern architecture.

These days I am able to make a living and I would like to become more recognised as a stained glass artist. I am seeking more ambitious commissions.”

Constructing a nineteenth century door panel

A panel from Piotr’s triptych of gorillas

Piotr’s first panel designed and made in London

Piotr with one of his stained glass classes in the crypt of St John’s Bethnal Green

Repairing a Victorian glass door

Restoring nineteenth century church glass

Before repair

After repair

Piotr Frac, Stained Glass Artist

Studio portraits © Sarah Ainslie

Contact Piotr Frac direct to commission stained glass

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I have collaborated with photographer Sarah Ainslie twice in the course of my writing, both occasions were creating portraits of local cafes: Paul Rothe & Sons, near Daunt Books in Marylebone where I work, and Beppe’s Cafe in Smithfield Market near where I live. I was delighted that these pieces were published here by The Gentle Author.

In addition to writing Spitalfields Life, The Gentle Author also produces books, so I was very excited to learn that Spitalfields Life is running a crowdfunding campaign to publish a book of Sarah Ainslie’s portraits of women at work, accompanied by an exhibition of the photos. I was curious to find out how this came about, so last week I met Sarah for a chat about her life as a photographer. I began by asking her when she started taking photographs.

‘When I was ten I had a little box brownie, I think it was called a Brownie 44a and it had two different exposures, a twelve and a thirteen, so you could just press the button. I took pictures of animals and family, things like that.’

Sarah wasn’t interested in the professions suggested to her by her headmistress. ‘I think I always wanted to go into the arts. I had my portrait painted with my brother when I was nine and it was such a visceral experience. I remember thinking at the time, ‘I absolutely love this’. It was the smell of paint. We had these plums to eat and we would just sit there. My brother hated it. It wasn’t a great painting because my brother really didn’t like doing it but it was a pivotal moment for me, being in a room where someone is painting – the smell of it – very physical, and that’s the thing I love about photography and being in the dark room.

I wasn’t very good at painting or drawing so I went to Derby Art College to do photography. It was very male, there were only three of us girls in our year. We shared a dark room and we were doing quite wacky stuff, while the guys were doing pictures of cars and things. Of course, we weren’t interested in anything like that. We were painting emulsion on paper and being experimental. The three of us are still in touch. One is Canadian and I am going to be part of a show with her next year in Canada.

Then I went on a course in printmaking in Oxford, doing etching and lithographs, and I worked with two tutors as their assistant, printing editions. I had never done it before.  That’s what brought me to London, the tutors rented a printing studio and asked me if I would come and be their assistant, printing their editions. That would have been in the late seventies.

We decided we needed a space for the etching press, so I was wandering around the East End looking for studios and found myself down in Wapping where I found a studio which we used to do the printmaking. Then I took on another floor which was about 4,000 square feet and divided it up into studios. I did most of it myself, apart from the electricity and plumbing. It was right on the river, an incredible place. Today it is a gated community but it was still a working industrial building then. There were masses of artists in all these buildings and I wanted to have my own space, and I lived there. It was very raw.

I got involved with taking photographs for theatre companies as well as doing my own projects, Brick Lane, Smithfield Meat Market and Shoreditch, at night. I was working mainly in fringe theatre, I really enjoyed working with the Women’s Theatre Group, Shared Experience, Theatre de Complicite and the Almeida.

I built my first darkroom in Wapping. There were six of us and I rented it for a tiny amount of money and then sublet the space. I got to know artists who were living there as well and met a couple of filmmakers Sally Potter and Jo Ann Kaplan, and started working with them. I was working on The Gold Diggers, it was night shoots in the middle of the city and was amazing, filming in all these little hidden alleys around Bank.’

The more we talk, the more fascinated I become with how Sarah found her connection with the city and the area she has loved for so long. ‘I did quite a lot of work with City Limits. They had no money, so when they asked you to do something you got paid hardly anything, but they published my theatre pictures which was helpful for me because it meant other theatre companies saw my work.

When we were thrown out of the building in Wapping, three or four of us got together and found this other building off Columbia Rd. At that time, the whole area was all about furniture and furniture restoration. It had no electricity or running water so we had to put all that in. Friends said this was a mad place to be buying, but it’s where I am now and where I have been since the mid-eighties.’

I tell Sarah that it is no wonder that she feels embedded in the East End, but then she tells me how she worked in South Africa, a fundamental experience in shifting her photography away from theatre. ‘I wanted to get more involved with other projects and be more collaborative,’ she confirms.

‘I went to South Africa with a company called Theatre Nomad and met a woman who asked if I would I like to visit a township. ‘I work with a group of women there and I’m really happy to take you in,’ she said, ‘I’m always asking people to come but no-one ever does.’ So we went and met some of the women, and I did some portraits. Then I realised I want to go back and do more, but I had to consider how I could do that because I am not part of that world. I came up with the idea of giving the women disposable cameras so that they took pictures and then I could make portraits of them.’

At the same time Sarah began a project focussing on striptease in the East End. ‘It happened after an exhibition at Shoreditch. The guy who ran the gallery asked ‘Do you think you would be interested in taking pictures of the strippers? I was keen because the photography I had done before had been in the street but I was keen to be within a community.

Lara, one of the strippers, was trying to organise a fanzine. She wanted to have the strippers’ words and some pictures of them, and pull it all together. A lot of the clubs were closing at that point so I felt it was important. There was one on the Hackney Rd and all the strippers worked in four or five different pubs down towards Bishopsgate.  Because she trusted me, Lara took me in and I worked in the way I had worked with the women in Africa. I hung out in the toilets and the back rooms while they were changing. There was a camaraderie between the women, they looked after each other in the same way as the women in South Africa did. This project became the book, Baby Oil & Ice.’

In 1992, Sarah was commissioned by Hackney Museum to document the working lives of women in Hackney and she has continued to photograph women at work ever since, including through her work as Contributing Photographer for Spitalfields Life.

During the hour and a half we spent together I became totally drawn into Sarah’s working life as a photographer. I am amazed by how these projects have taken her into so many different worlds. To Sarah, this is her daily work but to me it is extraordinary. It reminds me of a friend’s catchphrase ‘be bold and proceed.’ When I told Sarah this she said, ‘It’s funny because I never think of myself as being bold at all.’

Sarah Ainslie and The Gentle Author have worked together on many stories over the past sixteen years. In their commitment to supporting and recording lives in their community they are perfectly matched. I wish them every success in reaching their goal of publishing Women at Work: East End Portraits 1992-2025.

Stephen & Paul Rothe. ‘I said look at each other and, of course, what happens is that when they turn back to the camera they relax a bit and smile.‘

Portrait of Daniela and her cousin Sergio outside Beppe’s Cafe in Smithfield

‘Working in this area in the eighties, I was fascinated by Brick Lane market, a surreal place where dramas were being played out in the streets. There was so much chaos, life and energy, with people displaying their personal possessions to sell on the pavements.’

‘Smithfield Market had a strange subterranean feel, where the darkness and glowing lights lit rows of animals hanging off their hooks, reminding me of a Rembrandt. This world I explored has now completely transformed into something much more clinical, losing the soul and humanity of the place it once was.’

Portrait of Rosie in her home in the Grahamstown Township, South Africa

Photos by participants in the Grahamstown project. ‘I had to think of a way of collaborating rather than just going in, taking the pictures and leaving. It was amazing. I went two or three times over a year and then we had an exhibition – part of the Grahamstown Festival. The township had never been part of the festival. It was a great project.’

Dawn, Stripper

‘I was invited to photograph women who worked in the strip pubs in Shoreditch in 1999, it was an invitation into another world. In the very intimate area of the toilets and changing rooms I heard stories about their lives, laughter, banter, boredom, drinking, glamour and camaraderie. I was there when the outfits were chosen for each strip…and there when they returned naked holding their discarded clothes and still wearing their heels.’

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Click here to support publication of Sarah Ainslie’s WOMEN AT WORK

Click here to order a copy of Journal of a Man Unknown

Today I publish Novelist & Historian, Gillian Tindall‘s exploration of the lost mansions of Stepney that came to light during the Elizabeth Line construction

Three hundred years ago, Stepney was still green fields with just a frill of ribbon-development along the main road and around St Dunstan’s. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though terraces of neat Regency houses were spreading fast, there was pasture land beyond. The Stepney of Cockney tradition only arrived with the expansion of the docks, the laying of railway lines to service them, and the rapid in-filling of the fields with rows and rows of small houses for the population that provided the work force.

But what was Stepney like before – much longer ago – when London was still contained within its medieval walls whose gates shut at night? By one of those flukes of time and chance, it was the construction of the Elizabeth Line which helped literally to bring to light what Stepney once was. Near the church, where the line divides in two, a big access and ventilation shaft was constructed on the site of one of the area’s oldest recorded buildings. From early Victorian times until the Second World War, streets covered this acre of land and there was no possibility of recovering the lost big house that only existed as a vague folk memory. Yet bombs and planners between them have so devastated this area that archaeological excavation has now become possible. By this means, the foundations of long ago, cess-pits, animal bones, shards of pottery and glass and even the seeds of plants that once grew round a moat, have again been revealed.

The archaeologists of the London Museum, who undertook the excavations, knew from local lore and earlier, partial digs that something important had stood there. Maps as late as the nineteenth century record ‘King John’s Palace’  – or, at least, the towered gateway to it. In fact, there is no evidence that King John (reigning from 1199 to 1216) had a house in Stepney. It has been said that whenever the origins of a venerable building passed from the memory of man, it is ascribed to the wicked King John because there was only one, making him easier to distinguish from the bevy of royal Henries, Edwards and Richards.

The gateway, which survived till 1858 when it was witlessly demolished by the non-conformist institution occupying the site, appears to have belonged to a Tudor edifice dating from after 1450, well over two hundred years later than John’s reign, though it may have been constructed upon the foundations of an earlier building. It is this Tudor house, complete with a moat, that the archaeologists have been excavating – thought to be the ‘Great Place’ belonging to a John Fenne, that was rented to a Lord Darcy when Henry VIII was a young and popular monarch, and the divorces, the beheadings and the Reformation lay in the future.

This was not the only grand house set in these fields at that time. Stepney, an easy walk or ride from London proper, was becoming popular as a dormitory suburb for prominent courtiers and men of the City. There were several big houses not far from St Dunstan’s church, including one where the City Farm is now that was owned by Henry Colet, a leading member of the Mercers Company. This appears to have been a traditional timbered courtyard house, not quite as grand as Lord Darcy’s home even if the Colets turned it into a meeting place for the great and good of their day.

Only one of the twenty-two children that Dame Colet bore survived, a tragic record even for those times of high infant mortality, but John Colet, the sole survivor, was to become famous. As Dean of St Paul’s, he founded the school that still bears that name in west London today. Upon his father’s death he acquired his acquired a large, timbered house for himself near by, set among orchards at the corner of today’s Salmon Lane. Here he entertained the leading European thinkers of his generation, including the reformist scholar Erasmus.

Dean Colet died of ‘the sweating sickness’ in 1519 which may have been just as well, for if he had lived fifteen years longer he – with his radical views on religion – might well have lost his head to Henry VIII, like his younger friend and protegé, Thomas More. During the chaos of the Reformation, it was probably at the former Colet house that Thomas Cromwell, the King’s right-hand man, lived in state. He sent his neighbour Darcy to the gallows for opposing the King – with Darcy angrily prophesying that one day Cromwell’s head would be cut off too. And so it was.

Two generations later, after Elizabeth I had been Queen for many years, life was more settled and new money flowed from overseas. The moated Place with a gatehouse in Stepney was acquired by Henry Somerset, later Marquis of Worcester. He undertook works to smarten and modernise the property, and his name became permanently attached to it. Somerset came near to losing his own head in the next round of mayhem – the Civil War and the execution of Charles I – and, after him, the supposed ‘King John’s Palace’ became used by as series of non-conformist religious groups. A Meeting House, assorted chapels and then terraced houses were built on the gardens.

A new gentry replaced the old in Stepney. These were men who made fortunes in foreign trade and Stepney, near to where their ships were berthed, was well-recognised as ‘a convenient spot for the habitation of mariners.’ Some lived in the old, courtyard houses of earlier generations, while others built themselves modern gentlemen’s residences in classical brick. In the late eighteenth century, the old Colet house became the ‘Spring Gardens Coffee House.’ Then, in the nineteenth century it, like Dean Colet’s house, Worcester House was destroyed when these ancient mansions were pulled down to be replaced by narrow streets, as Stepney was swallowed up by London.

Now those streets are gone, the greater part of them needlessly demolished not by World War II bombs but by post-war planners dreaming of ‘green spaces’ and ‘radiant towers.’ Yet incendiary bombs did fall close to St Dunstan’s church onto the site of Worcester House. They destroyed a Baptist chapel which, when it was built in the eighteen forties, had been only a few yards along the road from the then-just-surviving gate-house to ‘King John’s Palace’. The chapel’s mock-Tudor doorway alone still stands. I suspect that increasing numbers of people may think this nineteenth century remnant is a legacy from medieval times – King John lives!

A similar illusion is also available in the heart of the City Farm just down the road, on what was once the south side of Worcester House’s grounds, near the Colets’ home. Here, in the eighteen sixties, a grand, Congregationalist church was built in the fashionable Gothic style. It too fell to firebombs early in the War. Today, sacks and seed boxes are piled up and free-range chickens peck round the stone wall and arched doorway that is all that remains. So battered have these not-very-ancient structures been, by misfortune, abandonment  and the weather, that it is quite possible to believe that you are gazing at something far older – and the long-ago grand people of Stepney do not seem so far away.

Old stone wall at Stepney City Farm

Reconstruction of the Stepney Moated Manor by Faith Vardy (Copyright © MOLA from “Stepney Green: Moated Manor House to City Farm” published by TfL)

Dean Colet by Hans Holbein the younger

Dean Colet’s house, c.1790

The Baptist College, 1840

Gloomy Sunday by John Claridge (Stepney in the sixties)

St Dunstan’s church

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Denise Martin, Street Sweeper, Hackney 1992

Annette Wakerley, Locksmith, Roman Rd 2018

Ivy Harris & E Vidal, Cleaners, Homerton Hospital, Hackney 1992

Sarah Pillar, Senior Midwife, Barkantine Birth Centre, Isle of Dogs 2012

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Lilly Claridge, Volunteer, Age Concern, Hackney 1992

Dr-Anu-Kumar, GP Elsdale Surgery, Hackney 2023

Rosemary More, Architect, Hackney 1992

Lynda Oazer, Campaigner, Solidarity Britannia Food Bank, Bethnal Green

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Donna Wood, Postwoman, Emma St Sorting Office 1992

Donna Wood, Postwoman, Emma St Sorting Office 2022

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Centenarian Alie Touw has lived in this country for over half a century and made Spitalfields her home in recent decades. Yet if circumstances had been different, or if Alie had followed her father’s advice, she never would have left Holland at all – as she confessed to me. ”Please don’t go to England,’ my father said, ‘The people there, they look down on small countries.'”

The story of the Dutch in London is rarely told but just a few minutes walk east from Alie’s home is a street once known as ‘Dutch Tenterground,’ with reference to the community of diamond cutters and cigar makers who came here from the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. And just a hundred yards west from Alie’s home, a Dutch Church has stood in Austin Friars in the City of London since 1550. Today Alie is one of the longest serving of its congregation. It was this church that brought Alie to her current home, when Alie’s husband became caretaker there in the eighties

Such is Alie’s moral stature and seniority within the Dutch community in London, whenever a new ambassador is appointed from the Netherlands, I am told it is an accepted protocol that they invite Alie to dinner at the embassy.

At one hundred years old, Alie remains in robust spirits and reassures me when  – in order to arrange a photographer to take her portrait – I enquire of her future plans. ‘Don’t worry,’ she jokes, ‘I am not going to die.’ Mystified by her longevity, Alie is regretful that she has outlived all her siblings, her husband and her eldest son.

Yet she is fascinated and engaged with the lives of the young women who visit as carers, permitting her to live independently. Most are immigrants who are overqualified but accept menial work as a necessary sacrifice towards building a new life in Britain. Alie appreciates their fortitude because theirs is a struggle that she understands keenly.

“I came over from Holland with my husband and two sons in 1956.

My brother-in-law had a factor in Arnhem, manufacturing car radiators, which was destroyed in the war. Opposite was a school where the English were treating their wounded, so he went across to talk with the officers who were staying there. ‘What are you missing?’ he asked, ‘Do you need anything?’ They replied, ‘We would love to have a bath,’ so he said, ‘You can come over to my house and have a bath.’ He made friends with the English officers and they said, ‘Why don’t you start again in England?’ He left in 1947. He took some of his employees and started up his business again in the Midlands and he did very well.

When he came back to visit us after a couple of years, he said, ‘You’re still struggling.’ If you lose everything, it takes so long to recover. If you have children, they always come first. I could sleep on the floor but I wanted a bed for my child. I had lost my sewing machine which I used to make all the clothes for my family. He said, ‘Why don’t you come to England as well?’ He talked us into it.

My husband was a chocolatier and came to London to look for a job and, eventually,  he found one at a factory in Finsbury Park. In Holland, there was no chocolate and he had been working in a bakery. We were still struggling in 1956, so we left for England with our two little boys. My younger son had been born in July 1945.

England had suffered as well, but they had more than we had. We shared a house with the manager of the chocolate factory and his wife, they lived downstairs and we lived upstairs. While we were there my sons went to the local school. I said, ‘If you make a friend, you can always bring him home.’ My younger son brought home a black boy who was his friend. The wife of the factory manager saw him come into the house. I thought it was normal, I never taught my children that you could not do that – all are welcome. He was a nice boy and I went to meet his mother who lived alone, supporting herself with her sewing machine.

A couple of days later, I had a knock at my door and the manager’s wife said, ‘Your son brought a black boy here.’ I said, ‘Yeah, so what?’ I did not see anything wrong in it. She said, ‘You cannot do that, it brings the whole neighbourhood down.’ Some time later, my husband said, ‘I have to leave.’ He got the sack from the chocolate factory and had to find another job.

He found a job in Winchester and we bought a house because there was nowhere available to rent. The factory belonged to an English woman whose husband was Dutch but after a couple of years they had a row and she said, ‘Out you go, and all the Dutch go too!’ My husband was out of a job again until he found one making chocolate in a big hotel at Marylebone, but then he had to stay in lodgings. I had a third baby by then and he came home on Friday night and left again on Sunday.

My brother-in-law said, ‘This is no good, I am going to look for a shop so you can all be together,’  and he found one with a three bedroom council flat above for us in Redditch, near Birmingham. It was a confectionery shop and we sold sweets, bread and cakes. It was in a run of ten shops and we spent twenty years working there from eight until six, Monday until Saturday. We worked so hard and we did survive, but then my husband had enough of it.

We heard that they were looking for a caretaker for the Dutch Church in the City of London. So my husband said, ‘I’m going to pack in, we’re going to sell this shop.’

We had several bakers working for us and about fifteen reps coming to the shop from different factories, and we had to buy stock and pay for it every month. We always needed the bank to help us out. We did well but the shop did not. Sainsburys opened and some of the other ten shops lost everything. I asked my husband, ‘Tell me exactly what you owe,’ and I sold the shop. I was not going to go and live in London if we still owed money to people in Redditch. We had to pay our debts off and then we could leave – and that was what we did.”

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Centenarian Alie Touw lives in a small flat in Petticoat Lane where she delights in domesticity. The kitchen is clean and well-organised, and Alie is especially pleased to have acquired a new grinder suitable for apple sauce. To impart the ideal flavour to apple sauce – she explains – you need to include the peel but then it raises the question of how to achieve the smooth puree that is the desired texture for proper apple sauce, which is why a grinder is essential.

Such culinary matters are important to Alie Touw, not because she is a pedant or unduly house proud but because she believes in the significance of small things. Alie understands that the culture of keeping house is the basis of a civilised life, she knows this because she has experienced the disruption when a family home is destroyed and the domestic world is displaced by chaos and violence.

When I visited Alie to hear of her experiences during the war, we sat together in conversation on either side of her kitchen table as the dusk gathered in the late afternoon. ‘I don’t like taking about the war,’ she confided to me with a frown, ‘My father lived through two wars but he would never speak about it.’ Only after she had finished telling her story did I fully understand her reluctance but, now that I know what happened, I am grateful to her for her astonishing testimony.

“We had a hard time in Holland during the war, especially the last winter of 1944, it was terrible. We were occupied for more than five years.

At that time you could not even trust your own neighbours. I was twenty-six, I had been married two years and I had a one year old baby. I had a pro-German neighbour living next to me in our house in Arnhem near the Rhine. He was from Germany and he had ten children who had to fight for his country. His wife was Dutch but she was even more pro-German, so we had to be very careful what we said to them. I never spoke to her anymore, just in case.

People were bringing Jewish children over the bridge, arranging for them to escape from Germany, and sometimes they stayed with me overnight before catching the train next morning to London. Another of my neighbours who I was very friendly with, she had five Jews hiding in the loft of her house. On the other side of me I had an old couple who knew I was alright, that I would never reveal anyone for the sake of a reward. He was in the resistance and every morning he listened to Radio London. He would tell me, ‘It’s going well, it’s going well’ and I would say, ‘Fine, fine.’ But then we all had to leave.

We had to leave our home on the 23rd September, two days after my birthday. Everybody had to leave or they would shoot us they said. We had no telephones at that time, so had no idea what was going on. Arnhem was not a small village, it was big town and everyone had to leave. There were dead soldiers lying in the street. My father went to look in the pockets of the dead soldiers and took their addresses, so he could inform the families. There was shooting through the streets and in the windows. Nothing was safe anymore. There was fighting everywhere and every night the sky was red with the buildings near the bridge over the Rhine burning. We saw people running through the street and we asked, ‘What’s happening?’ and they answered, ‘Our house is gone!’

The Red Cross gave us addresses where we could go to, so we started walking from town to town. I had to walk for hours with my baby. At first, we were staying with my parents, but we had to leave them. Me and my husband and his sister, all of us went walking until we came to the place. The weather was so bad and all we had was a bicycle. It was raining and there was thunder, everything. We got soaked. All we had was a small suitcase for ourselves and a big one for the baby. It was all we could carry, since they told us it would only be a fortnight, so we did not take much with us but it was nine months before we could come back, after the war ended.

They expected a fight over the bridge over the Rhine which was the border with Germany – they called it the Battle of Arnhem. The Germans wanted to hold it but on the other side were the English, American and Polish soldiers. There had been fighting in the streets. The British and the American and Polish wanted to cross the bridge over the Rhine but the Germans would not give up, and so many people died. The Dutch blew up the bridge.

On the first night, a farmer took us in and we had to sleep on the floor because they did not have beds for us. We did not know how long we could stay or how long the war would go on. They were very kind and they had plenty of food for us. We brought what we had with us but we did not have much.

We slept on straw on the floor of the stable with a blanket over us. After five or six weeks, my husband said, ‘We have to go, we are eating up all their food.’ So we had to leave and, one afternoon before we left, we were having a cup of tea and we looked outside and saw a familiar face, my brother-in-law. I rushed out and he told me he had been made to digging holes in the streets for people to jump into if a bomb fell. He had never lifted a spade or done physical work in his life before. So we brought him in and gave him a cup of tea, and he told us my father and my sister and her three little children were sleeping on the floor of a school.

We went to join them and stayed overnight. Of course, we had to ask permission and we asked to stay but we were told, ‘No get out, get out! There are too many here and we don’t trust you.’ So we had to go back.

We had to find a place to stay. My father-in-law contacted his daughter who lived in Aalsmeer near Amsterdam and she said, ‘Come over here.’ The Germans told us we could go to the north or the west. It took us four days to walk there. Every night, the Red Cross gave us an address of a place we could stay. I still cannot understand how they organised it, but there were so many who wanted to take in people who had been evacuated. We could not always stay together. It was November when we started walking, and it was raining and raining for days. We had no raincoats.

Everywhere the Germans stopped us to check our identities. From the beginning of the war, we had to show it wherever we went. We were not free any more. There was a curfew every night between ten and four o’clock when we could not go outside.

On 5th December, we arrived at my sister-in-law’s house. We had been travelling since September. My husband had made a little cart for wood which we put the baby in and attached to the back of the bicycle. When we still had five kilometres to go, a farmer with a big cart stopped. He said, ‘Put the whole lot on board, where do you have to go?’ It was evening already and he took us to my sister-in-law. She was standing outside and my father-in-law was there already. They took us in and we stayed there until the war was over.

In January, my husband said, ‘I am going to see what is left of our house.’ I do not know how he ever dared, we were not supposed to go there. It was so near the end of the war that I do not think the Germans had any ammunition in their guns to shoot you. There had been fighting in the street and lots of houses were damaged. He found our front door open, there was no glass left in the windows and the house was empty. When they blew up the bridge in Arnhem, all the windows in the nearby streets were broken. I had been saving up since I was eighteen and I had some lovely things, some brand new furniture, bed linen and cutlery. There were no curtains left, they even took the curtains off. All my husband found was some baby clothes and a little cot in the loft.

Food was very scarce at that time. The winter was long and cold, and food became so scarce that some people died of hunger. We had no money but you could not buy anything – the Germans stole everything. Every morning we went to farm to see if they had any food and they asked us, ‘You’ve come all the way from Arnhem, we don’t know who you are – we want to know if you have been with the Germans?’ There was a list of people who collaborated with the Germans and, after the war, they got those people. They shaved the heads of girls who had been with German soldiers.

At the farm, they said to us, ‘We will find out who you are, come back tomorrow.’ Next morning they saw us coming and gave us a sack of flour. My sister in law took us in even though she had hardly any food herself. There was almost no electricity or gas to cook but there were these communal kitchens and people brought what food they had to share. My husband said, ‘I will go and try to help out.’ My father-in-law went with him and they came back with soup.

Then the Germans became desperate. They could come to your house and if you said, ‘No you cannot come in,’ they would shoot you. You had to let them in. They went in all the houses looking for radios, although we had already got rid of them because we were not allowed to have radios. We were not supposed to listen to London but people hid radios.

All the young men were summoned to the quay on Saturday afternoon and were taken to Germany. My husband had to go. They were put on a boat to Amsterdam and from Amsterdam sent by train to Germany. It was April and the war was nearly over. I went to the quay to say goodbye to him and he said, ‘Don’t cry.’ They were told, ‘Take a blanket with you and a spoon and a mug,’ so that if somebody came to the train when it stopped they might get a drink or some food. The Dutch people did this. But my husband said, ‘I’m not taking a mug or a spoon, I’m going to escape.’

The train stopped at the border with Germany and my husband saw a familiar face. His brother lived there and he recognised his sister-in-law, going round with a kettle giving everyone on the train a drink. There were soldiers on the train and they were at a station. She saw my husband and said, ‘Peter, what are you doing here?’ He told her, ‘They took me, we have to go to Germany.’ She said, ‘You’re not, here’s the kettle,’ and she took him home. My brother-in-law was in the resistance. They stole German uniforms and put them on and went to the gaol every evening with a list of names from Aalsmeer. They said, ‘These people have to come out.’ Each time, they took a few out. It was unbelievable really what they did.

I did not know when my husband would come back, if ever, but one day the baker returned to Aalsmeer. The shortage of food got very bad and there was no soup kitchen anymore. It was just at the end of the war and my husband was still not back. There were no dogs and cats, people were eating the animals.

My son got very ill because he had no fruit, no vitamins. My sister was a nurse in another town and, before my husband left, he put the child on his bike to take him to the hospital where she worked and asked, ‘Can you take care of your nephew?’ They admitted him to the hospital and I did not see him for a fortnight. The hospitals still had a little food. They were able to make him better but he cried, ‘Mama, mama,’ day and night. He was just two years old and when the doctor saw him, he said, ‘This child is so ill.’  I had to send him to bed without any food. The boy should never have been born then, but what can you do?

My brother who lived in Amsterdam was in the resistance and he had a typewriter to type pamphlets for the underground secret service. One day he had a knock and the door and he had to chuck the typewriter out the window. If they had found a typewriter, they would shoot you.

By 5th May (VE Day), it was over. My husband came back home on a bicycle all the way from the east. He had to travel all the way across Holland on his bicycle, but he came back. There was no money and no jobs but my husband went to the bakery and repaired some bicycles and they gave him a loaf. Sweden sent us flour and bakers started baking. There was no butter but bread tasted like cake for us.

The Red Cross made up wooden boxes of food. We saw the planes came over flying low and dropping the boxes in the fields. Each family got a case containing bacon, beans, sardines, flour, yeast, egg powder, biscuits and chocolate. Those planes were all coming from Lincolnshire and people spread out sheets on the ground with the words ‘Thankyou boys!’ We were so grateful. Today my son lives in Lincolnshire and is married to the niece of one of the pilots who flew those planes.”

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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‘I am an optimist, most of the time’  – Portrait by Sarah Ainslie

‘I don’t know how it happened!’ declares centenarian Alie Touw, shaking her head and raising her hands with a smile of mock bewilderment if you ask the secret of her longevity. ‘I have so many things wrong with me and I fell over several times, but I keep getting up again.’ With her shock of white hair and keen green eyes, Alie sits peacefully and keeps her counsel.

High above Petticoat Lane, Alie lives in a small flat where she peers down upon the City to the west and Spitalfields to the east, observing the relentless passage of life below and contemplating the ironies of existence. Each week, she ventures out to buy food at the supermarket and savour the exoticism of our present age. I doubt if many of those who pass Alie in the street are aware of this traveller from another time walking in their midst. Such is her vitality and demeanour, Alie easily passes as someone decades younger than her hundred years.

Yet Alie is acutely aware of the extraordinary times and momentous events she has witnessed in her long life. She carries equivocal and turbulent memories of the world before we were born. They colour Alie’s personality today and she acknowledges she herself is the outcome of these experiences. This admission makes Alie’s generosity of spirit especially impressive, because her relationship with existence has been forged in dark times and perilous situations. ‘I am an optimist, most of the time,’ Alie will reveal if you press her.

‘There are so many stories to tell,’ Alie confesses to me with a helpless grin, conceding the astonishing journey she has made through inauspicious circumstances, across Europe from Arnhem in Holland and over an entire century, to discover peace in Spitalfields. I visited Alie at her flat in Petticoat Lane and was inspired and uplifted to hear Alie’s stories because – although she speaks of the past – she has much to say to us today.

“I was born at the end of the First World War. Holland was invaded and there was not much food, so I do not know how they brought me up. I came into the world on 23rd September 1918 as the fifth daughter, the twelfth child of my parents. My father was a train driver. He was born in 1847 and he never talked about his past.

I still remember my mother who died when I was eight years old. She was nineteen when she got married and twenty-one when she had her first child. She went on and on, until she had thirteen children. We were living in Arnhem near the river Rhine and, if the weather was nice, we went for a walk and sat on the riverside with her before we went to bed. When she got ill, my eldest sister looked after her and us, which was quite a challenge.

On my mother’s last night, we were woken up in the middle of the night by my sister who said, ‘Your mother is not very well, you had better come and say ‘Good night’ to her.’ That was the last time I saw her. We were sent to stay with the neighbours but we could hear the carriages in the street and my little sister who was six years old screamed when they took our mother away from our house. I could hear my father crying in the night.

I was always ill. Even as a baby, when I was a couple of months old, I was in hospital. My sister told me my mother kept one of my jumpers and would not wash it until I got better. She told everything to my sister. A lot of what I know of her is what my sister told me.

My elder sister was already engaged to be married, with a fiancé who had a good job. She said to my father, ‘I cannot look after the family.’ She was sixteen years older than me and she had her own life to live. My father did not like that, he expected her to stay at home, so we had to go into an orphanage. I spent ten years there until my eighteenth year. In September of that year I was nineteen but I was able to leave at Easter. They looked after us very well, except we did not get enough food. We did not starve but were always hungry. It was just bread and butter in the morning, and in the afternoon we had a meal.

You were not allowed to complain. One girl complained. There was a monthly meeting with the people who looked after us and she was asked to apologise to them, but she said, ‘I’m not going to say ‘Sorry.”  So they said, ‘Out you go!’ and she was thrown out with only the clothes she had on. She was seventeen years old.

Sometimes we had a good time in the orphanage but I was often ill. I had tuberculosis and pneumonia but I recovered. Every day my father visited, to see a different one of us. He came every Friday morning to see me. He had a botched cataract operation so he was nearly blind and he carried a white stick. I said, ‘Oh father, do be careful.’ He came on the bus to see me but one day a van knocked him over when he was nearly home.

In the orphanage, we had savings of ten cents a week – out of which you were given pocket money of three cents to put in the collection at church. On Monday nights, we felt very lonely, so they gave us wool to knit socks for the boys and, every Friday night, we had to wash the boys’ socks. I could knit when I was four years old, my sisters taught me and it came in handy. They would say ‘This is how much you have to do tonight. ‘

The boys never had to do anything, we had to do all the chores. We did not have much free time. We went to an ordinary school with normal children but we had to walk in a line with a woman supervising us. After school, we always had to prepare the potatoes for the next day.

On Sunday morning we went to church, then we had a meal and we could go home for the afternoon. My father walked for half an hour to collect us and we walked home with him. He brought us back again by six o’clock and by seven o’clock we were in bed.

When we were fourteen, we had to leave school and learn domestic service. They wanted me to leave at thirteen but I said, ‘Can I do another year?’ You did six weeks in the kitchen, six weeks in the house, doing cleaning and scrubbing wooden floors, six weeks in the laundry and six weeks in the sewing room. I was not strong enough to scrub floors so they sent me straight to the sewing room. They saved our money for us in the bank and, when we were twenty-one, they gave it to us – a hundred guilders. The first thing I bought was a bicycle. In the last year, you did not have to anything for the orphanage but make your own clothes buying the materials out of that money.

When I was eighteen, I had to go home to take care of my father. He was ninety years old by then. My elder sister who had taken care of us, she took him in after my mother died and took care of him for ten years. She had to do all the sewing and the cooking. She was an angel but she had had enough. We all had to look after my father and our brothers. The two eldest brothers were already married but the other brothers still at home. They needed help.

I was one of my father’s favourites. I said, ‘I want to be a nurse.’ He said, ‘No you have to look after us.’ My other sister had already taken care of the family for five years, since she left the orphanage at seventeen. When she got married, I took over. I did not mind really, I had no choice. Think about it, it was a large house, we had no washing machine or vacuum cleaner or central heating.

When I was twenty, I got engaged and my younger sister had to take over. After a couple of years I got married and had a child. Then the war started.”

Portrait copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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