It is far more likely that they won't listen to
me at all than that they will stop working to hear what I have to
say."
CLIFFORDS: "Maybe!"
So it was fixed up. He shook me by the hand, never asked my name
and I visited his factory three days a week for eight years when I
was in London (till I married, in 1894).
The East End of London was not a new experience to me. Laura and I
had started a creche at Wapping the year I came out; and in
following up the cases of deserving beggars I had come across a
variety of slums. I have derived as much interest and more benefit
from visiting the poor than the rich and I get on better with
them. What was new to me in Whitechapel was the head of the
factory.
Mr. Cliffords was what the servants describe as "a man who keeps
himself to himself," gruff, harsh, straight and clever. He hated
all his girls and no one would have supposed, had they seen us
together, that he liked me; but, after I had observed him blocking
the light in the doorway of the room when I was speaking, I knew
that I should get on with him.
The first day I went into the barn of a place where the boxes were
made, I was greeted by a smell of glue and perspiration and a roar
of wheels on the cobblestones in the yard. Forty or fifty women,
varying in age from sixteen to sixty, were measuring, cutting and
glueing cardboard and paper together; not one of them looked up
from her work as I came in.
I climbed upon a hoarding, and kneeling down, pinned a photograph
of Laura on a space of the wall.
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