The Godson Street Sagas. Chapter Two. Beware your neighbour.

The Godson Street Sagas. 2. Beware your neighbour

Bertie blamed the dustmen. Well, it was understandable really, what with them loosing Patrick their colleague in the incident back in February when they tipped a home-made bomb into their truck and it went off. The rest of the team, Mick and Phil were walking wounded.

You may remember the story. A cell of Ireland for the Irish, I4I bomb makers had aligned itself with a vengeful Russia and set itself up in one of the flats above us. The police tracked it down and carted them off but the Met missed the bomb that the bombers had thrown out with their garbage. There it sat in the bin shed until the council arrived at 10 pm with its great big lorry and tipped it with the rest of the rubbish into its wagon. Bertie tells the story in Bertie Bonkers and AI Jeeves. Chapter 10. The raid on St Patrick’s Day.

Poor Phil, the bombers seemed to have had it in for him as well because that was the second time he was caught up in an attack. The first time was back in the spring of 2022 when President Putin was again using Irish proxies to bomb the city. (Bombing the capital. 16.3.22.)

So this time, when the bin men protested that leaving the bin shed open to all sorts of people and not just the deserving homeless was downright dangerous, Bertie was inclined to listen to them. So now there is a lock on the bin store and the homeless ones, Bertie’s would-be neighbours, must seek shelter elsewhere.

Godson Street, despite its holy name has had a mixed record for doing good.

Once, hundreds of years ago, it was just pasture on the high ground looking down towards the smoke and danger, the streets of London city in the distance with their promise of wealth, excitement and violence. Through its verdant fields the New River flowed bringing fresh drinking water to the parched people of Clerkenwell and beyond.

In search of comfort and compassion a young, beautiful and pregnant lady knocked on the heavy wooden door of the house of refuge that stood in White Lion Street with its back to the fields that would soon become a row of houses for the aspiring classes of the turn of the nineteenth century .

She knocked on the door and waited. She could hear the sound of clattering of dining plates as it was midday. She stood, listening. Above the sounds of a meal being eaten in silence she could hear giggling, quickly suppressed. Then there was the sound of a bell being rung and a stampede of feet echoed through the corridors as a crowd of young women burst into the open on the far side of the hostel.

She would have gone down the steps and around the tall building to see if she could see the women now shrieking with delight and play but at that moment the front door opened.

“Yes, my dear?” the middle aged woman who must have been 35 if she was a day, dressed in grey, her red hair tied up in a rebellious bun that threatened to object to her semblance of docility.

“How may I help you?”

The woman, whom Cathy would learn to call the warden looked at her new recruit with compassion and not a little relief. For only that morning she had been in intense and she felt successful negotiations with a minor member of the aristocracy. a Lord Godson, who had apparently made his money in salt and wanted to diversify into property. Lord Godson had been staying at the Angel inn resting from his arduous coach journey from Hampshire’s southern coast before risking the last, most hazardous part of his journey to the city. He had woken early and after a good breakfast had gone for a walk and, as luck would have it, saw this field behind the hostel and wondered whether it was for sale.

As he always did, Lord Godson carried his money with him in a pouch strapped to his body. It was a large amount of money for he had decided to sell his family interest in the saltings that had for decades provided a lucrative business for locals on the south coast looking to diversify from their core activity of smuggling French brandy. He had got into salt after one scuffle too many with the customs men and but for the good offices of the local parish priest who was willing to swear on God’s honour that he knew not where he was although he was at that very moment hiding in the presbytery cellar, his story might have ended there, strung up on a scaffold.

That was 25 years ago and his time shipping salt from the salt pans the lay between Lymington and Keyhaven had been enriching. It had brought him wealth, a title, a bride and a son but he found salt boring.

The warden had 20 young ladies in various stages of pregnancy and motherhood under her roof. Keeping them well fed and well cared for was expensive and she also had to pay a couple of local men to keep the place safe from vindictive partners who objected to the women they had made pregnant having a life of their own.

Lord Godson was well aware that his own son was not of unblemished character and had it in mind that if he could involve him in a building project that would take his mind off smuggling, brandy drinking and girls, he could yet amount to something.

“It is my son’s 21 birthday soon and I plan to give him something that will keep him occupied and wealthy. Madam Warden. You say that you are looking after 20 young ladies and would consider selling the field behind your recreation ground for the sum we discussed.”

The warden sat quietly, her hands in her lap, still as a cat which waits upon a mouse.

“I am willing to offer you, here and now the sum we discussed but on one condition, that you are willing to increase your intake of young women from 20 to 21 and that I may have that undertaking in writing.”

And so it was that when the future Lord Godson was presented on his 21 birthday the gift of land in Islington on which he could build an estate for sale or rent to London’s future middle classes the land was bordered at one end by a hostel for 21 young women that was surrounded at the back where the women recreated by a high wall. One of those 21 ladies was Cathy.

24.6.2025