Bex Hainsworth

fOUrpence

Whitechapel, 1888

The spire of Christchurch rises like a splinter,
desperate to slide free from slum muck.
Itchy Park stinks like Eden, the rotten fruit

of our bodies hasn’t fallen far. We are Eve,
we are Hagar, we are Magdalene. Piecework
couldn’t pay, so many nights hunched over

rejected matchboxes, fingers sticky with glue
and paper petals for West End bonnets.
We are our own wares, setting up stall

in the Babel of Commercial Street. Every
tongue understands a rut. Surgeons, sailors,
vicars, barbers. We’ve been held down by them all,

against rented mattresses and cobbles, curved and cold
like the carcasses of our mothers and their mothers.
Autumn dawn is the colour of old bruises with a moon

like a nail print in a neck. The papers say something
is hunting us in the dark, like this is a novel idea.
The do-gooders and tours preach vigilance, abstinence.

God doesn’t exist on Buck’s Row or in Mitre Square.
Hell would be a relief. It costs fourpence for a lodging house
bed, to sleep swaddled in prickly straw mangers. We sip gin,

disappear in search of company, coin. We pull shawls
the colour of lamb’s blood around our throats – still shiver,
but then everyone walks over paupers’ graves.

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in Atrium, The Rialto, Honest Ulsterman, bath magg, and Poetry Wales. She is the author of two pamphlets: Walrussey (2023) published by The Black Cat Poetry Press, and Circulaire (2025) now available from Written Off Publishing.

Bex said the following about her poem:

Whitechapel, 1888 was the hunting ground of Jack the Ripper. It was my aim to go beyond the romanticism and mythology of the perpetrator, to focus on the very real lives of the women living and working in Victorian London. I wanted to explore the intersection of poverty and gender that led to these women being maligned, mistreated, and ultimately murdered. No one victim is named and so they speak to the reader as a chorus across the centuries. Fourpence is what it would have cost for a lodging house bed for the night, which may have saved their lives.