The Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Both Marybelle and George worked well together on the magging of Mr Thomas Tooth of Laverstoke Mill, Whitechurch, Hampshire, chubbing him along and building his selfesteem the entire evening until there was only one more contest to come, and young Tooth was twenty pounds behind.

  This last contest was between a little black and white terrier named Valiant, a good fighter who wore the champion's silver collar around his tiny neck. The young terrier was known to possess an excellent ratting technique and could usually be depended on to make a kill of thirty to thirty-five rats in a timed spell. The odds were called very short so that there were no punters save Thomas Tooth interested in betting.

  The young country clerk, though too drunk for his own good, and heedless of the peril he faced should he lose, nevertheless knew the odds to be wrong and asked for better, for an evens bet.

  'Gentlemen there is no sport in you!' Tooth cried. 'Will you not take a chance? Thirty pounds on an evens bet!'

  Thirty pounds was a very big bet, and the crowd grew silent and waited to see if a bookmaker would accept the offer. Instead one of them laughed and waved Thomas Tooth away with the back of his hand. 'G'warn, be orf with you, lad, go on 'ome and kip it orf!'

  Thomas Tooth, swaying slightly, took out his dumby and made as though he was looking into the depths of his wallet at a fortune lying at its bottom. 'My credit is good, I swear it!' Tooth cried, persisting with the lie. 'Who will take my marker?' He turned to look at the four bookmakers. 'If I should lose I swear I shall settle before the midnight hour.'

  The young clerk looked desperately over at George Titmus the ratting master who had earlier been so free with his compliments. 'Who'll take evens, thirty pounds on Valiant to kill thirty rats, small rats… no sewers, cess or docks?'

  Titmus nodded, seeming to take the young gambler seriously. 'Small it is, sir. I've a nice sack o' small 'ouse and country, just right for the little fella 'ere.' He glanced in the direction of the dog Valiant held in his owner's arms. 'Should do 'is thirty rodents easy enough, strong little fella, known to be most game!'

  The punters around the ring grew silent, looking towards the bookmakers to see what would happen next. Tooth had called for small rats, house and country, which was a fair enough call as some sewer, cesspool and dockside rats were almost as large as the little terrier himself. The rat master had accepted, the contest was fair game.

  From the darkness of the stairway leading to the ratting room and to the backs of most of the punters a booming voice rang out. 'Aye, I'll take it! I'll take ye marker evens on thirty rodents killed! Settlement afore midnight, did ye say?'

  'Ah, a sporting man, at last!' the young gambler cried, turning to face the darkened stairway. 'Certainly, midnight! Payment you shall have precisely at the striking of the hour, my good sir!'

  'Aye! May the devil hisself help ye if ye doesnae pay, laddie!'

  There was a surprised gasp as the owner of the voice stepped out of the gloom into the room. The brutish, broken face which moved into the light was well known to be Dan Figgins, ex-heavyweight boxing champion of Glasgow and London, now a bookmaker with a reputation for very rough and unfavourable handling should his clients fail to settle on time.

  Dan Figgins was not a regular at the ratting ring, being a horse man and well known, even by the aristocracy, at his betting box at Newmarket and Ladbroke Grove. Thomas Tooth, almost alone in the room, was unaware of this infamous pugilistic personage and besides, was now too desperate and too drunk to care. He scribbled his marker for thirty pounds and handed it to Figgins. Whereupon the rat master called for the rat boy to bring the ratsack, shouting: 'Mixed smalls, country and 'ouse, bring out the ratsack!'

  This was where the final phase of the sharping began. The rat boy, a tiny, ragged lad of about ten years old, his dirty face and mucoid nose not having felt the touch of soap for a year or more, had prepared a bag of thirty-five large sewer rats to earlier instructions.

  The rat master, cupping his hands to his mouth called again to the rat boy. 'Ring in the rats and shake out the tails!'

  The boy, dragging the rat bag, which was tied with twine about its neck, brought it over to the outside edge of the ring. He hopped nimbly over the three-foot wall of the small circular enclosure and the bag of rats was handed to him by Titmus. The boy dropped the sack in the ring and placed his boot onto the centre of the jumping sack, which immediately calmed the rats within. The boots he wore were greatly oversized and the property of the house and were crusted with the dried blood of the night's previous bouts.

  'Slap, shake and pat a rat!' George Titmus called. 'Step up the gentleman what's makin' the touch! All's fair what finds no sneaks or squeaks!'

  Thomas Tooth, being the only punter, stepped into the ring to do the honours. Puffed with drunken self-importance, he commenced to beat solidly at the boy's threadbare coat, slapping hard into his skinny ribs and pummelling his shoulders and thighs in such an enthusiastic manner as to cause the lad to wince at his careless blows. Finally he required the urchin to hold his arms downwards and away from his body and, first feeling down the length of each arm by squeezing tightly across the bicep and forearm along the greasy sleeve towards the boy's wrists, he then demanded that the lad shake both sleeves vigorously. This deployment was intended to remove any rats which might miraculously have escaped the previous rigorous inspection.

  Tooth, now finally satisfied, gave a nod to the rat master, who pronounced on the punters, 'All's clean what feels clean, nothin' squeaked, nothin' seen!' He turned to the rat boy. 'Sample the show, three in a row!'

  The boy bent over and taking up the bag at his feet, began to untie the twine, though mid-way through this task he appeared to have acquired an itchy nose. He held the top of the bag with his left hand and scratched his nose with the other, finally wiping the copious snot from under it into his open palm and appearing to wipe his hand on his matted and greasy hair. His hand disappeared completely beneath his very large cap seemingly for this very purpose.

  His sniffing and scratching finally over, the rat boy returned his attention to opening the bag and without as much as a glance inwards plunged his arm into the bag of squeaking rats and brought up the first 'show', a rat selected blind to show that the bag had been called correct, and selected as specified, 'small, house and country'.

  'One-o!' he shouted holding a small house rat up above his head and then dropping it into the ring at his feet before plunging his arm back into the bag and withdrawing it again. 'Two-o!' The second rat was almost identical in size to the first. Once again his arm entered the rat bag, which was now jumping and bumping around his boots 'Three-o!' the boy finally yelled, holding a third rat above his head.

  'All's fair what's shown fair! Ring the rats and free the tails!' the rat master shouted.

  Whereupon the boy upended the entire bag of rats into the ring and they fell in a large tail-twisted and squirming clump. The rat boy commenced to sort them out, untying their tails and scattering them helter-skelter about the ring. Free to sniff and scratch while their eyes grew accustomed to the bright light, they seemed now to be quite calm. The rat boy climbed out of the enclosure as George Titmus rang the starting bell and the terrier, Valiant, straining in his master's arms and yapping in great excitement, was dropped in among the rodents.

  What Thomas Tooth hadn't witnessed was that the three sampling rats the boy appeared to have pulled at random out of the rat bag, in fact came from under his large cap. These three small house rats, so ceremoniously shown, had been nestling quietly in his hair. They had been trained to the smell of mucus on his hand, and upon it entering his cap they had slipped down his coat sleeve where he'd concealed a crust of bread. So that he now only had to put his hand inside the bag and let a rat drop down his sleeve into it, whereupon he would withdraw it again to show that the rats in the bag had been selected small. He repeated this twice more to show three small rats in what was seen to be an honest call.

  The rats which were upended into the r
ing from the bag stank of the river and the sewers, a particular smell no person experienced in the game of ratting could possibly mistake. Their bite was most infectious and often quite deadly, and they were larger by as much weight again as the three smaller house rats the boy had 'shown', though a direct comparison was no longer possible as all the rats in the ring now appeared to be of similar size.

  This was achieved by a second clever ploy, though it would take a more sober man than Thomas Tooth to see the trick. The rat boy, having emptied the rats from the bag, scattered them about the ring, though a moment before doing so he had again wiped his nose. The three smaller house rats in the ring, trained to the smell of the mucus on the boy's hand, once again darted up his sleeve, leaving only the larger rats behind.

  Moreover, while Thomas Tooth was busy patting and slapping at the boy in the ring, behind his back the silver collar was taken from the dog Valiant's neck and placed around the neck of a second terrier of similar markings. This second ratter, a bitch named Rose, cankered from rat bites, was a sister to Valiant from an older litter. Enfeebled from the gnawing of the canker, she could no longer fight well, even though her canine instinct and eagerness to fight remained, and to all appearances she was equal to the task.

  Rose worked briskly, picking up a rat and shaking it, biting deep behind its head to snap its neck and then drop it, immediately grabbing at another. Blood dripped to the floor and the little canine was soon slipping as she scrambled to snatch at the now panicky rats. The terrier lunged at a very large rodent, slipped in the blood on the ring and missed. The rat, panic stricken, bit deeply into the little bitch's nose and hung on. Rose, who had already killed twelve rats, was beginning to tire. She tried to shake the large rat off, but it held fast and soon the little bitch's slender neck started to drop. As though by some primeval instinct, the remaining rats rushed at the weakened ratter and pulled her down. She tried to rise but the rats smothered her, tearing at her tiny black and white pelt.

  The bell sounded and the rat master shouted: 'Rats high, dog low! Take yer dog or let it go!'

  The rats had won and the rat boy, wearing a thick leather mitten, for the rats were now maddened by the taste of blood and would bite at anything, jumped into the ring and pulled a frenzied rat from the still alive terrier's body and threw it back into the ratbag. Some of the rats held on so tenaciously that the boy had to grab about their blood-matted stomachs, lifting the terrier's body with the rat still attached to it. With a twist of the wrist he removed the rat, leaving its teeth embedded in the pelt, as the little bitch fell back into the ring to be smothered again by the feeding rodents.

  With the rats finally safely in the bag, the boy tied the top and lifted it out of the ring. The blood-crazed rats would continue to attack each other inside the bag in a squeaking feeding frenzy until only one was left alive. Such a rat was tagged and much prized as a symbol of luck and, should it recover from the numerous bites to its body, was eagerly sought by a keen ratter as a pet.

  The rat boy climbed from the ring, the ragged ends of his trousers and the toes of his boots soaked with fresh blood. The stench of death was everywhere and the punters, the fun over for the night, began to leave. As was the custom, most of them repaired downstairs to Marybelle Firkin's public house where the gin whores would be carousing and the fiddler would be playing a merry jig on a gypsy fiddle.

  Marybelle Firkin's inglorious establishment was well known for both ratting and whores and was well frequented by gonophs and macers and magsmen, and all manner of thieves and villains. Towards the latter part of the evening, when the ratting was over, the Pig 'n Spit became a place of great merriment and fornication with every dark corner as well as the skittle court behind the public house taken up with thrusting bodies and much loud groaning. Lust and loving was bought here for the price of three drams of gin. Hence the people in the surrounding rookery took much amusement by referring to both Marybelle Firkin and the Pig 'n Spit as 'Merry Hell Fucking at the Pig 'n Shit'.

  George Titmus, the last to leave the ratting ring, turned the lamps down low. Rose, the little terrier, tried to rise, but slipped on the blood-stained floor. She tried again and this time got shakily to her feet, whimpering and looking up with trusting eyes to see if she could find her master. But she lacked the strength to hold herself up and collapsed back among the dead rats. She was dead before her owner sneaked back up the stairs to retrieve the silver collar about her neck.

  With the contest declared in favour of the rats, Thomas Tooth owed thirty pounds to Dan Figgins to be paid by midnight. The fish was landed.

  Dan Figgins' small, cold, agate-blue eyes, only just visible within the multiple folds of scar tissue surrounding them, grew sharp as pin-points as he heard Tooth explain his inability to pay up at the appointed hour.

  'There's naeone t' blame for tha' except yourself, laddie,' Figgins growled.

  Thomas Tooth grinned foolishly and with some courage from the brandy yet within him said, 'I cannot pay you, sir, you will simply have to wait!'

  'Nay, laddie, ye doesnae understand, ye'll nae be breathin' God's breath beyond the midnight hour!'

  Thomas Tooth shrugged. 'Methinks you cannot get blood from a stone now, sir, can you?'

  The crowd gasped at his temerity.

  'Aye, that I can, laddie!' He turned to the crowd. 'You cannae blame us for givin' him a doing, it wasnae our fault he couldnae pay, was it?'

  The drunken crowd murmured their approval and someone shouted, 'Drub 'im, Danny boy!' Then added in a dismissive tone, 'Cheeky bastard!'

  'Ye shouldnae have said tha', Mr Tooth. I'm a patient mon, but tha's gone a wee bit too far, I cannae let ye get away wi' it!' Dan Figgins smashed his huge fist into the young clerk's face, breaking his nose in a gush of blood and sending the hapless Tooth sprawling across the room. He knocked into a whore, who careened backwards screaming as she bumped against the far wall, and slid to the floor with the young gambler's bloody head imprisoned between her thighs.

  This created uproarious laughter from the crowd who quickly gathered around the huge fighter, who was now standing with his fists balled above the young drunk.

  Dan Figgins reached down, preparing to jerk the sniffing and whimpering Thomas Tooth to his feet, when he felt himself propelled backwards and then turned completely around by an arm the size of a doxy's leg.

  As if by some peculiar magic the huge shape of Mary-belle Firkin was suddenly seen to stand in front of him. Her great ham-like arms were now folded across her huge bosom. The congregation of drunks and whores grew silent as the giant mot and the fierce Figgins locked eyes, hers bigger and even more blue than his own.

  The fiddler leaped upon a table beside the huge woman and pulled a long melancholy note from his fiddle, then he tapped her lightly on the shoulder with his bow. Marybelle sighed at his touch then smiled a most beatific smile at Dan Figgins, dropped her arms to her side, and in a voice astonishingly sweet and pure started to sing.

  Fine Ladies and Gents come hear my sad tale

  The sun is long down and the moon has grown pale

  So drink up your gin and toss down your ale

  Come and rest your tired heads on my pussy… cat's tail!

  The crowd, delighted and immediately distracted, took up the merry ditty and started to sing it over and over again as they cavorted around the tables and the fiddler sawed his bow across the gut, raising his knees high, prancing nimbly on the table top. The gin whores and the younger doxies danced with the drunks and the place was soon grown most merry again. Even Figgins was taken up by two whores, who whirled him across the room and planted copious kisses upon his broken face.

  Ikey arrived back at the Pig 'n Spit shortly before midnight to find the miserable young Tooth seated in a corner sniffing and blubbing, now rapidly come to realise that he would not see another sunrise. Just when he thought he might try to bolt, hoping to escape into the darkness, Ikey tapped him on the shoulder.

  Thomas Tooth, reduced to tears of dr
unken self-pity, clutched at the sleeve of Ikey's great coat and begged him to save his life by making good his debt to the awesomely ferocious Dan Figgins, who was threatening to take his life on the stroke of midnight.

  'O' course, my dear.' Ikey spread his hands. 'What are friends for? A friend in need is a friend indeed! Do not fret, all's well what ends well!'

  The arrangements which followed over the next couple of weeks between Ikey Solomon, the contrite young gambler and the carpenter George Betteridge, would prove to be one of the best investments Ikey was to make in his entire life of crime and punishment.

  In the testing laboratory at the Laverstoke Mill, Thomas Tooth explained to Ikey, some thirty sheets of the bill paper used for banknotes were brought twice weekly to be submitted for testing and verification of their quality.

  It was Thomas Tooth's task to count the sheets against the number which originally arrived for testing. Then he had to enter his count into the receivals and exit ledger before taking them across a large quadrangle and through a maze of buildings to where the furnace was located, at the opposite end of the mill from the laboratory.

  Ikey had George Betteridge build a false floor into a cupboard under a stairway which Thomas Tooth had to pass on his way to the furnace. A single floorboard was hinged so that it lifted neatly up at one end if correctly touched. In a matter of moments Thomas Tooth could conceal two sheets of rolled paper under the floorboard as he passed.

  Later, Betteridge, on the pretence of going about some-small maintenance task, would retrieve the paper, conceal it in his tool box and take it out of the mill gates under a pile of wood shavings and off-cuts. As a mill carpenter, he was entitled to sell or take these home for his own use as kindling.