‘In the midst of life....’
XXXVI
It was but a little crowd that stood at the Old Bailey corner while the bell tolled, to watch for the black flag. This was not a popular murder. Josh Perrott was not a man who had been bred to better things; he did not snivel and rant in the dock; and he had not butchered his wife nor his child, nor anybody with a claim on his gratitude or affection; so that nobody sympathised with him, nor got up a petition for pardon, nor wrote tearful letters to the newspapers. And the crowd that watched for the black flag was a small one, and half of it came from the Jago.
While it was watching, and while the bell was tolling, a knot of people stood at the Perrotts’ front-doorway, in Old Jago Street. Father Sturt went across as soon as the sleepers of the night had been seen away from the shelter, and spoke to Kiddo Cook, who stood at the stair-foot to drive off intruders.
‘They say she’s been settin’ up all night, Father,’ Kiddo reported, in a hushed voice. ‘An’ Poll’s jest looked in at the winder from Walsh’s, and says she can see ‘em all kneelin’ round a chair with that little clock o’ theirs on it. It’s — it’s more’n ‘alf an hour yut.’
‘I shall come here myself presently, and relieve you. Can you wait? You mustn’t neglect trade, you know.’
‘I’ll wait all day, Father, if ye like. Nobody sha’n’t disturb ‘em.’
When Father Sturt returned from his errand, ‘Have you heard anything?’ he asked.
‘No, Father,’ answered Kiddo Cook. ‘They ain’t moved.’
There were two faint notes from a distant steeple, and then the bell of St Leonards beat out the inexorable hour.
XXXVII
Kiddo Cook prospered. The stall was a present fact, and the awning was not far off; indeed, he was vigilantly in search of a second-hand one, not too much worn. But with all his affluence he was not often drunk. Nothing could be better than his pitch — right out in the High Street, in the busiest part, and hard by the London and County branch bank. They called it Kiddo’s Bank in the Jago, and made jokes about alleged deposits of his. If you bought a penn’orth of greens from Kiddo, said facetious Jagos, he didn’t condescend to take the money himself; he gave you a slip of paper, and you paid at the bank. And Kiddo had indulged in a stroke of magnificence that no other Jago would have thought of. He had taken two rooms, in the new County Council dwellings. The secret was that Father Sturt had agreed to marry Kiddo Cook and Pigeony Poll. There would be plenty for both to do, what with the stall and the regular round with the barrow.
The wedding-day came when Hannah Perrott had been one week a widow. For a few days Father Sturt had left her alone, and had guarded her privacy. Then, seeing that she gave no sign, he went with what quiet comfort he might, and bespoke her attention to her concerns. He invented some charing work in his rooms for her. She did it very badly, and if he left her long alone, she would be found on the floor, with her face in a chair-seat, crying weakly. But the work was something for her to do and to think about, and by dint of bustling it and magnifying its importance, Father Sturt brought her to some degree of mindfulness and calm.
Dicky walked that morning in a sort of numb, embittered fury. What should he do now? His devilmost. Spare nobody and stop at nothing. Old Beveridge was right that morning years ago. The Jago had got him, and it held him fast. Now he went doubly sealed of the outcasts: a Jago with a hanged father. Father Sturt talked of work, but who would give him work? And why do it, in any case? What came of it before? No, he was a Jago and the world’s enemy; Father Sturt was the only good man in it; as for the rest, he would spoil them when he could. There was something for to-morrow night, if only he could get calmed down enough by then. A builder’s yard in Kingsland with an office in a loft, and money in a common desk. Tommy Rann had found it, and they must do it together; if only he could get this odd numbness off him, and have his head clear. So much crying, perhaps, and so much trying not to, till his head was like to burst. Deep-eyed and pale, he dragged round into Edge Lane, and so into New Jago Street.
Jerry Gullen’s canary was harnessed to the barrow, and Jerry himself was piling the barrow with rags and bottles. Dicky stood and looked; he thought he would rub Canary’s head, but then he changed his mind, and did not move. Jerry Gullen glanced at him furtively once or twice, and then said: ‘Good ole moke for wear, ain’t ‘e?’
‘Yus,’ Dicky answered moodily, his talk half random. ‘‘E’ll peg out soon now.’
‘‘Im? Not ‘im. Wy, I bet ‘e’ll live longer’n you will. ‘E ain’t goin’ to die.’
‘I think ‘e’d like to,’ said Dicky, and slouched on.
Yes, Canary would be better off, dead. So would others. It would be a comfortable thing for himself if he could die quietly then and there. But it would never do for mother and the children to be left helpless. How good for them all to go off easily together, and wake in some pleasant place, say a place like Father Sturt’s sitting-room, and perhaps find — but there, what foolishness!
What was this unendurable stupor that clung about him like a net? He knew everything clearly enough, but it was all in an atmosphere of dull heedlessness. There would be some relief in doing something violent — in smashing something to little pieces with a hammer.
He came to the ruined houses. There was a tumult of yells, and a crowd of thirty or forty lads went streaming across the open waste, waving sticks.
‘Come on! come on, Jago! ‘Ere they are!’
A fight! Ah, what more welcome! And Dove Lane, too — Dove Lane, that had taken to bawling the taunt, ‘Jago cut-throats,’ since ...
He was in the thick of the raid. ‘Come on, Jago! Jago! ‘Ere they are!’ Past the Board School and through Honey Lane they went, and into Dove Lane territory. A small crowd of Dove-Laners broke and fled. Straight ahead the Jagos went, till they were suddenly taken in flank at a turning by a full Dove Lane mob. The Jagos were broken by the rush, but they fought stoutly, and the street was filled with a surge of combat.
‘Jago! Jago hold tight!’
Thin, wasted and shaken, Dicky fought like a tiger. He had no stick till he floored a Dove-Laner and took his from him, but then he bludgeoned apace, callous to every blow, till he fought through the thick, and burst out at the edge of the fray. He pulled his cap tight, and swung back, almost knocking over, but disregarding, a leather-aproned, furtive hunchback, who turned and came at his heels.
‘Jago! Jago hold tight!’ yelled Dicky Perrott. ‘Come on, Father Sturt’s boys!’
He was down. Just a punch under the arm from behind. As he rolled, face under, he caught a single glimpse of the hunchback, running. But what was this — all this?
A shout went up. ‘Stabbed! Chived! They chived Dicky Perrott!’
The fight melted. Somebody turned Dicky on his back, and he moaned, and lay gasping. He lifted his dabbled hands, and looked at them, wondering. They tried to lift him, but the blood poured so fast that they put him down. Somebody had gone for a surgeon.
‘Take me ‘ome,’ said Dicky, faintly, with an odd gurgle in his voice. ‘Not ‘awspital.’
The surgeon came running, with policemen at his heels. He ripped away the clothes from about the wound, and shook his head. It was the lung. Water was brought, and cloths, and an old door. They put Dicky on the door, and carried him toward the surgery; and two lads who stayed by him were sent to bring his friends.
The bride and bridegroom, meeting the news on the way home, set off at a run, and Father Sturt followed.
‘Good Gawd, Dicky,’ cried Poll, tearing her way to the shutter as it stopped at the surgery door, ‘wot’s this?’
Dicky’s eye fell on the flowered bonnet that graced the wedding, and his lip lifted with the shade of a smile. ‘Luck, Pidge!’
He was laid out in the surgery. A crowd stood about the door, while Father Sturt went in. The vicar lifted his eyebrows questioningly, and the surgeon shook his head. It was a matter of minutes.
Father Sturt bent over and too
k Dicky’s hand. ‘My poor Dicky,’ he said, ‘who did this?’
‘Dunno, Fa’er.’
The lie — the staunch Jago lie. Thou shalt not nark.
‘Fetch mother an’ the kids. Fa’er!’
‘Yes, my boy?’
‘Tell Mist’ Beveridge there’s ‘nother way out — better.’
THE END
TO LONDON TOWN
In 1899, Morrison published the final book in his trilogy of London novels: To London Town. Following the tragic stories in Child of the Jago, this story provides a little light relief, and the author even allows some humour and romance to lighten the lives of his characters. It has been suggested by some Morrison scholars that the author was secretly stung by criticisms of his overplaying the squalor and despair of the rookeries (poor areas with high crime rates) he wrote about, such as the Jago, hence the attempt to create more of a “feel good” story. It is also widely thought Morrison used his own experiences as a teenage boy, left head of the family by a father’s death, to create this tale of a fourteen-year-old boy whose grandfather’s demise leaves him eventually to take charge as the family’s chief wage earner. This boy is no Dicky Perrott from the Jago; he has ambition and respectability and he has the good fortune to live in an area of well-meaning and respectable workers, that of the district of Blackwall. Young May is also lucky enough to fall in love with the unassuming Nora, a lovely sub-plot with a realistically ordinary beginning. Other themes that nicely reflect the times are subjects that would appeal strongly to the late Victorian reader - self help, resilience and appropriate ambition of the working classes.
The journal The Bookman (Vol. 17, Nov 1899) says of this novel “Sometimes idyllic and often gentle, the story shows beauty and goodness are predominant. Fate here is both kind and unkind, but there is an air of promise throughout.” It would seem that Morrison achieved his ambition of showing that he could write a more lyrical piece, as well as the realistic fiction.
At the beginning of the story, we meet Grandfather May, his widowed daughter-in-law and her children. They live in Epping Forest, which is at the time only a matter of eight miles or so from the outer edge of the expanding conurbation of London. Their tiny cottage can be imagined as similar to the cottages depicted in the paintings by Helen Allingham (1848-1926), with its shabby appearance and garden bursting with flowers and vegetables. The not so distant city is a threat in several ways – very early on in the narrative, little granddaughter Bessy is fascinated but also rather frightened by a party of boisterous Londoners out in the forest on a day trip; in addition, the creeping urban sprawl is threatening Grandfather May’s livelihood, the catching and preserving of butterflies, which ironically he sends to city retailers and collectors for sale. He is the main breadwinner of the family, so this is a worrying development.
However, Johnny, the oldest boy, is intelligent and straight talking, and he is keen to learn a trade so he can do his bit for the family and get on in life. The family is in a conundrum. All the best opportunities lie in the capital, but such a move seems like an impossible dream, and many ideas are put forward for Johnny — growing produce in the cottage garden, or becoming a postman like his grandfather. However, Johnny has memories of having lived in the capital before his father died, and it remains his ambition to go there. As Johnny continues to ponder his future, tragedy strikes the family – Grandfather dies, seemingly in an accident from a blow to the head. The family is stunned and grief stricken, but also frightened. However, through this loss, comes the answer to Johnny’s prayers – his London born mother decides to move back to the capital and open a shop in her old district of Blackwall, and better still for her fourteen-year-old son, he becomes an apprentice engineer with the company his father worked for. Johnny proves to be a keen, intelligent and ambitious worker, who supplements his training with evening classes and the shop, after a worryingly slow start, begins to take off as a lunchtime “takeaway” for local workmen. The family’s circumstances are about to change, however; a widow with a thriving business is a target for suitors and there are challenges ahead for the family of a kind they did not anticipate. However, a chance meeting with a young woman he had first encountered on his arrival in London eighteen months before promises to take Johnny’s life in an unexpected direction.
This is a charming story and although it is not cited as one of Morrison’s best novels, it has many of the hallmarks of his work – vivid descriptions of the local residents and of the area itself, and some scenes of moderate violence, including uncomfortable scenes of domestic abuse. This time however, it is presented in the context of an altogether gentler tale of (eventual) achievement and blossoming love.
The first edition
CONTENTS
NOTE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
NOTE.
I designed this story, and, indeed, began to write it, between the publication of Tales of Mean Streets and that of A Child of the Jago, to be read together with those books: not that I pretend to figure in all three — much less in any one of them — a complete picture of life in the eastern parts of London, but because they are complementary, each to the two others. — A. M.
CHAPTER I.
THE afternoon had slumbered in the sun, but now the August air freshened with an awakening breath, and Epping Thicks stirred and whispered through a myriad leaves. Far away beyond the heaving greenwoods distant clouds floated flat on the upper air, and a richer gold grew over the hills as the day went westward. This way and that, between and about trees and undergrowth, an indistinct path went straggling by easy grades to the lower ground by Wormleyton Pits; an errant path whose every bend gave choice of green passes toward banks of heather and bracken. It was by this way that an old man and a crippled child had reached the Pits. He was a small old man, white-haired, and a trifle bent; but he went his way with a sturdy tread, satchel at side and butterfly-net in hand. As for the child, she too went sturdily enough, but she hung from a crutch by the right shoulder, and she moved with a jog and a swing. The hand that gripped the crutch gripped also a little bunch of meadowsweet, and the other clasped tight against her pinafore a tattered old book that would else have fallen to pieces.
Once on the heathery slade, the old man lifted the strap over his head and put the satchel down by a tree clump at the wood’s edge.
“‘Nother rest for you, Bess,” he said, as he knelt to open his bag. “I’m goin’ over the pits pretty close to-day.” He packed his pockets with pill-boxes, a poison bottle, and a battered, flat tin case; while the child, with a quick rejection of the crutch, sat and watched.
The old man stood, slapped one pocket after another, and then, with a playful sweep of the net-gauze across the child’s face, tramped off among the heather. “Good luck, gran’dad!” she cried after him, and settled on her elbow to read.
The book needed a careful separation, being open at back as at front; likewise great heed lest the leaves fell into confusion: for, since they were worn into a shape
more oval than rectangular, the page numbers had gone, and in places corners of text had gone too. But the main body of the matter, thumbed and rubbed, stood good for many a score more readings; and the story was The Sicilian Romance.
Round about the pits and across the farther ground of Genesis Slade the old man pushed his chase. Now letting himself cautiously down the side of a pit; now stealing softly among bracken, with outstretched net; and again running his best through the wiry heather. Always working toward sun and wind, and often standing watchfully still, his eye alert for a fluttering spot amid the flood of colour about him.
Meantime the little cripple conned again the familiar periods of the old romance. Few, indeed, of its ragged leaves but might have been replaced, if lost, from pure memory; few, indeed, for that matter, of The Pilgrim’s Progress or of Susan Hopley, or of The Scottish Chiefs: worn volumes all, in her grandfather’s little shelf of a dozen or fifteen books. So that now, because of old acquaintance, the tale was best enjoyed with many pauses; pauses filled with the smell of the meadowsweet, and with the fantasy that abode in the woods. For the jangle of a herd-bell was the clank of a knight’s armour, the distant boom of a great gun at Waltham Abbey told of the downfall of enchanted castles, and in the sudden plaint of an errant cow she heard the growling of an ogre in the forest.
The western hillsides grew more glorious, and the sunlight, peeping under heavy boughs, flung along the sward, gilt the tree-boles whose shadows veined it, and lit nooks under bushes where the wake-robin raised its scarlet mace of berries. The old man had dropped his net, and for awhile had been searching the herbage. It was late in the day for butterflies, but fox-moth caterpillars were plenty among the heather; as well as others. Thus Bessy read and dreamed, and her grandfather rummaged the bushes till the sunlight was gathered up from the turf under the trees, and lifted from the tallest spire among the agrimony, as the sun went beyond the hill-tops. Then at last the old man returned to his satchel.
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