Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘I only works with the best. It ain’t me line of business, see. Ain’t me expertise, ain’t what I knows best. A man must stick to what ‘e knows, the cobbler to ‘is last, the butcher to ‘is block, the poacher to ‘is traps. These,’ he pointed to the copper plates, ‘they come about in the business o’ receivin’. Receivin’ and disposin’ is me business, my dear, I received these and now I am disposin’ o’ them. Simple arithmetic, if you knows what I mean?’

  ‘Aye, ‘e be the prince of all the London fences,’ Silas Browne agreed, glad to find a way back into the conversation. ‘I knows him for that reputation.’ He looked directly at his wife. ‘That be the truth Maggie m’dear, Mr Solomons ‘ere is a well-regarded London fence, also known and trusted in these Midland parts.’

  Maggie the Colour sniffed. ‘And the paper? That be fencin’ business too?’

  Ikey looked amused. ‘If you ‘as the right connections, my dear, everything Gawd made on this earth is fencin’ business! All it takes is a little cash and a mind for makin’ a connection ‘ere, another there. Innovation is what some modern folks calls it. Let me give you an example. A lovely little silver candlestick goes missing from Mrs A’s ‘ouse and is brought to Mr B, what is me, yours truly. I knows Mr C, who will melt it down and sell the silver content to Mr D, a most excellent silversmith who is innocent of all guile. He will craft it into a fish server what might then be bought again by Mrs A to console ‘erself over the tragic loss of ‘er lovely little silver candlestick!’

  Ikey clasped his hands together and dry rubbed them. ‘All because o’ the noble art o’ ready cash and steady connections the world o’ trade goes round and round, and we all profits nicely on that particular merry-go-round. What say you, my dear?’

  ‘You may speak for y’self,’ Maggie sniffed. ‘We are not accustomed to the ways o’ stealin’.’

  Ikey smiled. ‘Quite right, my dear, only from the banks who can afford it, ain’t that so? Forgery ain’t fencin’, that’s the truth, forgin’ is the veritable Robin Hood profession, almost Christian, a perfect example o’ robbin’ the rich to pay the poor, an honourable profession it is to be sure.’ He paused to take a breath. ‘But one what also requires from time to time a connection or two? Maybe a paper connection what come from A to B, what’s me, and then goes on to C, what’s thee!’ Ikey clapped his hands, pleased with his neat little summary.

  ‘Aye, it be good paper, the best, that I admit,’ Silas Browne said, ‘though we’d be more friendly disposed if we knew more about where it come from.’ He pointed at the bill paper. ‘Paper the quality of your’n, tha’ be mill, tha’ be special!’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It had all begun when a carpenter and works mechanic named George Betteridge, who was much taken by the game of ratting, fell into debt to Ikey. Despite two separate attempts with Ikey’s own little terriers to get back his promissory notes, he still owed a considerable sum. Ikey, as was the custom, requested that he pay up by the following week, either in cash or in kind to the value of what he owed, a debt of nearly ten pounds. The hapless Betteridge confessed that he was penniless. He had a wife and seven children, lived in a single rented room in a village in Hampshire, and possessed nothing of sufficient value to match the debt. Furthermore, he saw no prospect of obtaining goods to the required value as a petty thief. Nor was he placed in a position to steal from a rich master, being employed as a carpenter doing general maintenance work for a paper mill in the village of Whitechurch.

  ‘Paper is it? What sort o’ paper?’

  It was a routine question. Ikey was accustomed to probing into the unused corners of the minds of men who lack imagination, and who are unable to see the opportunities for profit right under their bumpkin noses.

  ‘All sorts o’ paper, all special,’ the carpenter replied.

  ‘Special is it? What’s its name then?’

  ‘Name o’ Laverstoke Paper Mill, very reputable, been making particular papers for nigh sixty years, they ‘as.’

  ‘Laverstoke eh? By particular, does you mean expensive?’

  ‘No, no, it ain’t paper you can buy, like!’ Betteridge corrected then lowered his voice and cupped his hand to the side of his mouth. ‘Paper for bills, banknotes, very secret it is, very ‘ush-’ush!’

  Ikey concealed his excitement. ‘May I ask you a question, Mr Betteridge? Does you know, or could you make the acquaintance, o’ someone what works in this section what you says is strictly private. That is, the particular section what makes your actual paper for these. . .er, bills?’

  The carpenter scratched his head, thinking. After a moment he volunteered, ‘Me wife ‘as a second cousin, a young cove what goes by name o’ Thomas Tooth. Methinks ‘e works in one o’ the sections by front office, though I can’t say for sure, ‘e being a clerk an’ all and me only ‘umble carpenter and mechanic.’

  ‘This second cousin o’ your dear wife, this Mr Thomas Tooth, do you think ‘e might be partial to a night o’ rattin’ and a good tightener at a chop ‘ouse after? Or even two tickets to the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, compliments o’ yours truly with a nice little doxy thrown in for ‘is particular amusement?’ Ikey looked at Betteridge slyly and spread his hands. ‘We’d be most honoured, my dear, and ‘ighly complimented to ‘ave ‘im as our esteemed guest!’

  The young Thomas Tooth proved to be everything Ikey had hoped for, naive but not without a certain arrogance, married with two children and another in the oven. He was also ambitious to improve his lot in life, resentful that he was being held up by a doddery chief clerk by the name of Seth Robinson, a Quaker, and entirely trusted by his masters at the Laverstoke Mill.

  Ikey was careful to build up his confidence in the game of ratting and to guide him in the ways of the sport, even teaching him a few of the finer points, until the young Thomas Tooth felt compelled, through Ikey’s generosity and good spirits towards him, to trust him completely as a friend and confidant. The first requirement of the sharper, the confidence man, is complete trust from the dupe, and it did not take Ikey long to have this condition firmly in place in the mind of the young clerk.

  The more serious sharping now began and Ikey elicited the help of Marybelle Firkin, the mot of the Pig ‘n Spit, the public house where the ratting took place in St Giles. With her went the aid of George Titmus the rat master.

  Ikey was therefore absent on the earlier part of the night when Thomas Tooth was finally netted, this action being almost entirely left to the enormous lady publican and her diminutive rat master.

  Marybelle Firkin was a very large woman, said to consume an entire saddle of the roast beef of old England at one sitting, whereas George Titmus, her rat master, was four feet eight inches tall and weighed eighty-five pounds wringing wet, though this did not happen very often as he had not taken up the habit of cleanliness. Working with rats and blood made him stink to high heaven, but he sensibly reasoned that should he wash it would occur all over again at the very next evening’s fights. His skill with rats was such that his stench was tolerated among the punters, most of whom were themselves none too keen on the deadly touch of water from the Thames.

  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 self-esteem 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 ring 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 sleev
e, 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.