by Mick Jackson
That roar focussed the attention of every soul within two hundred paces. The punters milling among the tents saw a cycling bear go weaving between them and assumed that this was an extra bit of entertainment they were getting for free. The bear steered in and out of them, until some clear space finally appeared up ahead. Then it caught the evening air in its nostrils and found itself pedalling down an open road.
If the first roar had got the other bears’ attention, the second was like a call to arms. They suddenly understood that the bear was moving … was in charge of its own progress … and that they must follow. And that no chain or trainer could stand in their way.
Fifty yards down the lane the bear finally abandoned its tricycle, which was just as well as a gang of showfolk wasn’t far behind and were short on ideas as to what they might do if they actually caught up with him. But this group of pursuers soon found themselves being overtaken by the other bears, which they found a little unnerving. Most of the bears were still in costume – dressed in dinner jackets and pyjamas and petticoats. When the bears came alongside, the showfolk slackened their pace a little. Then, once the bears had passed, they checked over their shoulder to make sure there were no more coming, and slowly picked up speed again.
Further back, a second wave of people came running: more circus workers, along with over a hundred punters, including a number of children. Only one man had had the foresight, before setting off, to consider a scenario in which a bear might actually be cornered.
‘Find Bob Welland,’ he called out to a young lad, before leaving. ‘And tell him to fetch his gun.’
Bob was quickly located and now came along at the rear of the second pack. But Bob was a decent runner and it wasn’t long before he was at the front of the second mob and gaining on the mob up ahead.
The bears hadn’t a clue where they were going – were just pleased to be out in the open air. They’d stretched their limbs more in the last five minutes than they’d done in the previous five years. They were in a great gang now, but had no leader. They just followed the lane as it swept down the avenue. But as they pressed on the quality of the terrain began to deteriorate, until it was nothing but an unmade road. And then they were leaping over signs and wooden fences, and passing piles of earth and stacks of posts.
It was someone in the second group who first appreciated their impending predicament. ‘The bears,’ he called out. ‘They’re heading straight for the bridge.’
In point of fact, to describe it in such terms was some way short of accurate. The groundwork had commenced a good three years earlier and the huge towers at each side of the gorge were now complete. The cables which would ultimately hold the structure together had been hung between them. But it would be another year or more before the road itself was suspended and any vehicles or pedestrians would make their way across. So, in the conventional sense, it was far from being a bridge.
By the time the first crowd of people rounded the corner the bears were already clambering up the scaffolding and gathering at the top of the tower. Two great cables hung over the gorge like giant skipping ropes. It was a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot drop to the treetops and river below.
The audience just stood and watched as the first bear stepped onto one of the cables. Inching forward, it reached out a paw to left and right, just as it did on the high-wire. A second bear slowly stepped onto the other cable. And within a minute all the bears were edging out over the gorge in two long lines.
The second group of pursuers had arrived now and stood and gaped alongside the others. And perhaps they would’ve done nothing more, until all the bears had completed the crossing, if a small child hadn’t broken the silence.
‘They’re getting away,’ he said.
Bob Welland was ushered forward. The crowd made way for him. They watched as he positioned himself, swallowed hard and brought the rifle up to his shoulder.
He closed one eye and focussed on a bear in the middle. Picked it out because of its petticoats. He slowly followed it as it slid each paw forward. Saw nothing else now – just the bear in the petticoats and, beyond it, the woods on the far side of the gorge.
But as he held his breath and focussed, he suddenly thought, ‘Honest to God. What on earth am I doing?’ Then, ‘Even if I manage to hit one bear, it’s not as if all the rest would suddenly turn around.’
As far as Bob was concerned he’d already shot one bear, and that was one too many. At this rate they’d be carving ‘Bob Welland, Killer of Bears’ on his headstone.
Bob opened his other eye, breathed out, and brought the gun down, which was met with some confusion. Most of the children had their fingers in their ears, ready for the gunshot. Bob was shaking his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
But the man standing next to him was the general manager of one of the circuses. He’d paid good money for his bears, not to mention all the training and feeding. And whilst he may not have held out any more hope than Bob of actually retrieving his assets he sure as hell wasn’t going to stand around and just watch them get away.
‘Give it ’ere,’ he said.
He snatched the gun from Bob’s hands, brought it up and squeezed the trigger. Given that he barely bothered to take aim the results were quite spectacular. There was a distant but audible clang as bullet struck metal and the bear in the petticoat seemed to stall, twist, then tip to one side.
The same child who, a minute before, had broken the silence by pointing out that the bears were escaping, piped up again.
‘He got one,’ he said.
In fact, the man with the rifle had done no such thing. He’d merely clipped a steel link which gripped the cables a clear yard to the right of one of the bears, but it was enough to break its concentration. And making the bear jump had set in motion any number of twists and turns, as it endeavoured to correct itself. Until its final act was to reach down and try to grab the cable. It got within half an inch. Its claws brushed the air just above it. Then the bear started to fall.
It fell head first. In the crowd, mothers covered their children’s faces. Others averted their eyes. As the bear fell, it slowly turned, executing a cartwheel in mid-air. But when it was more or less upright, something peculiar happened. From a distance it looked like a small explosion of clothing. The bear’s skirts suddenly caught the upward draught, billowed and locked into place. And the bear’s descent was reduced, from that of a falling boulder to a gentle drift.
As long as the bear held its paws out over its dresses to stop them flapping up around its ears that gentle drift continued, and by carefully leaning to left and right it discovered that it could, to some extent, control its flight.
An old man was walking his dog along the bank of the river. He’d heard the to-do, had looked up to see some people climbing out over the cables and heard the gunshot. Had seen some lady fall, and for almost a minute, nothing but frilly underwear, as she sailed towards him. She landed about twenty yards up the shore, then proceeded to rip all her clothes off, including her bonnet, whereupon the old fellow suddenly appreciated that she was actually a bear. The bear turned, gave him a rather sinister look, then ran off, in the opposite direction. Man and dog just stood and stared, dumbstruck. Then they both looked up again, to see if any more were on their way.
The other bears turned their attention back to their high-wire walking. All their training, it seemed, had not been in vain. The trickiest part was the ascent from the dip in the middle to the tower on the other side. But once the first two or three had completed the crossing they waited and offered encouragement to those that came behind.
No more shots echoed up and down the gorge that day. And it wasn’t long before the final bear teetered along the last few yards of cable and joined the rest of the bears.
There was a moment, once the bears were re-united, when they looked back at their audience. Instinctively, a young girl raised her hand. And soon, all the children in the crowd were gently waving, like some private salutation. But
the bears didn’t respond. They just turned their backs and within a couple of moments had disappeared from view.
5
Sewer Bears
We all have our dark little secrets – those sources of shame which make us flinch whenever they come to mind. So it is with every town and city. And none more so than the city of London, which has enough skeletons in its cupboards to keep the whole place a-rattling from now till Kingdom Come.
One of its guiltiest secrets is that, for a good proportion of the nineteenth century, bears were kept locked in its sewers, where they served as the city’s unpaid flushers and toshers. Around a hundred bears patrolled that stinking labyrinth of pipe and tunnel which carried away the waste from the city’s homes and factories, and drained the water from the streets. Without their efforts every heavy rainfall would have plunged the whole place underwater and the air would have been thick with pestilence.
But make no mistake, the bears were prisoners. Every grate and manhole cover was locked tight-shut. The only light that found its way down to them was that which filtered through the grates and gulleys, or came up from the gates where the drains emptied straight into the Thames.
It was the bears’ unenviable task to accompany the city’s effluvia, from the moment it first entered the system right down to the river. True, gravity bore some of that burden. But it is in the nature of sewage to coalesce at every opportunity, to silt-up at every turn. The bears’ only objective was to keep things moving. For they knew that, whatever they managed to clear before them, there would always be plenty more coming along behind.
Bears were regularly carried away in the throes of a flash-flood. To try and guard against such an eventuality they constructed a series of ledges – shadowy recesses high up in the brickwork, to which they could retreat whenever the levels suddenly rose. Even so, every hour of labour was carried out in fearful anticipation of a downpour. If the drains were not sufficiently clear they knew the sewage would rise – and keep on rising – and no matter where the bears were hiding the flood would eventually find them out.
All in all, it was a sorry sort of existence. Their only nourishment came from whatever edible scraps they happened to find about them, or acquired by trading those few items of value they turned up during the day. The sewers beneath the breweries and slaughter-houses were significant stations on their circuits, but were just as popular with every other creature trying to survive underground. On the whole, rats were more wary of bears than vice-versa, and, if necessary, the bears were quite prepared to make a meal of them. But the rats were quick, and capable of delivering a nasty nip before departing so, by and large, bear and rat left each other to their own individual brand of misery – or as much as was possible in the circumstances.
The bears operated in gangs, each team despatched to a particular precinct, with their makeshift rods and shovels to prise the foul matter from where it had set. They worked in shifts, moving in as soon as possible after someone had shot the night soil or deposited a tank or two of offal, whatever time of night or day that might happen to be.
A century later, long after the bears had abandoned the tunnels, a group of academics, investigating the bears’ subterranean existence, discovered great expanses of wall, decorated with a multitude of tiny scratches, which they interpreted, quite wrongly, as bear-hieroglyphics … something akin to the primitive cave drawings in France and southern Spain. But there was nothing remotely artistic about them. They were simply a means for the bears to mark off those parts of the city which had been visited and the distribution of bear-labour on any given day.
The concentration of so many pestilential and poisonous gases meant there was always a risk of explosion and, from time to time, some errant spark would set the whole lot off. The authorities took a philosophical view on the matter, being of the opinion that, as long as such explosions were kept below ground and didn’t injure anybody of import, then they were to be tolerated. So it wasn’t unusual for Londoners to hear a muted thump and register a minor tremor through their shoe leather as some hideous combination of gases, long compressed between the brickwork, finally found the ignition it craved.
In the summer of 1849 the pavements of John Street, just off Gray’s Inn Road, unexpectedly erupted and, soon after, two bears were seen climbing out between the flags. They got as far as Red Lion Park where they climbed up into the trees. Marksmen were brought in and both bears were shot and killed. Their bodies were taken away and disposed of, and those passers-by who happened to witness the incident were encouraged to keep it to themselves.
The bears lived in constant fear of such explosions and did everything in their power to prevent them coming about, but they also knew that such an event offered their only chance of freedom, so whenever a sewer did go up they would rush to the scene, partly to see if any bear had been injured, but also carrying with them some faint hope that their moment of liberation might have finally arrived.
The odd explosion, along with the general wear and tear of the tunnels, necessitated a certain degree of maintenance beyond the bears’ abilities, and the men who undertook these brief ventures into the underworld did so with the same level of wariness as a sortie behind enemy lines. Among those employed to do such work, stories were rife of men who’d failed to watch their backs and been dragged off into the darkness.
‘They loves human flesh,’ one fellow was fond of saying. ‘To bears, we tastes just like chicken.’ Although how he happened to come by such particular information was never made clear.
It is impossible to estimate what number of Londoners knew of the bears’ existence. Certainly, no committees were formed to lobby for an improvement in their conditions, and no Member of Parliament got to his feet to call for their release. The best that can be said is that it was a subject on which most people chose not to dwell.
The only Londoners to have regular contact with the bears were the Gutter Traders, an informal association of no more than twenty men in all. As already stated, the bears would gather on their rounds a certain amount of edible matter (if that is not too exaggerated a claim for it) as well as any odds and ends which might have some value to those citizens up above. The simple fact is that the bears lived their lives in a state of perpetual hunger. In order to avoid starvation they developed a means of exchanging any knick-knack they had found or the odd coin or piece of jewellery for some morsel of food which might help sustain them and their fellow-bears through another day.
At dawn, it was not unusual to find some seedy-looking character kneeling at the kerbside, apparently conversing with a drain. Every now and again they would slip their fingers through the grate and pick something out. Then bring it up to their face and examine it, sometimes with the aid of an eyeglass. There would follow a period of negotiation. Finally, some package of meat or bag of left-overs would be deposited. Then the dealer would take up his latest acquisitions and go on his way.
The system was far from perfect, but worked well enough for both parties to persist with it. Any Trader who drove too hard a bargain would find themselves avoided. If the bears were too demanding they would go without.
In such negotiations the Trader did all the talking. If the deal was considered unacceptable, the bear would shake its head. Then it was up to the Trader to restate his position, or amend his terms. Some deal was usually struck. And, to be fair, it was a rare day when there was anything like outright hostility, which was due in no small part to the fate suffered by a local character known as Jimmy the Hat.
Jimmy got his name on account of his rather beaten old bowler that he was said to have picked out of the gutter. He’d been dealing with the bears for no more than a fortnight and was there early one morning, at the usual grate. A couple of bits and pieces were passed up: bent cutlery, some sort of buckle and so on, none of which had made much impression.
‘Anythin’ else?’ said Jimmy.
The bear studied Jimmy for a second, apparently uncertain as to whether to proceed. Then slowly unfo
lded a grubby old rag. A gold ring sat in it. Jimmy could see it glinting just below the bars and he knew, even at that distance, that it was worth something. He could feel it in his bones.
The ring had a stone set in it, which caught a small fraction of light. ‘Pass it up,’ he said.
The bear was reluctant to hand the ring over – had spent enough years sifting through the filth and trading the few things that were to be salvaged from it to appreciate that this was not your average find.
Jimmy the Hat was all shrugs and open palms. ‘I’ve got to have a proper look,’ he said, ‘to see if there’s any maker’s marks on it.’
The bear didn’t have much choice, and eventually the ring went up through the bars, just as it must have once slipped down between them, except this time it was held between the claws of a bear. Jimmy took it and brought it up to his eye. And even as he did so, he was already getting to his feet and glancing over his shoulder, as if to find the light. When he was standing he had one more look at the ring, then calmly slipped it in his waistcoat pocket. Then he winked at the bear beneath the bars, turned, and walked away.
The bear let out a great roar from its dungeon, but Jimmy was already scuttling off down the street. The bear roared again and pressed its nose right up against the cold metal, to try and get one last sniff of Jimmy – to draw in the man’s rancid smell and hold it there.
There was nothing to be done. The other bears were informed of the situation and told to keep an eye out for the evil little shyster. And for the next few months the cheated bear went out of its way to work in those neighbourhoods that a swindler such as Jimmy the Hat might frequent.