Shonny, though: snowdrops. In January. It was just like the dear, goodhearted boy. He was so cheerful, so eager to help, so keen to work like a man. Yet for all his energy and laughter she had a pang of anxiety every time he went out of her sight. He seemed so defenceless.
She had no high ambitions for him. But what use was that wonderful character to him as long as he was pushing his worker’s barrow? She wanted him away from the rags. She could hire a boy to run the barrow.
It was Dido’s idea that Shonny should help her. He knew she was fond of the boy, and he wanted to keep her happy, so he made the boy stay at home with her, with the rags. Dido thought he was doing what she wanted but he was doing the opposite. That was how people went on, never understanding each other.
Dido never thought about Shonny’s interests, either. He was like a father who can only think, “What’s good enough for me is good enough for my son.” Dido thought no-one was better than he was, and so he never thought that Shonny deserved a chance to make more of himself. All he cared about was keeping the boys straight. That was quite right. But he never thought that anything more was needed. He kept on saying, “Keep ’em straight and they won’t fear no man.”
Dido’s trouble was that he had no imagination. Mrs Peach knew her sons thought her silly, but she had eyes that saw a great deal. She saw Shonny’s brightness fading, until he was just one more slum workman. She saw his eyes change and become wary, shifty, the eyes of a street boy.
She wished she could do something for him through the chapel. There were better-off people at the chapel, gentlemen with businesses, or who worked in offices, lady schoolteachers and so on. Surely one of them might find Shonny his chance. “Smart lad wanted” — that was the phrase that allured her. The trouble was, they only knew her as a face, all these people. She was a regular attender, she dressed decently, but they did not speak to her. The minister spoke to her sometimes and in the past had helped her, but she did not dare approach any of them. She might have plucked up courage if she had not gone in such fear of contradicting Dido’s notions. She lapsed back into dreams. She saw herself getting Shonny ready for his first day as an office junior. She scrubbed him, inspected his nails, brushed his clothes down, gave him his spending-money and told him the respectful phrases to use to the older ladies and gentlemen. She made him up some lovely sandwiches, thick ham and plenty of mustard, and put them in a little fibre suitcase. No tin box when she could buy a nice case for sixpence and see him walking down the street with it like a little gentleman. She never got beyond the first morning in her dreams about Shonny. It was pleasure enough. She would never have been able to confide her thoughts or dreams to anyone; nor dared if she had been able. Least of all could she have opened her heart to Dido. It was not so much mother-love she now felt for him as a fearful reverence. She feared him in some way as she had feared his father. Behind his respect for her, behind his disciplined, impassive face, she sensed (without being able to define it) battened-down the same fury as that with which her husband had once terrorised her.
Not only did she fear Dido. She feared for him. Dido had tried to think out the implications of all that had happened to him, had found the effort too complex and had given up, accepting what the days brought. He imagined that his mother, once he had cut short her feeble questions, had bowed without further thought or question to the inevitable. He was wrong. She went about her business passive and silent as ever, but she lived in deep and constant alarm. She could not make out the situation clearly. On the surface of her thoughts she believed that Dido could do no wrong. She wished he hadn’t fought that man but he had stood up for his mother’s rights and he had done good for the street. Now he said he couldn’t go back to work in case that rough lot came back. She didn’t know what to make of him taking money and things. She had never thought he would take things. He just said it was only right.
But however much she stifled her thoughts she could not stifle her imagination, which was more far-reaching than her sons, and was secret. She dusted and made the beds and cooked and poked the paddle into the steaming boiler, and tried to fend off the fears that beset her. Dido was a mystery to her. She was a simple woman but she feared what he might become. She repeated like an incantation, “My Dido’s a good boy. A good boy. A good boy.”
The more she feared for Dido the more her thoughts went back to Shonny. In this dreadful street something was happening to Dido. Chas was in it, too. If only she could save Shonny from it.
She almost nerved herself to go to the chapel but fear of Dido prevailed. She settled instead on a more modest resolve. As soon as Chas had gone out she went upstairs to see Mr Valentine.
Mr and Mrs Valentine lived in the top floor front. The back room was occupied by an Irish navvy, his wife and two children. Mrs Peach slept in the back room beneath, and was kept awake at night by their footsteps and quarrelling and the crying of the children.
For the most part the Peaches had nothing to do with their fellow-tenants, whose presence only made itself known when boots tramped up and down the stairs. The Irish couple came in drunk sometimes and were occasionally glimpsed in a state of damage, since they both had the habit of getting into fights, the man with fists, the woman with fingernails or with the eight-inch hatpin which skewered her wide-brimmed hat with its fernery of dirty plumes. Sometimes they were sick on the stairs or fouled the yard lavatory, but they always cleaned up. The man had been warned by Dido and that was enough.
Mrs Peach was so repelled by them and by the stink from their room that she left even their gaunt children alone. Her pity for the little creatures was overcome by her disgust for their dirtiness. Unlike the boys, however, who also ignored the Valentines, she kept up a sneaking relationship with this couple.
They were childless, getting on for sixty, a pair of outcasts from the clerical middle class. The man was tall, with a big, bald cranium fringed with grey and thick glasses perched on an eagle’s beak of a nose. He wore a black suit that was almost grey with dirt and dandruff, covered with lumpy patches of darning and frayed at collar, cuffs and ankles. The trousers were too short for him and he always walked with a stoop that made him look as if he had a hump between his shoulders. He was like a pathetic, anxious caricature of those gentlemen Mrs Peach had glimpsed, like the minister and Shonny’s headmaster, and she felt both sorry for him and respectful towards him, as she did towards his wife, a woman as waxen and frail as a lily, who always wore the same threadbare but ladylike grey gown and whose eyes always had the same haunted expression. Their past was a mystery and she would never offend them by asking, but she guessed at some chain of misfortunes that had brought them to this slum. They hardly ever went out; perhaps because they were terrified of Rabbit Marsh, perhaps because they earned so little addressing envelopes that they dared not leave off work for an hour.
Mr Valentine opened the door when she tapped. He peered at her so closely that it dawned on her for the first time that his sight must be failing. No wonder, sitting at that table day and night, more often than not in a weak gaslight, scribbling. Behind him she saw his wife at it now, all hunched up. How their shoulders and fingers must ache!
She explained her business shyly and came into the room at his invitation. She said to Mrs Valentine, who put down her pen dazedly, “Please don’t let me interrupt you.”
There was a row of perhaps two dozen books on the mantelpiece. Mr Valentine led her towards them. They were old and some of them were split at the back but they awed Mrs Peach. “Yes,” Mr Valentine said, “you have the right idea, Mrs Peach. Books are what the little fellow needs.”
She ventured, as timidly as if speaking up for her son to some great man, “He’s a good little reader. He loved reading at school. He’s always buried in his boys’ papers.”
“Something improving,” Mr Valentine mused, echoing her phrase. He bent forward and put one eye so close to the backs of the books that her heart quite stopped with pity and fright. He pulled a book out. Without looking i
nto the book, he recited:
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk—
She murmured, “It’s very nice —”
“The only thing that can lift our spirits out of these vile surroundings,” he said. “Poetry.”
“You see,” she said faintly, “I thought of something more, well, practical. To help him find a good position.”
“Ah!” Again he squinted along the row of titles. He took down another book. “This was a great inspiration to me when I was young. Self-Help by Samuel Smiles.”
She took the book and looked at it helplessly. “Oh, yes, Mr Valentine. I’m sure this would be a benefit to him. It’s just to give him the idea, you see.”
She went downstairs and returned to her work in the yard. Chas went in. When she followed soon after she found him with the book in his hand. He said, “Where you get this, ma?”
“I borrowed it from Mr Valentine.”
He read, “Self-’Elp.” He uttered a hooting, prolonged laugh. “Fat lot o’ good it done ’im.”
Shonny was indeed a good and innocent boy; he was truly still a child. But innocent and good children live according to the modes of childhood, which are the modes of natural man and are incomprehensible to the conditioned adult. That is why they sometimes come into collision with the adult rules of “good” and bad. Shonny, moreover, was a child in whom the sap of adolescence seethed.
He liked going to Dinsdale’s because (for one thing) they gave him hot sausages there with his mid-morning mug of tea.
Dinsdale’s was a slop-shop in Cable Street next to an arched alley. The shop was crammed with a bizarre assortment of clothes, uniforms, dress-suits, blazers, composite suits whose separate articles were of different colour or in fashions thirty years apart. It was thronged by seamen from the nearby docks, and the locals had many a laugh when a black or chinaman or lascar came out, talked by the salesman into some fantastic rigout.
Behind the shop and fronting the alley was the workshop. A dozen women and girls worked here as alteration hands. Mrs Peach, like other rag merchants, sent them her most paying merchandise, anything that still bore the semblance of a garment. The women sewed, patched and ironed these relics until they were fit for the shop. The women worked at benches and sewing machines. All through the year they kept a fire going with cloth scraps and waste wood, to heat the irons. The long, gloomy room was filled with the smell of scorched and steamed cloth, which Shonny liked, just as the sausages, cooked with forks over the fire, had an inimitable taste of charred cloth and wood.
He came in and dumped his sack and the women yelled their greetings. He was a favourite with them. The overseer started to empty the sack and one of the women grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him close to her. She gave him a big kiss on the mouth. “Come on, love, give us a kiss.”
He kissed her. He knew this game. It was regular when he came here. The other women were already shrieking with laughter as the woman cried, “Gawd, ’e’s no good at ’e’s bleet’n’ lessons this one. A proper kiss, lovey.”
She put her mouth on his and he kissed her with his own mouth open as the women had taught him, not liking the smell or the wetness of the big writhing mouth on his.
“Come ’ere, come ’ere —” This was a girl at the next machine, her arms open, and the woman pushed him so that he stumbled, exaggerating the stumble because this was a game, into the girl’s arms. The girl clutched him tight, all down, against her, and when he felt funny she screamed.
“’E’s ’ard, the little bugger’s gittin’ ’ard. Oo, you little bugger. I could put jam on it an’ eat it.”
Yells and comments from all round fell on Shonny’s confused hearing. A woman near-by was shouting, “Greedy mare she is. Spends the ’ole night under ’er bloke an’ she’s after a bit more.”
He span and lurched from woman to woman, from one hot cuddle and smoochy kiss to another. They stuffed his hands into their dresses and their own hands groped into the flies of his trousers. He yelled with anger and pushed and said, “Ah, pack up, leave us alone, go on, stop muckin’ about,” and though he was angry and at moments near to crying, he was also tickly and laughing and near to falling on the floor and shrieking with laughter. He liked coming to Dinsdale’s.
At last they let him go, and he had his tea and sausages and a big bit of bread. The overseer came back from the shop and gave him twenty-two shillings in silver, which she put in an envelope for him. He buttoned it carefully away in his jacket.
Off he went, on the next stage of his daily adventure; for the streets were an adventure to him. He trotted among the looming dock wagons, a little chap in a cheeky cap and muffler and working trousers tied at the ankles; but wearing stout boots and a sporty jacket with leather buttons like little hot cross buns which mother had found for him among the stock; trotting behind an empty barrow, darting among the huge, laden wagons and beneath the muzzles of great horses.
In front of him he saw a small boy, no more than eight and dressed in such gaping rags that his bottom showed through the split seat of his trousers. The boy clung in a bunch of limbs, rolled up like a little money-spider, at the tailboard of a wagon. Shonny yelled, “Whip be’ind yer, mister!”
The carter reached without haste for the long whip in its sheath next to him, but by the time he flicked the thong at the tail of his wagon the little boy had dropped off and darted to the pavement, where he yelled obscenities at Shonny and threw a lump of horse dung which fell short.
There was no honour among boys in this matter. The children lived in the streets and their games were a continual gamble with death. And Shonny loved it. He had been happy at school, running in gangs with the other children and playing in the streets with them.
When he left school, proud to be a man, it had been a matter of accumulating grievance to him that mother and Dido no longer let him go out with his former playmates, who for some reason were now considered beneath him. Instead of achieving freedom he had lost it. He spent all his evenings at home, apart from the two or three times a week he went to the picture palace with Chas, and his only pastime before he went to bed at what he considered the ridiculous hour of ten o’clock was reading. He read penny “bloods” by the hundred. Sexton Blake and the boys of Greyfriars were his heroes.
He loved his work, because it gave him freedom to run the streets all day, to explore a huge and fascinating world, the whole eastern quarter of a great city. He plunged into all manner of adventures. He had no desire to do anything else, especially as he was proud to be helping mother.
He meant to go home by way of Vallance Road, but he had not yet reached Whitechapel when, “Oy — Shonny!”
He saw Cockeye on the pavement. He shouted back, “Wotcher!” and ran the barrow into the kerb.
At their age there was no time wasted on sociable enquiries. Cockeye said, “’Ave a fag,” and Shonny, giving the matter no thought, took one. Two little old men stood there smoking.
It was not remarkable that they should be on speaking terms. Shonny had gone to school with Cockeye. There they had been enemies by tradition and had fought a hundred times. Shonny was not likely to forget the feud with the Murchisons. In fact he flamed with militant zeal in his big brother’s cause. He was also aware that Cockeye was a predator and his first thought when he stopped was that he must be specially careful with his mother’s twenty-two bob.
But there are no permanent barriers between children. In the intervals of fighting they assume truce as a matter of course. They talk amicably, join in common causes or against common enemies as a thing to be taken for granted. Also Shonny had a glimmer of admiration for Cockeye, whose dirtiness and lawlessness exemplified to extremes his own lost freedom. In the same way, although Shonny was always being adjured by his mother to feel thankful for the good boots he had always worn, he had never ceased to envy the barefoot boys who ran about in the most freezing or slushy of weather.
Cocke
ye said, “Bin up the Old Ford?” This was a picture palace.
“Yeh.”
“Good a’n’ it?”
“Yeh. Where ’e escapes over that waterfall. Did yer see that?”
“Yeh. An’ that comic.”
“The one that fell down the coal ’ole?”
“Yeh. See the other one walk on ’is bowler ’at just ’e was comin’ up?”
“Yeh.”
They stood and shook, heads back, mouths open with mirth, as if they were looking again at that rainy screen. While Shonny was still laughing Cockeye said, “J’ever go nickin’?”
Shonny did not answer. He was taken off guard and he was ashamed to confess that he no longer went nicking. At school he had gone along with the other children in a gang, and they all had to steal some trifle. Honesty did not come into it. It was a ritual, a tribal test which each had to pass.
“You gone windy, ’ave yer?”
“Not windy.”
“Yes you are. You gone charlie.”
The way to answer this was to hit Cockeye. Shonny had not fought for some time and he longed to; it was an itch in his muscles. But a fight would mean rolling, ripping, snarling on the pavement; and he had mum’s money in his pocket, which he was afraid to endanger. He contented himself with, “Show you ’oo’s charlie.”
“All right. You ain’t charlie?”
“Get a kick in the cobblers, you say that.”
“All right.” As if clouds had passed over, Cockeye was friendly again. He offered his cigarettes, they both lit up, and they started to walk together until they reached the corner of Whitechapel Road when he said, casually, “Come nickin’.”
“What?”
“I’m goin’ nickin’. Comin’?”
Shonny turned the barrow and walked with him down Whitechapel Road. This did not mean consent; it was a reflex ahead of his thoughts. His legs carried him along in the gutter while Cockeye walked on the pavement alongside. He was unable to start his thoughts going. He was an honest boy and he accepted without even inward dissent the eighth commandment. He knew stealing was wrong.
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