by G. M. Best
‘My father was as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world and my first memories of childhood are all happy ones. At first it was easy for me to grow up imagining that I would become a learned and distinguished man, but, when my family returned to London from Chatham, it appeared as if all those hopes would be dashed forever. The area in which we came to live in Camden Town was still semi-rural but that did not prevent our new house being shabby, dingy, damp and mean. Despite the air of decay, our neighbours sought to disguise their poverty in a desperate attempt to keep up appearances. It may sound ludicrous but the more genteel among them, in answering knocks on their doors, endeavoured to admit their visitors whilst keeping out of sight behind the door so as to give the impression it had been opened by a servant. I recall how the same desire to maintain appearances meant that a working bookbinder was looked down upon by his neighbours for keeping fowls and so lowering the tone. Signboards and placards declaring rooms for let were discouraged. A few houses were considered a disgrace to us all when they were afflicted in their lower extremities with eruptions of mangling and clear starching because their residents were reduced to taking in washing.
‘Despite the pretensions of my family and the other residents, there was a debt collector who used to come to the area so regularly to deliver the summonses for rates and taxes that you might have supposed he was delivering circulars. My father never paid anything until the last extremity, and heaven knows how he paid it then. Although he never undertook any business without applying himself zealously, conscientiously, punctually, and honourably, his financial affairs were increasingly shaky. As I grew older this made him seem to lose all idea of educating me, although I was a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and easily hurt. No one else in my family, not even my mother, suggested that something might be spared from our meagre income to send me to a school. My parents would care for me night and day whenever I was sick, but the rest of the time I was either ignored or expected to clean people’s shoes and do other small chores around the unattractive rooms we rented.
‘Occasionally a family’s hunger must be allayed even at the cost of one’s self-respect and so I would be sent on an errand to pawn some of our ever-diminishing possessions. I still recall with a sense of shame how furtively I used to skulk around the pawnshops, glancing timorously and irresolutely at the golden balls outside their premises, trying to guess which one might be the more generous. These dirty shops contained the most extraordinary and confused jumble of old, worn-out, wretched articles that can ever be imagined. My wonderment that some of them had ever been bought was matched only by my astonishment at the idea that any of them might ever be sold again! Odd volumes from sets of little-read books, wineglasses of different patterns, pans full of rusty keys, gaudy chimney ornaments – cracked, of course, pickle jars without stoppers, high-backed chairs with spinal complaints and wasted legs, wearing apparel and bedding, fenders and fire-irons; indeed a miscellany of objects of every description. Even the supposed special items, such as an unframed portrait of some lady who had flourished in a previous century, by an artist who never flourished at all, were to my eye unattractive. And the clothes in such establishments told the saddest tale. The make and materials of these shoddy items, so carelessly heaped together, spoke of better days; and the older they were, the greater the misery and destitution of those whom they once adorned.
‘I sometimes wandered into areas less salubrious than the one where I lived but I hated it if I misjudged the time and this led to me being out when night fell. Then the great city lay outstretched before me like a dark shadow on the ground, reddening the sluggish air with a deep dull light, that told of a labyrinth of public ways and shops, and swarms of busy people. Long lines of poorly lighted streets might be faintly traced, with here and there a brighter spot. But these merely revealed the piles of uneven roofs oppressed by chimneys and the occasional tall steeple looming in the air. Once-noble buildings were here reduced to squalid tenements, their sewage flowing into the street. Like you, I soon came to know that in every overcrowded room men, women and children lived in indescribable filth with cleanliness a thing unknown. I have known – as of course have you – yards and cellars so full of human excrement that I could scarcely cross them without befouling myself.
‘I remember one evening when the cold, thin rain, which had been drizzling all day, began to pour in earnest. The rustling of umbrellas and the constant clicking of shoes on the slippery and uneven cobbles bore testimony to the inclemency of the weather. As the crowds, which had been passing to and fro throughout the day, dwindled away and the little ragged boys who usually disported themselves about the streets, stood crouched in little knots under projecting doorways, only the noise of shouting and quarrelling in the public houses broke the melancholy stillness. I saw a wretched woman with a mewling infant in her arms. Round its meagre form she carefully wrapped the remnant of her own scanty shawl, whilst attempting to sing a popular ballad in the hope of obtaining a few pence from any compassionate passer-by. A brutal laugh at her weak voice was all she gained. The tears fell thick and fast down her pale oval face. The child was cold and hungry, and its low half-stifled wailing added to her misery as she moaned aloud and sank despairingly down on a cold, damp doorstep. I knew they were both doomed to die of cold and hunger and that no one cared. Nor would anyone care for me if ever I were reduced to such a condition.
‘With such experiences the joys of childhood were denied me. I fell into a state of dire neglect, the memory of which still haunts me. I suffered very much from other boys who chased me down turnings, brought me to bay in doorways, and treated me quite savagely, though I am sure I gave them no offence. To add insult to my unhappy condition, my parents, though denying me any schooling, chose to send my sister Fanny to the Royal Academy of Music. What would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent to any place of education? My mind craved to be taught something and I did not care where. I was prepared to accept any school, however humble. I could not understand why my sister was so favoured and I was so ignored.
‘My mother came up with the grand idea of supplementing the family income by opening a school for young ladies and I was given the task of posting advertisements for it through letterboxes. Nobody ever came to it and I cannot recollect that anybody ever proposed to come, or even that preparation was made to receive anybody. Our visitors therefore were not clients but more debt collectors, because my father continued to squander what little resources we had. I still remember how one dirty-faced man, I think he was a bootmaker, used to edge himself into the passageway of the house as early as seven o’clock in the morning and call upstairs to my father: “Come! You aren’t out yet, you know. Pay us, will you? Don’t hide, you know, that’s mean. I wouldn’t be mean if I was you”. But, Mr Twist, our whole life had become mean. Mean and shabby and dismal.
‘Not surprisingly, I kept myself apart from others of my own age and I became a desperately lonely young boy. Books became my only comfort and I read the few we owned over and over again. They called me an odd child and perhaps I was, but it was an oddity born of isolation. It was always a relief when I had the chance to visit my godfather, who alone seemed to take some interest in me. He was a sail-maker and ships’ chandler who lived in Church Row, just behind the great church of Nicholas Hawksmoor in Limehouse. I used to pass all the boat-building yards where the very air was perfumed with wood chips and I saw all trades swallowed up in mast, oar and block-making. It used to remind me of happier days when I was five and six, growing up in Chatham. I dreamt of boarding a boat and sailing down the stench-ridden Thames to freedom and a new life in countries where opportunities would abound and my childhood hopes of future greatness could be rekindled.
‘In reality my troubles were only just beginning because far worse lay ahead of me. A friend of my father had become the manager of a boot blacking company and he suggested to my impoverished parents I should start working there at a sa
lary of six or seven shillings a week. To my horror they rapidly assented and, just two days after my twelfth birthday, I set off for a three-mile walk from Camden Town to the Strand to commence my new career. The company was based in a warehouse in an impoverished area, which was an unwholesome maze of squalid corners and filthy alleys. “Warren’s Blacking”, as it was called, operated in a crazy, tumbledown old house on the left hand side of the way at old Hungerford Stairs, abutting the river and overrun with rats. I just have to shut my eyes and I can still see its wainscoted rooms and worm-eaten, damp, and rotten floors and staircase. I can still hear the sound of the grey rats as they swarmed down below in the cellars and scuffled and squeaked their way up the staircase into the place where we worked. I can still smell the stinking river water that lapped around this God-forsaken manufactory, carrying, amid its unending filth and flotsam, the occasional bloated corpse, the tragic outcome of some suicide or accident or maybe the decomposing evidence of yet another of this city’s unsolved crimes.
‘My task in this stinking hellhole was to take bottles of blacking and prepare them for sale by covering the pots with a piece of oilpaper and then a piece of blue paper. I would tie each bottle with string and paste on a printed label. And I did that for ten hours a day, my whole being racked with the humiliation of it. My meagre earnings did not prevent my father being declared an insolvent. He was incarcerated in the Marshalsea Prison. My heart felt it would break when I visited him there for the first time and he told me the sun had set upon him for ever and that he would spend the rest of his life in that dank, malodorous, soul-destroying place, where the very stones exuded despair. His eyes awash with tears, he told me to remember that if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings, and sixpence of it, the result would be happiness, but, if he spent a shilling more, he would be doomed to wretchedness. It was good advice but I regret to say he never heeded it himself. Almost everything, by degrees, was sold or pawned and my mother and the rest of my family had soon to join him there.
‘Can you imagine what it is like to see your parents pent up in a narrow prison cell and watch their faces gradually assume that squalid and sickly hue which marks every person deprived of light and freedom? Whenever I visited I was forced to listen to the screams and cries of those around them till I wept for the sheer futility of their existence. And my life outside was not much better. It seemed just a larger prison in which the walls of massed humanity threatened to squeeze the very life out of me. I lived in horrible lodgings, surrounded by the equally impoverished. All around me were signs of want and destitution: emaciated faces, stick-like limbs, threadbare coats and trousers, moth-eaten gowns and damp shawls. In this harsh world, I might just be twelve but I had to win my own food. I kept a small loaf of bread and a quarter of pound of cheese on a shelf in my squalid garret room and this was my main meal each night when I returned from my labours in the warehouse. For month after month I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind.
‘I prayed to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was abandoned, but no one heard my prayers. When I heard that my sister, who was still at the Academy, had been awarded a silver medal for her studies, the tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart was rent. I could not bear to think of myself being beyond the reach of all such honourable ambition and success. In my desperation I turned increasingly for companionship to the two boys who worked alongside me, Bob Fagin and Paul Green. Bob was an orphan and Paul the son of a fireman employed at Drury Lane Theatre. Both were very different from me in terms of their birth and attitude and they were old beyond their years, using language that was coarse and vulgar. They regarded me as “the young gentleman” and laughed at my inexperience and naïvety. Since my arrival I had been careful not to tell them how I came to be there or how much I hated it. Instead I had won their interest by regaling them with some of the stories I had read and, if there was no one watching us, occasionally acting them out. Even if your heart is breaking, playing the clown can sometimes be the only means of self-preservation.
‘Bob and Paul invited me to “experience life”. In my desperate desire for friendship, I responded, accompanying them to those low quarters of the city I had hitherto avoided. There I freely observed every vice you care to name and many I would not wish to mouth. I saw prodigies of wickedness, want, and beggary. I saw every kind of theft. I saw gangs reduce their victims to bloody pulp. I saw whores giving their bodies to drunks in the street for all to watch. I learnt just how much poverty can corrupt and destitution distort and I was deeply ashamed of my newly acquired knowledge, even if I knew myself to be not only the son of an insolvent but also the grandson of an embezzler.
‘One dark night a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, I became not just an observer but also an unwilling participant. Bob and Paul, recognizing those changes in me which marked that I was becoming a man, took me to the house of Bob’s uncle. I suspect it had once been a house of some distinction but it was in terminal decline, a dirty den of a place. Its panelled walls were black with neglect and dust and most of its mouldering shutters were fast closed, the bars that held them screwed tight into the discoloured wood. This made the rat-infested rooms dark and gloomy, despite the efforts of their mostly drunken inmates to give the house an air of festivity. Plenty of alcohol and the services of a few hard-eyed but full-bosomed women were its only attractions. Bob and Paul encouraged me to drink more than I had ever done before and then handed me over to one of the youngest of the prostitutes present. I will not dwell on the sordid details, Mr Twist, but they and others far worse than them enjoyed watching as she took my final innocence away.
‘And that, believe it or not, was my introduction to Nancy. She was scarce older than me but she was a corrupt product of a system that no writer, however great, is allowed to fully expose. Our society likes even its moral crusaders to avoid certain topics. It prefers to pretend that this is a Christian society, turning a blind eye to the little creatures in petticoats that pursue men in the streets, plucking at their garments and seeking to entice them into sex by making lewd suggestions. The law may say it’s illegal to have sex with a child under the age of twelve but you know as well as I do that it does nothing to prevent child prostitution. Nancy may have had the face of an angel, but her experiences of indiscriminate sexuality had given her the heart of a devil. I guess her seduction of me – if you can call her rape of me that – was just a momentary diversion from the old men she was normally asked to favour with her lascivious attentions. It gave me no pleasure and I doubt if she thought much of my childish masculinity.
‘The next day the full implication of what had happened to me struck home. I cannot describe to you how common and dirty I felt. At work, when Bob and Paul began to taunt me with what had happened, I was taken with a seizure. They had to lay me down on the straw-strewn floor as the spasms shook me. Bob filled empty blacking bottles with hot water and tried to apply them to my icy body. I writhed on the floor in my anguish.’
Charles Dickens paused, his ashen face contorted with the pain of what he had just revealed to me. Even after so many years I could see that the depraved nature of the events he had recounted were an agony to recall. He moved across the room and poured himself a drink. His hand trembled as he brought the glass to his lips. He quickly poured himself another and speedily drank that also. I asked him if he felt able to continue. He turned and nodded, whispering through his gritted teeth, ‘The worst is yet to come.’
5
MURDER MOST FOUL
By a Herculean effort Dickens composed himself and, having collected his thoughts, resumed his story. My pen cannot describe the anguish that swept across his face at intervals. To me it was obvious that his was a tale written in his very blood:
‘They say every cloud has a silver lining and my illness gave me the excuse I needed to avoid further expeditions with Bob and Paul and, a few weeks later, my t
ime at the factory ended. The company moved to new premises near Covent Garden and my father, who had secured release from prison, came to watch me at work through the new shop window. I think it was only then that the degradation of my situation struck home because he immediately quarrelled with my cousin and took me away, despite the protests of my uncaring mother that the family needed my earnings. I never shall forget or forgive that my mother was keen to keep me there. It may seem a harsh thing to say, but I still feel my entire family still looks upon me as something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage. I fear they have no idea of, and no care for, my existence in any other light. And, I’ll be honest with you, Mr Twist, there are times when my soul sickens at the sight of them.
‘I foolishly thought that I could put my experiences with Bob and Paul and, above all, with Nancy, behind me. My father enrolled me at a school called Wellington House Academy and there I worked hard to educate myself, even though its respected proprietor was by far the most ignorant and worst-tempered man that it has ever been my misfortune to know. He saw the teaching profession not as a vocation but as a business in which the aim was to make as much as he could from us and to put into teaching us as little effort as possible. His main expertise lay in corporal punishment. He was always smiting the palms of offenders with some diabolical instrument, or viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight with one of his large hands, and caning the wearer with the other. I’m sure hitting us boys was the principal solace of his existence.
‘What we learnt largely came from the school’s usher. He was our writing master, mathematical master, and English master, and he also made out the bills, mended the pens, and did all sorts of other things. Sometimes he was assisted by our Latin master, a colourless, doubled-up, near-sighted man with a crutch. He was always telling us he was cold and he used to disclose the ends of flannel under all his garments. He kept applying a ball of pocket-handkerchief to some part of his face with a screwing action round and round and he had the bizarre habit of putting onions into his ears in the mistaken belief that this helped to reduce his deafness. Nevertheless, this poor man was a good scholar and he took great pains when he saw (as he did in me) intelligence and a desire to learn. There was also a French master, who used to come in the sunniest weather with a handleless umbrella, and a fat little dancing master who used to come in a gig, and teach hornpipes to the more advanced among us, though to what advantage I can scarce surmise.